Under a recent post by a prominent British left-wing figure, a reader coined a word for my people: proxy and prostitute, fused into a single insult.
The post it answered had made the same claim at greater length and in more respectable language – that the Kurds are the instrument of whoever happens to need one.
I can forgive an anonymous stranger a cheap joke. I have less patience for people who call themselves intellectuals and arrive at the identical idea in longer sentences.
The habit is not confined to the Left. On the American Right, one of the most-listened-to commentators has described Kurds as savages while extending sympathy to Ankara.
Are we savages, or proxies? The question is false on its face. It reduces an estimated 40 million people to the moral standing of a criminal gang available for hire.
Kurds are a nation by any definition you care to apply: language, territory, continuity, and self-understanding, lacking only sovereignty over our homeland.
Our history was claimed first by Persians and then by Turks. Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad set out to remove us from our own land.
What we have learned instead is endurance: against a Turkish education system that has spent more than a century telling Kurdish children they are Turks, and against the insistence of both Ankara and Tehran that every Kurdish liberation movement is a terrorist network.
That insistence is precisely the well from which Western commentators – Left and Right alike – draw their water.
The erasure was not an accident of local politics. Kurdistan was partitioned by the post-Ottoman settlement, promised a state at Sèvres in 1920, written out of Lausanne three years later.
What is striking is not that borders were drawn badly; borders are usually drawn badly. It is the asymmetry that followed. The states assembled from that settlement acquired, within two generations, the presumption of ancientness.
Turkey teaches an unbroken descent from Central Asia. Iran teaches an unbroken civilizational line.
Kurds, whose tribal confederations were governed by their own Mirs until Ottoman centralization destroyed the emirates in the 1830s and 1840s, and whose structures were dismantled again under Reza Shah, are told we are a collection of tribes with pretensions.
The peoples granted deep history, and the people denied it were assembled in the same century.
We never surrendered the claim. Through the imprisonment and killing of our intellectuals by Turks, Persians, and Arabs, we went on reclaiming our history as we went on reclaiming our land.
Have we had allies on this journey?
Henry Kissinger’s abandonment of Mustafa Barzani after the 1975 Algiers Agreement remains one of the cleanest betrayals in modern statecraft: arms cut off the moment Tehran and Baghdad found it convenient, the sequence documented afterward by the Pike Committee.
When Saddam gassed Halabja in March 1988, no Turkish, Persian, or Arab government mourned, and the West’s response was slow enough to constitute an answer of its own.
In case after case, the arms, ammunition, and chemical precursors that reached those regimes reached them through Western firms and Western governments, with one exception: Israel and the wider Jewish world.
Geography with a government
Speaking to my own people, I return often to two millennia of Jewish suffering and to what Zionism accomplished: not merely survival, but a homeland in which a people could prosper.
The Jewish priority is Jewish survival, and it is non-negotiable; it supersedes any alliance. I do not find that troubling. I find it instructive. It is what a nation with agency looks like.
What Kurdish sovereignty would offer Israel is not sentiment. It is strength.
Israel is alert and largely alone in a neighborhood organized around its disappearance, and the same governments that guarantee that arrangement guarantee that my people never see daylight.
A sovereign Kurdistan would sit astride the corridor running from Iran through Iraq and Syria toward Lebanon, the ground Tehran needs in order to move weight westward.
It would be a non-Arab, non-Persian, non-Turkish state with no quarrel with the Jewish state’s existence, holding terrain, water, and energy at precisely the point where Iranian projection is most exposed.
Strategic depth is not a favor. It is geography with a government on it.
We are not yet in a position to offer it, and I will not pretend otherwise. Israel represents its people; we cannot yet say the same.
Kurdish political factions have not risen to the level that commands a unified front; no national congress, no body with the standing to speak for the nation.
Each faction belongs to the Kurdish people; none can claim the nation, and none can claim the land with legitimacy. That failure is ours – not Washington’s and not Jerusalem’s.
Kurds agree almost unanimously that Israel is our ally, unofficial and unequal though the relationship is. We do not say the same of the United States.
The current administration’s tone toward us is degrading in a specific way: it addresses Kurds as a problem to be managed inside other people’s states rather than as a nation with its own agency.
That agency is the only unifying theme in Kurdish politics. Whatever else divides our factions, every one of them walks that road.
So the practical point is narrow. If Washington wants Kurdish allies, the language has to change first and the substance second: help convene a Kurdish national front with standing to represent the nation – in the letter and in the spirit.
A degraded Kurdish political class is worth nothing to anyone who may one day need us, and the record of the last century suggests that day arrives more often than anyone plans for.
The writer, based in Vancouver, is a commentator on Kurdish affairs, Kurdistan, and international politics.