ARUTZ SHEVA
by Dr Mordechai Kedar
October 23, 2014

The Kurds have a right to independence. Their lack of it until now is an unjust and tragic accident of history. The borders of most of the Arab countries east of the Mediterranean were delineated in the period following WWI, on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. The borders were fixed on the basis of British and French interests and the ties those two countries had formed with local groups.

Two non-Muslim groups were granted independence: The Jews were given Britain’s pledge – in the form of The Balfour Declaration – that it would help establish a National Home for them, and France granted the Christians dwelling north of Israel the country of Lebanon, as separate from Syria. The Zionist movement was active and visible in the political corridors of Britain, while the French empathized with the fears the Lebanese Christians held of becoming a minority in a country with a Muslim majority.

One ethnic group, the Kurds, was left without a state, and was, instead, divided among four countries: Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. The main reason for this was that the Kurds had no organization representing them on the European scene and no country that interceded for them. The Kurds were the really major sacrificial lamb of the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. In every one of the nations to which they were appended, they are hated, denied their rights, pushed to the sidelines and persecuted. Hundreds of thousands of them have been murdered in struggles against the governments of the countries to which they were parceled out. Israel helped the Kurds in northern Iraq in the early 1970’s…..

……The world must tell the Kurds: It is time for your redemption. It is time to announce the death of the artificial countries of Syria and Iraq, created in the Sykes-Picot Agreement; it is time to re-arrange the Middle East in accordance with the interests of its own peoples, not those of Britain and France. Colonialism disappeared seventy years ago, and the time has come to erase that colonialist heritage – that is, the borders of Syria and Iraq……

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