Iraqi Kurdish leadership and Israel posted by Richard Seymour

One of the least noticed but most curious aspects of the current battle for Iraq is the relationship between Kurdish leaders and Israel. There have been a number of reports about the growing closeness between leaders of the two main Kurdish parties, the KDP and the PUK, and Israel, not least by Seymour Hersh. They seem to have struck upon a common interest: Iraq should not survive as a state.

While some will quite reasonably put this down to the particularly supine politics of the KDP and PUK leaders, both of whom have - in the name of an internecine power struggle - sold out their fellow Kurds, one to Saddam, the other to Iran. However, John Cooley traces the history back much farther in his An Alliance Against Babylon: The US, Israel & Iraq (2005). In particular, the relationship may well have began when Israel was busily coercing Iraq's Jews to leave the mainly Arab state and emigrate to the new Jewish state (with the help of the British, and Iraq's pro-British puppet government). Israel, seeking allies in the Middle East and Africa, looked to non-Arab groups like the Kurds and non-Arab nations like Turkey, as well as Iran, following the 1953 coup. Cooley reports that Israel, through Mossad, was supporting SAVAK in Iran and also the Kurds in Iraq for several decades. He writes:

Serious Israeli support for the Iraqi Kurds goes back to 1964 ... Defense Minister Shimon Peres met secretly with an ageing Kurdish leader, Khumran Ali Bedir-Khan, who had spied for Mossad during the early years of Israel's independence. In August 1965, Mossad organised an initial three-month training course - the first of others to follow - for the officers of Barzani's "Pesh Merga" (Kurdish for "those facing death" or sacrificers) fighters. The operation was code-named "Marvad" (carpet).

In the late summer of 1966 ... Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol deputised Aryieh ("Lyova") Eliav, the Labor party general-secretary who was then a member of the Knesset and deputy minister for industrialization and development, to conduct a survey in Iraqi Kurdistan and contact Barzani. An Israeli assistance programme was set up under Haim Levakov, a Palmach veteran and specialist of Arab affairs. An Israeli delegation with a complete Israeli field hospital and a small Israeli staff of doctors and nurses was sent to Barzani’s forces in jeeps and trucks, probably from Iran...

Eliav greeted Barzani in the name of the Israeli government. He presented greetings from the Knesset to Barzani in the form of a special gold medallion, struck to commemorate the opening of the newly elected Knesset. What forms Israeli assistance could take, besides arms and military training, was discussed. The field hospital, described by Eliav as a “big present” to Barzani, was set up.

During this time, which Cooley describes as “the secret Kurdish-Israeli honeymoon”, Barzani made a number of covert trips to Israel, touring the kibbutzim, meeting editors and politicians. Mossad and SAVAK helped the Kurds set up an intelligence outfit called Parastin, and Iranian intelligence arranged for Kurdish insurgents to be trained by Israel on its territory. The Shah made a deal with Saddam in 1975, which lasted right up until the uprising of 1979, and that terminated the Iranian connection (the post-revolutionary government was inclined towards a nationalism reinforced by Shi’ism, and treated the Kurds rather harshly as a result). Much more deserves to be said of the US involvement in this affair, particularly after Iraq’s involvement in the oil-price rises in 1973, and of course in the aftermath of the October 1973 war. However, that would be more work, and neither of us wants that.

What is worth mentioning is that when the Shah decided to drop the Kurds, in return for territorial concessions, so did Israel and the United States. The United States, for its part, took a well-documented turn toward Saddam, assisting his murder of the Kurds, covering up his crimes, with the executive trying to frustrate congressional moves to limit arms sales to the dictator. Only after a joint Kurdish-Shi’ite uprising in 1991 had been crushed with the help of the US did it turn toward support for the Kurds again. Israel, meanwhile, resumed support for the Kurds in the run up to the war on Iraq when it became clear that they might finally break up Iraq. Seymour Hersh was told by a former Israeli intelligence officer that the Israelis were building up the peshmergas so that they could go much farther than the Americans could dream of, and “penetrate, gather intelligence on, and then kill off the leadership of the Shi’ite and Sunni insurgencies in Iraq”.

While none of this diminishes for a second the endless tragedies to which the Kurds have been subjected nor vitiate their legitimate demands, it does help explain a crucial dynamic in the present Iraqi situation. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was advertised, among other things, as a bid to create a unified democracy. If democracy doesn’t look to be doing very well, the centrifugal forces are gaining in the New Iraq. Kurds are demanding nothing short of federal autonomy, some Shi’ites want the same, many don’t, and Sunnis are preparing themselves for civil war over the matter. It is hard to resist the conclusion that one aim of this war was to infirm Iraq as a nation-state. Sunnis and Shi’ites are uniting to prevent that.