While Iraq and Syria collapse, the Kurds of these two countries have rallied together and stood their ground against Islamic State (IS)—despite considerable odds. Haviv Rettig Gur speculates about the possibility that they will create an independent state of their own, and the potential affinity of such a state with the Jewish one:
The Kurds have learned the same lesson as the Middle East’s Jews: solidarity and clarity of purpose are military assets as crucial to survival and victory as ammunition and warplanes. . . .
If ever a people deserved to carve out a homeland from the wreckage of the collapsing Middle East, [the Kurds] do. . . . [P]erhaps, if they eventually emerge from the wars of Syria and Iraq victorious, prosperous, and democratic, the Kurds can . . . [set] a precedent that legitimizes moderation and liberal nationalism in a region that has largely lost its faith in the redemptive power of ideas.
I don’t know much about the Kurds, but I know Israel. Israel’s democracy and prosperity did not originate in a generation of founding philosopher-fathers or in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of limited monarchy. Israel is democratic despite its Jews’ hailing almost entirely from dictatorships, despite its lack of a constitution, despite its birth and development in the shadow of war, despite the prominence of its military elite, despite deep and abiding ethnic divides. Its democratic roots, in other words, were not carried here from other lands or inherited from its intellectual heroes. Rather, Israel’s democracy was born in the ethos of national solidarity given to us by the Jewish intellectual tradition and the architects of modern political Zionism.
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