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An Insider View on How Kurds See Israel and Palestine

Published

4 days ago

September 16, 2024

There is no conflict in the Middle East, or arguably in the world, that divides people more than the Israel–Palestine conflict. Everyone seems to have an opinion on this issue, from university students to social media influencers, academics to world leaders. However, few people understand the plight of both Jews and Palestinians better than the Kurds. Kurds, too, have been a scattered and persecuted minority.

The Kurds have a historical connection to Palestine that dates back to the time of Salah ad-Din, the great Muslim Kurdish leader revered for his role in defeating the Crusaders in the Holy Land. To expand and protect the vast Ayyubid sultanate which he founded, Salah ad-Din placed many Kurdish settlers in Palestine, Egypt and Syria. The descendants of those Kurdish settlers continue to live in Palestine today, but they have largely assimilated into Arab culture, abandoning their Kurdish roots and language.

Similarly, Jews have lived in Kurdistan for centuries, dating back to the 12th century by some accounts. However, most migrated to Israel with the establishment of the Jewish state and the Right of Return law, which gave all Jews the legal right to immigrate to Israel. Today, there are between 200,000 to 300,000 Kurdish Jews in Israel who continue to celebrate their Kurdish roots but have adopted the Hebrew language.

Worryingly, some Kurds support Hamas

While the Kurds have a historical connection with the two nations, they are not monolithic in their views on the Israel–Palestine conflict. This has become more evident since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza.

Recently, pictures of assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh have circulated in Kurdish social media. This attention to Haniyeh has alarmed many Kurds, including myself, about the growing number of Kurds who seem to support Hamas. They are expressing solidarity with Hamas due largely to the fact that Kurds and Palestinians share a common Muslim identity. Furthermore, Kurds see their own struggle mirrored in the Palestinian experience.

Yet the Kurdish and Palestinian situation is different. Kurds are a diverse lot. Not all of them are Muslim. Some belong to ancient religious communities like the Yezidi and the Yarsani, who have faced persecution by Muslims seeking religious homogenization.

Islamist Kurdish factions that support Hamas, including some political groups in the autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq, add another layer of complexity. Many of these groups have praised Haniyeh as a martyr and resistance fighter despite Hamas’s use of terrorist tactics like suicide bombings and its support for leaders like Saddam Hussein, who murdered countless Kurds. Furthermore, I have searched both in English and Kurdish and found no evidence that these Islamist Kurds expressed any sorrow over the unjust killings of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023. These Islamists do not care about the fact that Human Rights Watch termed Hamas’s actions war crimes.

Support for Hamas among the more religiously radical Kurds reveals a key tension in Kurdish society. Despite a century of Kurdish nationalism, many Kurds still seem to prioritize their religious identity over their ethnic one. The Kurdish political class has yet to win the hearts and minds of more religious Kurds. For instance, Ali Bapir, the current leader of the Islamic Justice Group, and members of his party were reported to have refused to stand up for the Kurdish national anthem due mainly to a line that reads, “Our faith and religion are our homeland.”

These Islamists often align with regional powers like Iran or Turkey despite both countries engaging in a silent cultural genocide against Kurds. Clearly, they still put their religious identity first. This prioritization of religion over ethnic or national identity informs their support for Islamic powers like Iran and Turkey or organizations like Hamas.

These Islamist Kurds are not merely supporting Hamas because they feel for the oppressed Palestinians. They seek what all Islamist groups seek: a strict Islamic state. This is clear if one examines the history of these groups in Kurdish regions. In Turkish-occupied Kurdistan, a radical armed Kurdish Islamist group known as the Kurdish Hezbollah emerged around the same time as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the 1980s.

This Islamist organization launched a conflict against the PKK and anyone who disagreed with their extremist views. They carried out kidnappings, assassinations and mass murders. There are now concerns that this terror group has reformed into the Islamist party known as the Huda-Par, which won 4 seats in the Turkish parliament in the 2023 election.

