The Kurds of Israel

 Nadene Goldfoot

Kurds of Syria use their women in the fight-On 9 October 2019, days after former US president Donald Trump announced that US troops would pull out of north-east Syria, where they had allied with Kurdish-led forces for years. A newly empowered Turkey, which sees the stateless Kurds as an existential threat, and whose affiliated groups it has been at war with for decades, immediately launched an offensive on border towns held by Kurdish forces in north-east Syria, including Ras al-Ayn.

Last October of 2021, President Trump recalled American troops from Syria, acquiescing in a Turkish invasion of the country’s north to roll back the hard-won autonomy of Washington’s former allies, the Syrian Kurds. We approved of an invader's wishes against our ally's best interests. The Kurds were known as great fighters against ISIS, too.

     Kurds successful in fighting ISIS:  Female Yazidi and Kurdish Soldiers Fight Back Against ISIS.  The frontline of the fight against Islamic State militants in Nawaran near Mosul, Iraq, April 20, 2016.When Islamic State swept into the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar in 2014, a few young Yazidi women took up arms against the militants attacking women and girls from their community.

This sudden swerve in American policy—the withdrawal of support for an ally deputized as the American infantry in the fight against ISIS—shocked the sensibilities of Israelis and American Jews not a little. Yet far from producing the usual cacophony of clashing opinions, Mr. Trump’s retreat from the Kurds brought a rare monophony—a chorus of Israeli and Jewish-American voices sounding the same line of support for the luckless Kurds.  He had left an ally in the lurch.  

During their heroic struggle against an ascendant ISIS between 2014 and 2017, Western support for the Kurds was total. But once ISIS was gone, that support turned into cold betrayal, as America and Europe stood by and watched Ankara, Turkey go after the Kurds in Syria this year while Baghdad did the same in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2017.  How quickly the big shots forget their friends.  

Israel is a home now to some 200,000 Jews of Kurdistani origins, who are mostly descended from nearly 50,000 Kurdish Jews evacuated from Iraq during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah in the early 1950s. Israeli Jews of Kurdistani background preserve ties with the ethnic Kurdish communities in the Middle East, including with the Kurdish individuals residing in Israel.

Kurdistan was a mountainous region now divided among Turkey, Iran and Iraq.  There are Kurds living in Israel today.  Kurds in Israel refers to people of Kurdish origin residing in Israel (excluding Kurdish Jews). The Kurdish population who are Moslims in Israel is small and is mainly composed of individuals and families, who fled Iraq and Turkey during the Iraqi–Kurdish and the Kurdish–Turkish conflicts during the 20th century, as well as temporal residents arriving in Israel for medical care.

We also had Jews who made Kurdistan their home in another period.  According to tradition, the first Jewish settlers went to Kurdistan as early as the time of Ezra of the 5th century BCE.  

The early beginnings of Jewish immigration are attested by the Aramaic dialect spoken by Kurdish Jews up to modern times;  it is close to the language of the Babylonian Talmud and the speech of the Nestorian Christians in Kurdistan.  

Toward the end of the 19th century, the Jewish community was estimated to number 12,000 to 18,000 scattered in numerous villages and townlets and living chiefly as merchants, peddlers, and craftsmen.  During the 20th century, their number increased considerably, amounting in Persian Kurdistan alone to a population of 12,000 to 14,000.  After 1948's birth of Israel, the great majority of Kurdish Jews, from all areas, emigrated to Israel, many of them in or near Jerusalem.  This  certainly was the beginnings of the famous ingathering prophesized of in the bible that was to happen. 

Operation Ezra and Nehemiah was an airborne transfer of 120,000 Jews from Iraq to Israel under the auspices of the Jewish Agency and the Israel government.  The project was created in May 1950 and ended in October 1951.  At first the Iraqi authorities didn't permit direct Baghdad -Lydda flights, compelling the immigrants to fly to Cyprus where they transferred to  Israel-bound aircraft. 

