The Kurds Fight for a Place in the Middle East

In the past two years, Kurdish militias known as Peshmerga have proved to be the most successful local forces fighting Islamic State. They have also offered refuge to, and earned the loyalty of, a number of persecuted religious minority groups—such as the Kakei and Yazidis (local sects with relatively small populations) and Assyrian Christians. In addition, writes Seth Frantzman, the Kurds and their allies display a strong affinity with Israel:

There is a general sense among the various minority groups in [the region of] Kurdistan that their war against jihadists is similar to what is happening in Israel. There is a great deal of respect for Israel’s fight against Islamist terror, and recognition that what was once done to the Jews has now been visited upon the Kurds and other minorities. In the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein was planning attacks on Israel, he was also committing the Anfal massacres against the Kurds, in which 4,000 villages were damaged and up to 180,000 people murdered. Saddam used the same poison gas on Kurds with which he threatened to “burn Israel” in 1991.

The commander of a Peshmerga unit, when asked which country he feels the Kurds are closest to, [cites] Israel. “We think Israel is our closest friend in the struggle,” he says. “We have a common history.” . . .

Indeed, for decades, Arab nationalists, Islamists, and the Iranian regime have described the Kurdish struggle in terms of Israel. On July 21, for example, the former Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, was reported to have claimed that the U.S. was “plotting to establish a second Israel in the region” in the form of a free Kurdistan.

Opposition to racism and genocide, and the feeling that both Iran’s mullahs and extremists in the Arab world have targeted them as a “second Israel,” have cemented a unique Kurdish bond with the Jewish state, and with the idea of preserving the kind of regional diversity that Israel represents.

Read more at Tower

More about: ISIS, Israel, Kurds, Middle East, Politics & Current Affairs, Yazidis

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF