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The Kurds are the real victims of the Middle East, not the Palestinians
Kurdish people, denied their own state, have experienced genocide. The West doesn’t care because their oppressors aren’t Israeli
Why do some causes command all-consuming attention and allegiance while others are largely ignored or downplayed?
Why do those who profess concern for justice, human rights, and self-determination jump in with both feet in some cases, yet remain thunderously silent in others?
There is a compelling case study in the modern Middle East. It involves the Kurds, a people numbering more than 40 million, who have been denied a state of their own for more than a century. Their plight has been largely ignored by a news media missing in action, indifferent campus activists, absentee protesters, a silent United Nations, and the practitioners of selective outrage in Western nations who profess to champion the victimised.
There could have been a Kurdish state after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Allied Powers a century ago. The pathway was outlined in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which addressed the future of the lands previously under Ottoman rule. Kurdish identity and aspirations were recognised, yet never translated into reality.
Instead, Kurdish-populated territories, or Kurdistan as it was called, were divided among what became modern-day Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. In the aftermath of war, diplomats and mapmakers in London and Paris redrew boundaries, created new states, and established spheres of influence as if the region were their private backyard.
That the Kurds were a distinct people, with their own history, identity, language, and culture, scarcely registered in this larger geopolitical design. They were consigned to a tragic fate that, for more than a century, has denied them nationhood.
Yet the Kurds have demonstrated remarkable resilience, refusing to surrender their aspirations or abandon their yearning for freedom, even in the face of periodic persecution, suppression of language, identity, and culture, and, in Iraq, genocide during Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign.
Indeed, because of Kurdish courage and valour, the United States and other Western nations have turned to them for crucial assistance when needed, including in the struggle against Saddam Hussein’s regime and later against Islamic State (ISIS), only to walk away when Kurdish support was no longer required. That sense of intermittent engagement by others helps explain the Kurdish proverb: “No friends but the mountains.”
The relentless targeting of the Kurds, however, has not captured the attention of those in the West who profess to be cheerleaders for the oppressed.
Who can recall a mass march for Kurdish rights and freedom through central London or central Toronto, or a major rally in New York’s Times Square or outside the Sydney Opera House? The Kurdish issue should check all the requisite boxes – victims of proven genocide, targets of chemical weapon attacks, thirst for self-determination, quest for liberation – yet no outcry, no flotillas, no campaigns, no sartorial solidarity, nothing at all. Why?
Why, for instance, do roughly five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza engage the passion of so many, yet not more than 40 million Kurds?
Why do Palestinians, whose leaders have rejected numerous statehood proposals dating back to the 1937 Peel Commission, continue to have a devoted cheering section clamouring for a Palestinian state, while nearly 93 per cent of Kurds in Iraq, who voted for independence in a non-binding referendum in 2017, have been rebuffed by Iraq’s Iran-backed central government and largely ignored by the West?
Some argue the Kurds have unrealistic expectations. After all, they live in four established countries, so changing borders is not an option. Really? Borders drawn by distant colonial powers a century ago must be respected in perpetuity, even if they cavalierly neglected realities on the ground to advance self-serving geopolitical considerations?
In fact, borders can change. Recent examples abound. The Soviet Union crumbled, to be replaced by 15 successor countries. Yugoslavia collapsed and seven sovereign nations emerged. Czechoslovakia, like Yugoslavia, another post-First World War creation, experienced a “velvet divorce” between its Czech and Slovak components. South Sudan emerged as an independent nation from Sudan. So, too, Eritrea from Ethiopia and East Timor from Indonesia. Somaliland, meanwhile, has functioned as a de facto independent state apart from Somalia for more than three decades, despite lacking widespread international recognition as yet.
Striking asymmetry
Today, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq offers the most compelling case for Kurdish independence. It is arguably the best-governed, most open, and most pluralistic part of Iraq, and an all-too-rare model for a measure of progressive values in the broader Middle East. Women’s rights, religious freedom, and openness to the West are all hallmarks of this region of more than six million people.
And that is also precisely why Iraq’s government in Baghdad and neighbouring Iran are determined to keep the KRG in check and under their thumbs, resorting to violence and economic pressure when necessary. Yet, again, little of this has awakened the ire of the West’s self-appointed moral arbiters.
At the end of the day, perhaps the likeliest explanation for this indifference to the plight and promise of the Kurds is quite simple.
Could it be that the Palestinian cause can be made to fit into the contemporary, and all too simplistic, binary narrative of oppressor and oppressed, with Israel – the world’s only Jewish-majority state – cast as villain, a framing that echoes age-old tropes and carries a powerful emotional charge for some audiences?
The Kurdish story might seem more complicated from the outside. The antagonists include Arabs, Iranians, and Turks, but not Jews and Israelis, making it harder, and perhaps less comfortable, to fit into prevailing ideological frameworks and orthodoxies.
The result is a striking asymmetry. One national movement attracts enormous global attention, endless demonstrations, celebrity endorsements, campus encampments, and international campaigns. The other, despite representing a population many times larger and, in the case of Iraq, endured genocide, does not begin to command comparable concern.
The real question, then, is why a people of more than 40 million, denied a state for more than a century and subjected to repeated waves of repression, has attracted so little of the moral passion mobilised elsewhere.
Until that question is honestly confronted, claims of universal principles, support for self-determination and national liberation movements, and concern for human rights will continue to ring hollow.
David Harris is executive vice chairman of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and author of Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2025)
[Source: Daily Telegraph]
