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Who Truly Deserves a State? The Kurds or the Palestinians?




http://www.americanthinker.com
By Victor Sharpe
February 19, 2012



Article:


There are over twenty Arab states throughout the Middle East and North Africa, but the world demands, in a chorus of barely disguised animosity towards Israel, that yet another Arab state be created within the mere forty miles separating the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan.

Israel, a territory no larger than the tiny principality of Wales or the state of New Jersey, would be forced to share this sliver of land with a new and hostile Arab entity to be called Palestine, while seeing its present narrow waist reduced to a mere and suicidal nine miles in width -- what an earlier Israeli statesman, Abba Eban, described as the Auschwitz borders.

Remember, there has never existed in all of recorded history an independent sovereign nation called Palestine -- and certainly not an Arab one. The term "Palestine" has always been the name of a geographical territory, such as Siberia or Patagonia. It has never been a state.

But there is a people who, like the Jews, deserves a homeland and truly can trace their ancestry back thousands of years. They are the Kurds, and it is highly instructive to review their remarkable history in conjunction with that of the Jews. It is also necessary to review the historical injustice imposed upon them over the centuries by hostile neighbors and empires.

Let us go back to the captivity of the Ten Tribes of Israel, who were taken from their land by the Assyrians in 721-715 BC. Biblical Israel was depopulated, its Jewish inhabitants deported to an area in the region of ancient Media and Assyria -- a territory roughly corresponding to that of modern-day Kurdistan.

Assyria was, in turn, conquered by Babylonia, which led to the eventual destruction of the southern Jewish kingdom of Judah in 586 BC. The remaining two Jewish tribes were sent to the same area as that of their brethren from the northern kingdom.

When the Persian conqueror of Babylonia, Cyrus the Great, allowed the Jews to return to their ancestral lands, many Jews remained (and continued to live) with their neighbors in Babylon -- an area which, again, included modern-day Kurdistan.

The Babylonian Talmud refers in one section to the Jewish deportees from Judah receiving rabbinical permission to offer Judaism to the local population. The Kurdish royal house and a large segment of the general population in later years accepted the Jewish faith. Indeed, when the Jews rose up against Roman occupation in the 1st century AD, the Kurdish queen sent troops and provisions to support the embattled Jews.

By the beginning of the 2nd century AD, Judaism was firmly established in Kurdistan, and Kurdish Jews in Israel today speak an ancient form of Aramaic in their homes and synagogues. Kurdish and Jewish life became interwoven to such a remarkable degree that many Kurdish folk tales are connected with Jews'.

It is interesting to note that several tombs of biblical Jewish prophets are to be found in or near Kurdistan. For example, the prophet Nachum is in Alikush, while Jonah's tomb can be found in Nabi Yunis, which is ancient Nineveh. Daniel's tomb is in the oil-rich Kurdistan province of Kirkuk; Habbabuk is in Tuisirkan; and Queen Hadassah, or Esther, along with her uncle Mordechai, is in Hamadan.

After the failed revolt against Rome, many rabbis found refuge in what is now Kurdistan. The rabbis joined with their fellow scholars, and by the 3rd century AD, Jewish academies were flourishing. But the later Sassanid and Persian occupations of the region ushered in a time of persecution for the Jews and Kurds, which lasted until the Muslim Arab invasion in the 7th century. Indeed, the Jews and Kurds joined with the invading Arabs in the hope that their action would bring relief from the Sassanid depredations they had suffered.

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