Hallelujah…It’s About Time!
by Gerald A. Honigman
Finally, at long last, another native people, besides Arabs, is staking its claims to a slice of the justice pie in the Middle East–a region proclaimed by Arabs to be solely their own, despite the presence of scores of millions of native, non-Arab peoples in those lands.
A story by Sam Dagher in the July 10th New York Times reported that Kurds were going ahead staking claims to the huge fossil fuel deposits sitting under land in northern Iraq on which they have lived for thousands of years before an Arab ever arrived there. It was land promised to Kurds as an independent state after World War I, but was aborted on behalf of Arab nationalism in collusion with British petroleum politics–especially after the League of Nations’ Mosul decision in 1925. A united, Arab-dominated Iraq arose instead in the British Mandate of Mesopotamia, with the oil of the Kurdish north attached to it. The British miltary helped suppress the Kurds’ response to this.
As I have written for years now, while the dreams of a viable, federal Iraq looked good on paper, in reality, they were most probably merely American pipedreams–as well-intentioned as they were.
Long ago, Arab nationalism won out over a multi-ethnic Iraqi nationalism in the land, and hundreds of thousands of Kurds have been slaughtered by Arabs. Arabs have spoken of any Kurdish independence as the creation of another Israel; i.e., how dare anyone but themselves stake any political claim in the region. Keep in mind that one half of Israel’s Jews were refugees from so-called “Arab”/Muslim lands.
The Times reported that Susan Shihab, a member of Kurdistan’s parliament, said she no longer had faith that the rights of Kurds under the federal constitution from 2005 would be respected.
She has a lot of company in this line of thought–including anyone who has objectively followed the quest of non-Arab peoples for any semblance of respect and equality in “Arab” lands.
Berbers in North Africa are now being told that they must name their children with Arab/Islamic names, and both they and Syrian Kurds are not even allowed to use their own non-Arab languages –as just a few of too many other examples of this blatant Arab racism. And the same United Nations still having hissy fits over Israel’s security fence (designed to keep Arabs from murdering its kids), continues to act deaf, dumb, and blind about the Arab subjugation of tens of millions of non-Arab peoples.
The West and the current and last several American administrations in particular are and have been determined to create the Arabs’ state #22, their second one in the original 1920 Palestine Mandate. Jordan was created from the lions’ share of the land after 1922.
That that new Arab state, run by Mahmud Abbas and his “moderate” Fatah, will no doubt be hostile to its tiny Jewish neighbor and sees “negotiations” only in terms of its earlier, openly-professed Trojan Horse and destruction-in-phases scenario planned for Israel is a given. Hamas, to its credit, is simply more honest and won’t even indulge in word games regarding the acceptance or rejection of Israel.
Despite this, the world is intent on shoving what will likely be yet another Arab terror base down Israel’s throat–but this time, Tel Aviv, Israel’s Parliament, main airport, main seaport, Jerusalem, most of its population in its narrow nine to fifteen mile wide waist, and so forth will become the main Arab targets (this time courtesy of American arms)–not more remote areas like Sderot in the south, after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza several years ago. Recall the ten thousand rockets and mortars launched from Gaza against Israeli civilian centers after that withdrawal. There’s a lesson to be learned from that by anyone with functioning neurons…
Unlike Arabs vis-a-vis “their” kilab yahud Jew dogs, Kurds don’t want to deprive Arabs of their own just, due rights and have never terrorized Arabs. The problem has always been that most Arabs define their rights in terms which negate any at all for everybody else.
Where, for example, is it written that Arabs are entitled to have sole claim, with the exception of Iran, over all of the region’s fossil fuel deposits?
The oil in the region around Kirkuk sits on Kurdish land. It is as Kurdish as the Arabian Peninsula’s is Arab. That Saddam and his Sunnis forcibly Arabized the area earlier did not change this.
The Kurds have learned their lessons from the not-so-distant past regarding America, the Brits, and their Arab neighbors. Both the Brits and America used and abused Kurds repeatedly for their own interests–then abandoned them to Arabs who slaughtered them en masse soon afterwards.
Shi’a Arabs have recently been more tolerant towards Kurds than their Sunni counterparts because they needed Kurds as a counterweight to Sunnis who repeatedly blow the Shi’a apart. But, thanks to America’s overthrow of Saddam, the Shi’a are now in the ascendancy, and they too have no intention of granting any non-Arabs their just due. Kurds know this, and hence the current developments as reported in The New York Times.
If the world’s roadmap insists that Arabs must have a 22nd state, then it is certainly well overdue for thirty-five million truly stateless Kurds to at long last gain their one.
Anything less–despite the potential problems (and there won’t be problems creating a latter-day Arafatian Fatahland or Hamastan?)–will be sheer, nauseating hypocrisy.
On January 5, 2010, my book dealing with this overall topic will be released for the new book year. It is titled, The Quest For Justice…The Arab-Israeli Conflict In Greater Perspective.
Please watch for it. It is not just another book about the Middle East.