Similarly, in the Kurdistan region in Iraq, long before the Islamic State, secular Kurdish parties like the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) faced severe security challenges in dealing with radical Islamist groups like the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK). The IMK later morphed into Ansar al-Islam and many other Islamist groups. These groups sought to establish a strict Wahhabist Islamic state. Before PUK forces drove them out, they even imposed sharia laws in some villages. These were similar to the laws favored by al-Qaeda and Taliban, who incidentally trained many of the founders of Ansar al-Islam. They fought in Afghanistan alongside both these organizations.

So, support for Hamas by Islamist groups is not just mere support of fellow oppressed people or co-religionists. This support is part of a broader Islamist agenda that spans the Middle East region and poses a serious threat to local, regional and international security.

Kurds have the experience to see past simplistic narratives

It is important to note that Islamists do not represent all Kurds. The Kurdish position on the Israel-Palestine conflict is quite varied. Major political parties across greater Kurdistan take a neutral position on the Israel-Palestine conflict. They are not completely immune to the strong anti-Israel sentiment in the region. Yet Kurds can sympathize with embattled Israel’s geopolitical position. They recognize that their primary adversaries are Muslim-majority states like Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq. These states, not Israel, have historically oppressed and occupied Kurdish lands to this day.

It was Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, not an Israeli leader, who used Islamic scripture to justify the Anfal Genocide, which killed some 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds. He killed 5,000 more using chemical weapons in the city of Halabja. It is Turkey that has jailed, killed and tried to erase Kurdish culture and identity for a century. The mere utterance of the words “Kurd” or “Kurdistan” can land you in Turkish jail for a long time, if not forever. Turkey, not Israel, massacres Kurds and calls them “mountain Turks.”

Muslim states like Iran have been handing heavy prison and even death sentences to teachers, activists and protesters advocating Kurdish rights. This bloody crackdown on Kurdish civil society in Iran has been unceasing since the establishment of The Islamic Republic of Iran’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa to kill Kurds advocating for their rights. Recently, Kurdish girls like Jina Amini were imprisoned for how they dressed, what they thought or who they were. Even now, teachers are tortured or executed in Evin Prison for teaching the Kurdish language.

It was Syria, not Israel, that stripped 120,000 Kurds of their citizenship and made them foreigners in their own land. These Kurds are now stateless. However, since the Syrian civil war, the Kurds under the PYD and its military forces like the YPG have established their own regional self-administration with the cooperation of local tribes and dealt a major defeat of ISIS. Despite the countless lives given in the war against ISIS, the Turkish government has decided to carry out operations that are ongoing against the Kurds in Syria to ethnically cleanse them out of their regions and settle Turkish-backed Islamists and Syrian refugees currently residing in Turkish camps. The gruesome videos and reports of war crimes and human rights abuses reveal that Turkey’s efforts to create a safe zone in North Syria are motivated largely by its animosity towards the Kurds inhabiting the region.

It is quite shocking then that these very Muslim states that committed and continue to commit crimes against Kurds tell them that “we are brothers.” These states occupy Kurdish lands and are carrying out a genocide of Kurdish identity and culture that is killing thousands of people gradually and silently continues unopposed by regional and international powers.

Why is it then that these states speak out so vocally against oppression or aggression against Palestinians yet continue to occupy and oppress Kurds in their own backyard? If Palestinians have the right to statehood, so too do Kurds. Yet, the double standard reveals the insincerity of these states who claim to be defending the oppressed Palestinians. Narrow national interests, not concern for justice or for the Islamic community, motivate them.

Look at the regional reactions to the 2017 Kurdistan Referendum held in Iraqi Kurdistan. Some 139 out of 193 U.N. member states have recognized Palestinian statehood since the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) declared the nationhood of Palestine in 1988. The Kurds received vocal support for their 2017 referendum from Israel alone. Even UN Secretary-General António Guterres called Kurdistan’s move for independence “destabilizing.”

The majority of Muslim states, including the State of Palestine, objected to Kurdish independence. Yet these same states vocally support Palestinian statehood. PLO Secretary General Saeb Erekat called Kurdish independence “a poisoned sword against the Arabs.” Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei called the vote an act of betrayal and accused the US of seeking to create a new Israel in the region by supporting Kurdish independence — even though the US had opposed the referendum.

