There is a word that makes Turkish nationalists reach for their sharpest rhetoric and Arab governments shift uneasily in their seats: Kurdistan. There is a name that produces the same effect in the same quarters: Israel. That these two words provoke the same enemies is no coincidence. It is geography, history, and destiny converging – and it is past time that Israel recognized what that convergence demands of it.
When Theodor Herzl set out to convince Jews dispersed across the world that a state of their own was achievable, he was confronting the impossible. There was an idea that required organizing a people with identity, a people with all sorts of networks except a political one. He was not merely proposing that Jews reconnect with one another; he was actively forging those connections, mobilizing their collective resources to wrest a Jewish state from the promise of a thousand-year-old text, the Bible.
A fantasy, if you will. It happened, though. With the power of will and a booklet named Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State.) He worked both with a miner’s determination to dig and a jeweler’s fine craftsmanship to shape. It is a project still in the making, but it worked.
Herzl’s project required not only convincing Jews of their collective destiny, but securing the support of the great powers of the day – including the Ottomans. It was a political project that both foresaw the coming genocide at the hands of the Nazis, and prepared for it.
It remains one of history’s most consequential examples of political agency – born from the mind of one man, yet reshaping the fate of a people and the world. It was not a perfect project, nor a universally satisfying one, but it worked. It continues to cause massive political shifts in the region and the world.
Comparisons between Kurds, Jews
Kurds are always compared to Jews when a sovereign, independent Kurdistan – one that would provide safety and guarantee their future – is considered. Turkish nationalist discourse has long branded the Kurdish national project “the Second Israel,” and not without reason.
Herzl’s project restored Jerusalem as a sovereign capital, redrawing the political map of the Middle East. An independent and sovereign Kurdistan will do the same for Kurds. As neighboring states confronting common adversaries, Israel and an independent Kurdistan would naturally converge, forming a new axis on the region’s political map.
Was Kurdistan ever a political geography? Were Kurds ever united under one banner? Can one attribute political agency to Kurds? If one were to negotiate with Kurds today, is there an authority capable of representing their collective will – one that could negotiate on their behalf, make alliances, agree on terms, and mobilize its people?
That is the “Kurdish Problem” of our age. Despite being a people deeply politicized by nationalist aspirations, Kurds remain fractured along sub-national party lines. Despite appealing to the nation – mostly – with nationalist rhetoric, Kurdish political actors do not unite under a nationalist agenda.
Having been divided among five states – Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Armenia – and facing linguistic challenges including the use of three different alphabets, it is difficult for any Kurdish actor to develop a single rhetoric capable of reaching Kurds across all these countries in a shared voice.
It is difficult, and Kurdish political actors have repeatedly been beaten by these challenges. The result is 40 million people sharing the same aspiration, and no single political force to represent them.
In certain ways, we are living through biblical times. Iraq is a failed state, acting as if it were not. Syria is another, and Iran is fast becoming one. It is little more than the international community’s habit of recognizing Baghdad and Damascus that permits these capitals to masquerade as the seats of functioning sovereign states.
In reality, the Shi’ites, Sunnis, and Kurds of Iraq play the inmates’ game against each other. The same applies to the Alawites, Druze, fundamentalist Sunnis, Christians, and Kurds of Syria.
Iran is a much bigger tectonic plate. Once Tehran’s authority collapses, there will be nothing to hold together the inmates of the prison that Iran has become. Azeris, Kurds, and the Baloch will seek their own independent destinies, and the Persians will, for the first time in their history, find themselves compelled to forge an ethno-national identity of their own.
Turkey will be next. Its internal fractures are well-documented, and Washington’s strategic interest in unimpeded naval access through the straits has never aligned comfortably with Ankara’s ambitions.
For peace to take hold once Tehran falls – and with it, any remaining pretense of sovereignty in Baghdad and Damascus – Kurds, Azeris, Persians, and Baloch must be supported in building viable political structures. That is a project far beyond Israel’s capabilities alone. Keeping one’s enemies in check is one capability; forming states is another. Yet the accumulated goodwill between Israel and the Kurds, and between Israel and the Azeris, could prove decisive in shaping what comes next.
Kurds are natives of their land, having settled across Kurdistan since time immemorial. What they lack is a national political representative. Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and Syria under Bashar Assad each did their utmost to prevent this from happening. Both, in the end, failed. Iran under the Ayatollah and Turkey under Erdogan continue the same effort; their entire political project is oriented toward preventing Kurds from developing political agency.
One can argue that it is the Kurds’ own responsibility to build that agency, as the Jews led by Herzl did for Israel. That argument is not without merit. However, there is also the factor of external validation – the weight that outside recognition lends to internal political mobilization.
Israel is uniquely positioned to help the Kurdish people develop precisely that. By declining to engage with any Kurdish political actor in isolation, and by insisting instead on a unified Kurdish national interlocutor, Israel could effectively become the midwife of a Kurdish state that would anchor enduring peace and stability across the broader Middle East.
There is no path by which Iraq and Syria can continue as united countries. The sovereign maps that define them – and now Iran – are illusions drawn by British colonial cartographers. They do not hold. Iran is fast forward joining them, and Turkey will not be far behind.
Redrawing the map to create Israel was a fantasy when Herzl first put pen to paper. The task now is to reshape the region along natural borders, ones that can sustain real peace. For Israel, that begins with demanding that the fragmented actors of a potential Kurdish ally build the unified foundation a state requires.
Israel should say so openly. Doing so would give Kurdish nationalists the external validation they need to rise above the prison politics of capitals whose sovereignty is, in any meaningful sense, already forfeit.
The writer is an international relations analyst and commentator specializing in the Middle East and Kurdistan. He serves as the vice president of the Canadian Kurdistani Confederation and hosts the podcasts Rojeva Kurdistan and MidEast Talks.