This October marks a year since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, triggered by the 7 October attacks, and which has seen over 40,000 Palestinians killed by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and Israel warned to avoid acts of genocide by the International Court of Justice. With the war now spilling over into a ground invasion in Lebanon and a potential regional conflict, the Kurdish political movement remains caught in the cross-fire.
Elif Genç is a Kurdish women’s movement activist, PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, and co-chair of the Canadian Kurdish Community Centre. She has also written on the historic links and solidarity between the Kurdish and Palestinian people and movements. She spoke to Medya News to discuss the historic links between the two movements, and how Israeli and Turkish politicians have sought to exploit the two communities and pit them against one another. Select highlights follow, and the full recording can be watched back above.
Can you describe the historic dimensions of Palestinian-Kurdish solidarity?
Historically, as anti-colonial movements for emancipation, for struggle, they definitely share that in common… There are very few groups in the world as stateless as the Palestinians and the Kurds… What they also share in common, which is less known but very imperative right now, is the fact they were together in the Beka’a valley in the 1980s right up until the 1990s. It was an epicentre for Leftist groups at the time; it wasn’t just the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that was going there, in fact other Kurdish groups, Turkish Leftist groups, Angola, Cuba… And that’s where the PKK had their academy, and with that came a lot of solidarity between the two groups.
Has this solidarity continued into the present day?
[Palestinian figurehead] Leila Khaled visited [Kurdish politician] Leyla Güven when she was doing her hunger strike in 2019. Leila Khaled attended the third congress of the [pro-Kurdish] Peoples’ Democratic Party, there’s a lot of solidarity between this faction of the Palestinian struggle and our Kurdish liberation movement.
What factors have simultaneously placed this relationship under stress?
I think there’s a lot of factors involved. It has to do with factions in the Kurdish movement, it has to do with factions in the Palestinian struggle, a lot to do with ideology, with praxis, with tensions between Kurdish people and an [Arab] population that they also see as their oppressors, in some ways.
What positions have the Kurdish movement taken on the latest developments?
They’re very clear about that: of course, we condemn any kind of genocide, any massacre of a peoples, an oppressed people and especially the Palestinian people. What Israel’s doing there is war crimes, has been condemned across the board. At the same time, because of the events of 7 October – which have been contextualised in many different ways – the movement has also condemned Hamas’ use of violence against the Israeli hostages.
How have state governments sought to exploit the two communities?
[Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan] and [Israeli President Benjamin] Netanyahu have been playing a dirty game, pitting the two communities against one another. Netanyahu saw an opportunity, when they saw how much solidarity was being created between Hamas and Turkey at the time, he… got on his soapbox and started to say, ‘oh, Turkey is killing Kurdish people – it’s outrageous’. Which it is, it’s outrageous; but at the same time, there’s the irony that Netanyahu would sit there and talk about Kurdish people under occupation and massacred and an ongoing genocide when they are perpetuating their own genocide. And vice versa.
