#872 9/17/17 Re the Sept 25 Kurdish Independence Referendum This Week In The News: Parallels Between the Cases of the Kurds and the Jews

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Much in the news this week is Iraqi Kurds’ scheduled September 25 referendum on whether to proceed down the road, against international opposition, toward declaring independence  from Iraq.  There are a number of parallels between Kurds’ and Jews’ independence efforts as minorities in the Arab-majority Middle East. 

 One parallel is that both Kurds and Jews received post-Ottoman Empire promises from World War I’s victors that were, in Israel’s case, not fully fulfilled, and in the Kurds’ case, not at all fulfilled.  A second parallel is that Israel confronted, and the Kurds are about to confront, whether to take a key independence step in the face of international opposition.  A third is that neither Jewish nor Kurdish Mideast refugees have received the media mention that the seemingly one-sided “Palestinian refugee issue” routinely receives.  A fourth parallel relates to international borders.  While establishment of a Kurdish state in part of Iraq will require redrawing of the recognized Iraqi state’s recognized international borders, the media treats the expressly non-border 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines as “Israel’s 1967 borders.”

Re the Sept. 25 Kurdish Independence Referendum This Week in the News:  Parallels Between the Cases of the Kurds and the Jews

Iraq’s Kurds, non-Arab Sunni Muslims with ancient regional roots in what are today Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, have scheduled a referendum September 25 on whether to proceed with steps toward negotiating their political independence from Iraq.  “A Kurdish Brexit,” the Philly Inquirer’s Worldview columnist Trudy Rubin called it this morning.  Israel seems the only nation in the world to have come out in favor of Kurdish independence.

There are multiple parallels between the homeland independence cases of the Kurds and the Jews.

Promises Unfulfilled:  One parallel is the West having promised more to both the Jews and the Kurds after World War I than it delivered.  In the Jews’ case, Transjordan soon got the 78% of the original Palestine Mandate east of the Jordan, and though the Mandate called for close settlement of Jews on the land, not limited to the coastal plain, the British frustrated that, and the Arab-rejected 1947 partition resolution would have sliced off from the remaining Mandate much of what was left.

Philly Inquirer Worldview columnist Trudy Rubin this morning:

“The Kurds have dreamt of independence since 1920, when the great powers promised to carve a Kurdish state from the remains of the Ottoman Empire.  Instead, the World War I allies divided the beautiful, mountainous Kurdish lands among Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.”

Taking the Step Against International Opposition:  The Kurds, as had the Jews, face strong international opposition to declaring independence.  Dr. Weitzmann’s associate Meyer Weisgal, in So Far (pp. 262-63)  recounted that at the last minute, Ben Gurion demanded: “I must know at once what Weitzmann thinks about declaring independence” (emphasis original).   Dr. Weitzmann’s reply, Weisgal reported, was “What are they waiting for, the idiots?”

The parallel is not exact.  The Kurds are not set on declaring independence on September 25, but setting off down that road.  Nor do they face an instant invasion the following morning by five enemy states.  Yet, “there comes a tide in the affairs of men ….”, as Shakespeare phrased it, which applies no less to the Kurds’ case than to that of the Jews.  The U.S., wrote Ms. Rubin this morning, wants the Kurds “to delay the referendum until after the 2018 [Iraqi] elections,” both to ensure factional cooperation in definitively defeating ISIS, and to encourage election of a moderate Iraqi prime minister.  But when the Kurds asked whether Washington and Baghdad “would endorse a later date for a referendum, as well as the Kurdish right to self-determination,” the Kurds “received no such assurance.”

Media Non-Reference to Refugees:    Hardly an article on the “peace process” issues involved in what the world calls “the Israeli-Palestinian” conflict, which is more broadly and accurately the Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict, fails to mention “the Palestinian refugee issue.”  That Israel absorbed more indigenously Middle-eastern Jewish refugees from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel, making the conflict’s refugee issue two-sided, with one side having absorbed the refugees that fled to it, while the other side’s refugee “hosts,” including in Arab-controlled areas of western Palestine itself, keep the grandchildren of its refugees in internationally-supported “refugee camps,” does not merit media mention.

Back in 2003, in comparing media coverage of Israeli confrontations with Arabs, I encountered, at least for me, an unusual wire service article on Arabs’ treatment of another minority in their midst, the Kurds of Iraq, of whose treatment I had been unaware.  Here’s what this media watch’s #115 of that week informed readers had appeared that week in a Philadelphia Inquirer (Inq) Knight-Ridder article (emphasis added):

Saturday (Inq, 3/15/03, A4), the Inq had a Knight Ridder story on Kurds fleeing from one place in Iraq to another.  The article (par. 9) said that “tens of thousands of Kurds, Turkmen, and other minorities have been living in the northern [Kurdish controlled, “no-fly” zone] enclave since being expelled from the Kirkuk region by Hussein’s Baath Party in waves of ethnic cleansing. Thousands have been killed or have disappeared, their property given to Arabs from elsewhere in Iraq. The ‘Arabization’ program is aimed at consolidating Baghdad’s grip on oil-rich areas dominated by minorities.” ….

The news article added:

“… In a related development, New York-based Human Rights Watch charged in a report yesterday that the ‘Arabization’ campaign has continued unabated since the 1991 uprising.

“The group said it ‘believes that the Iraqi government’s systematic and continuing forced transfer’ of some 120,000 minority-group members is a crime against humanity.”

Ask yourself whether such “Arabization,” at the expense of Kurds and other Iraqi minorities, gets coverage more like that of the Jewish refugee side of the Arab-Israeli conflict’s refugee issue, or like the media’s peace-process issue of “the Palestinian refugees.”

In Some Journalists’ Minds, Some “Borders” Are Not Sacrosanct:  A final Kurds-Jews parallel is that reporting and opining on the territorial sovereignty of both requires journalists to take positions on the sanctity of territorial lines between peoples.

The Inq’s Trudy Rubin this morning concluded that some, at least, international borders are not sacrosanct:

“If Washington ever develops an overall strategy for the Mideast, it must include new thinking about the territorial reshaping of the region.  Accepting the Kurdish referendum would be good place to start.”

Establishing an independent Kurdestan in Iraq will require changing the international borders of a recognized state with internationally recognized borders.

By contrast, the media often refers to as “borders” the exclusively-military ceasefire lines, expressly declared in their defining document not to be international borders, “green line” in the Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement of 1949.

E.g., Trudy Rubin, Inq, 2/13/14:  “Both might accept a demilitarized Palestinian state along pre-1967 borders, with territorial swaps so Israel can keep large West Bank settlements.”  (emphasis added)

Trudy Rubin, Inq, 11/11/10:  “… Jewish settlements in the West Bank and in suburbs of Jerusalem beyond Israel’s 1967 borders.”  (emphasis added)