Yemenite Jews at a Tu Bishvat celebration, Ma'abara Rosh HaAyin, 1950.   Ma'abarot (Hebrew: מַעְבָּרוֹת) were immigrant and refugee absorption camps established in Israel in the 1950s, constituting one of the largest public projects planned by the state to implement its sociospatial and housing policies.  The ma'abarot were meant to provide accommodation for the large influx of Jewish refugees and new Jewish immigrants (olim) arriving to the newly independent State of Israel, replacing the less habitable immigrant camps or tent cities. In 1951 there were 127 Ma'abarot housing 250,000 Jews, of which 75% were Mizrahi Jews; 58% of Mizrahi Jews who had immigrated up to that point had been sent to Ma'abarot, compared to 18% of European Jews.  The ma'abarot began to empty by the mid-1950s, and many formed the basis for Israel's development towns. The last ma'abara was dismantled in 1963. The ma'abarot became the most enduring symbol of the plight of Jewish immigrants from Arab lands in Israel; according to Dalia Gavriely-Nuri, the memory of these camps has been largely erased from Israeli memory.

 80% of the Iraqis in Operation Ezra and Nehemia were dispersed among Maabarot.  10% were absorbed immediately in agricultural settlements, and 10% were welfare cases.  

Historically, a small Arabized population of Kurdish origins exists in Galilee and Jerusalem area, though it has mostly intermixed with local Arabs; their exact numbers are not available since they are counted as ethnic Arabs in the official Israeli census. Some Arabized families of Kurdish background can still be identified by specific surnames. These would be the non-Jewish Kurds.  The Kurdish population in Israel is small and is mainly composed of individuals and families, who fled Iraq and Turkey during the Iraqi–Kurdish and the Kurdish–Turkish conflicts during the 20th century. In 2006, the number of Kurdish refugees from Turkey was estimated at 200. Another estimate for both Iraqi and Turkish Kurds was 150 persons in 2007.

In March 2001,about 60 Kurds had tried to enter Israel but were denied.  It was bad timing. The beginning of this new century of 2000 was bustling with more problems to face.

 On the 4th of March, A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in the coastal town of Netanya, killing himself and three passers-by, and wounding more than 60 others.  On 7 March 2001 Ariel Sharon formally takes office as Israeli prime minister, heading a fragile seven-party coalition and a government team comprising a third of the 120-member Knesset.  26 March 2001 A Palestinian sniper shoots dead a 10-month-old Jewish baby in her father's arms, in the flashpoint West Bank town of Hebron. The town is home to 120,000 Palestinians, and 400 hardline Jewish settlers.  

But, by 2007, 40 Iraqi Kurdish children, mostly from Iraqi Kurdistan, were hosted with their parents and medically treated in Israel, as part of the project initiated by Israeli Save a Child's Heart Organization (SACH). 

In 2013, it was reported that Israel accepted three Kurdish children from Iraqi Kurdistan for medical treatment. The children were settled into Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, southern Tel Aviv area. They were some of the 183 children with Iraqi nationality, entering Israel for medical treatment since the establishment of the program.

     Yazidis who fled Iraq

In January 2015, Yazidi organizations made an official request from Israeli government to absorb Yazidi refugees from Iraq. There was no official statement by Israeli government as a result, but Yazidi sources claimed that refugee absorption took place and thanked Israeli government. There was no response from Israeli Parliament members, upon asking them on this matter of absorbing Yazidi refugees.

Yazidis or Yezidis are a Kurmanji-speaking endogamous minority group who are indigenous to Kurdistan, a geographical region in Western Asia that includes parts of Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. The majority of Yazidis remaining in the Middle East today live in Iraq, primarily in the governorates of Nineveh and Duhok.

Ever since 1962—when the label “Second Israel” was first attached to that same community of Kurds that has recently attracted such profound Israeli sympathy, the Kurds of Syria—the epithet has regularly been applied not just to them, but to the three other Kurdish populations of the Middle East too.

  Kurds of Syria wanted to secede from Baghdad and to broaden their autonomy into full sovereignty.

The accusation that the Kurds form a “Second Israel” was refreshed in regional discourse as recently as September 2017, when the Kurds of northern Iraq voted overwhelmingly, if unsuccessfully. 

Resource:

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurds_in_Israel

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jul/19/came-to-fight-stayed-for-the-freedom-why-more-kurdish-women-are-taking-up-arms

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/17/israel#:~:text=4%20March%202001,wounding%20more%20than%2060%20others.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/operation-ezra-and-nehemia-the-airlift-of-iraqi-jews

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%27abarot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yazidis

 https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/12/13/isis-and-the-false-dawn-of-kurdish-statehood/

https://abcnews.go.com/International/photos/female-yazidi-kurdish-soldiers-fight-back-isis-38882652/image-38883734