UCLA

This study traces the progress of the contacts between Zionists/Israelis and Kurds—two non-Arab regional minorities intent on self-government and encircled by opponents—in their earliest stage of development. From the early 1930s to the early 1950s, the Political Department of the Jewish Agency (later, the Israeli Foreign Ministry) and several eminent Kurdish leaders maintained contact with a view to cooperation. The strategic calculus behind a Zionist/Israeli-Kurdish partnership was the same that directed Zionist/Israeli relations with all regional minorities: If demographic differences from the region’s Sunni Arab majority had made them outliers and political differences with them had made them outcasts, the Zionists/Israelis and the Kurds, together with their common circumstance as minorities, had a common enemy (Arab nationalists) against whom they could make common cause. But in the period under consideration in this work, contact did not lead to cooperation, and none of the feelers, overtures, appeals for support, and proposals for cooperation that passed between the two sides throughout these two decades were crowned with success. For the failure of this pursuit, this study finds the Zionists, despite their openness to the Kurds, principally responsible, and identifies several reasons they chose not to give effect to Kurdish proposals: the distance and inaccessibility of the remote and landlocked Kurds; Zionist concern for Turkish, Iranian, and American sensitivities; doubts on the part of certain Jewish Agency personnel about the promise of such a relationship; and Zionist preoccupation and limited resources. Despite these inauspicious beginnings, what was then unknowable to those participating in real time is now undeniable to those observing in retrospect: namely, that the early relations between Kurds and Zionists were to be the foundation of their later partnership, the antecedents to their eventual alliance.