Among the leading Palestinian freedom fighters, Leila Khaled stands out for her consistent support of the Kurdish liberation struggle. Khaled is a member of the national committee of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and a representative on the Palestine National Council.
The leftist leader and resistance icon famously visited Leyla Güven, the Kurdish parliamentarian and political leader who conducted a world-famous hunger strike to demand an end to the isolation of imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan. She has previously spoken at conferences held by the democratic, pro-women, pro-minority rights Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in Turkey. The HDP has since been made illegal as part of Turkey’s ongoing repression of Kurdish political expression, to be succeeded by the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) party. In February 2020, Khaled said at a HDP conference: “We struggle together against Zionism, against imperialism and bigotry.”
Khaled has visited Leyla Güven, 55, the Kurdish parliamentarian and political leader who has maintained a hunger strike to demand an end to the isolation of imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan.
In this interview, Khaled agreed to be the keynote speaker at Ecosocialism 2024, a conference in Australia on 28-30 June that will bring together activists from around the Indo-Pacific region. When word got out, Zionist groups and far-right Australian media commentators began a campaign to stop her speaking at this conference, either in person or by video link.
The Australian Labor government declared that it would refuse Khaled a visa to come to Australia and in March, Meta (the successor to Facebook) took down Green Left’s well-established page on the social media site because it published interviews with Khaled and promoted her as the keynote speaker at Ecosocialism 2024.
The UK, too, has witnessed recent efforts to censor Khaled and prevent her from speaking out over Israel’s ongoing war on Palestine.
In the very interview that sparked these efforts at censorship, Khaled re-affirmed:
“The Kurds were divided between four countries, Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq, since the end of the Ottoman empire. This is an injustice and this issue is still not solved. I know that they are oppressed and for this reason we have had links with the Kurds from a long time ago. They were trained in our camps because they were fighting for their rights.”
It’s particularly noteworthy that Kurdish freedom fighters died defending Palestinian freedom fighters in Lebanon in 1982, as part of the first wave of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants to lose their lives in the armed struggle. Khaled then went on to point to the political and structural similarities between the two peoples, saying:
“The majority of the Kurds are in Turkey – some 20 million. Who is going to say that those Kurds in Turkey who are fighting the government are not the indigenous people? Nobody can say that. They are the people who have been living there but after many wars some have been forced to flee to other countries. They Kurds are from there and they have a national identity just as we have our identity as Palestinians. In Iraq, the Kurds have won the right to self-autonomy, although within the state of Iraq. They have the right to have their own parliament and their language. In Iran and Turkey, nothing like this has happened.”
While she has publicly condemned Turkey’s ongoing cross-border war on Kurds in Syria, Khaled has also expressed concerns that the autonomous territories held by the Kurds and allies in North and East Syria (Rojava) is too dependent on the United States’ intervention to weaken Syria as a country.
“They have a right in Rojava to self-autonomy because that is just,” she said. “So what will be the solution? Some Kurds speak about secession and to have a state of their own but this will not give them their rights. In the current balance of forces, the Kurds cannot win a separate state, whether in Iraq, Iran, Syria or Turkey. This solution of self-autonomy within the existing states by the law is what can work.”
Despite censorship and repression, Khaled continues to speak out, sharing constructive critique, messages of solidarity, and calls for self-determination and autonomy for both the Kurds and her own Palestinian people.
*Peter Boyle is a well-known journalist and political activist living in Sydney, Australia. He is also a correspondent of the Green Left Journal.
