JNS.ORG
by Ben Cohen
June 13, 2014

During the war in Iraq, when I was still living in London and coordinating news coverage of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein for various international media organizations, I was in regular contact with a brave Iraqi Kurdish journalist named Ayub Nuri. When Ayub and I finally met in person, several years later in New York, we spent a couple of hours talking about the region generally, and specifically about whether Israel had a natural ally in the Kurds.

So it was with some pleasure, in the midst of a horrible news week for the Middle East, that I came across an interview with Ayub in which he said the following: “Kurds are deeply sympathetic to Israel and an independent Kurdistan will be beneficial to Israel. It will create a balance of power. Right now, Israel is one country against many. But with an independent Kurdish state, first of all Israel will have a genuine friend in the region for the first time, and second, Kurdistan will be like a buffer zone in the face of the Turkey, Iran and Iraq.”

Think about the meaning of those words, “a genuine friend.” In this context, it means a country in the region that not only respects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, but also actively seeks to strengthen their mutual bonds. A country whose population is overwhelmingly Muslim but secular in political orientation, and one where the anti-Semitism that dominates elsewhere in the Islamic world is strikingly absent. Kurdistan actually is what many Jews mistakenly supposed Turkey to be: a Muslim-majority state with no ideological or theological objections to the idea of Jewish national self-determination.

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