Countries like Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria typically view both Zionism and Kurdish nationalism as projects of Western imperialism. This is despite the fact that it was the European imperialist Sykes-Picot Plan that unjustly partitioned Kurdistan between these states.

These states often label Kurdistan a second Israel, illustrating that an extreme anti-Kurdism, similar to their anti-Jewish/Israeli sentiments, animates their outlook.

Kurds can understand better than most the plight of Palestinians. Yet bitter experience has taught them how shallow so many Muslim states’ support for Palestinians really is. So, they can see through the hypocritical rhetoric. Thus, Kurds are less likely to side with Palestine and oppose Israel in a Pavlovian manner, and many have more balanced views.

All in all, the Kurdish experience provides a unique lens through which to view the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Kurdish struggle for identity, national sovereignty and justice mirrors that of both Jews and Palestinians. Yet they understand that an international community that applies its moral principles selectively will never end the cycle of violence and oppression in the Middle East.

[Tara Yarwais edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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‘Doomsday’ Glacier Is Set to Melt Faster

Published

2 mins ago

September 20, 2024

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‘Doomsday’ Glacier Is Set to Melt Faster

Tidal action on the underside of the Thwaites Glacier in the Antarctic will “inexorably” accelerate melting this century, according to new research by British and American scientists. The researchers warn the faster melting could destabilize the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, leading to its eventual collapse.

The massive glacier—which is roughly the size of Florida—is of particular interest to scientists because of the rapid speed at which it is changing and the impact its loss would have on sea levels (the reason for its “Doomsday” moniker). It also acts as an anchor holding back the West Antarctic ice sheet.

Warmed ocean water melts doomsday glacier faster — Yasin Demirci—Anadolu/Getty Images

More than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) thick in places, Thwaites has been likened to a cork in a bottle. Were it to collapse, sea levels would rise by 65 centimeters (26 inches). That’s already a significant amount, given oceans are currently rising 4.6 millimeters a year. But if it led to the eventual loss of the entire ice sheet, sea levels would rise 3.3 meters.

While some computer models suggest reductions in greenhouse gas emissions under the 2015 Paris Agreement may mitigate the glacier’s retreat, the outlook for the glacier remains “grim,” according to a report by the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), a project that includes researchers from the British Antarctic Survey, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.K.’s Natural Environment Research Council.

Thwaites has been retreating for more than 80 years but that process has accelerated in the past 30, Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist who contributed to the research, said in a news release. “Our findings indicate it is set to retreat further and faster.” Other dynamics that aren’t currently incorporated into large-scale models could speed up its demise, the new research shows.

Using a torpedo-shaped robot, scientists determined that the underside of Thwaites is insulated by a thin layer of cold water. However, in areas where the parts of the glacier lift off the seabed and the ice begins to float, tidal action is pumping warmer sea water, at high pressure, as far as 10 kilometers under the ice. The process is disrupting that insulating layer and will likely significantly speed up how fast the grounding zone—the area where the glacier sits on the seabed—retreats.

A similar process has been observed on glaciers in Greenland.

The group also flagged a worst-case scenario in which 100-meter-or-higher ice cliffs at the front of Thwaites are formed and then rapidly calve off icebergs, causing runaway glacial retreat that could raise sea levels by tens of centimeters in this century. However, the researchers said it’s too early to know if such scenarios are likely.

A key unanswered question is whether the loss of Thwaites Glacier is already irreversible. Heavy snowfalls, for example, regularly occur in the Antarctic and help replenish ice loss, Michelle Maclennan, a climate scientist with the University of Colorado at Boulder, explained during a news briefing. “The problem though is that we have this imbalance: There is more ice loss occurring than snowfall can compensate for,” she said.

Increased moisture in the planet’s atmosphere, caused by global warming evaporating ocean waters, could result in more Antarctic snow—at least for a while. At a certain point, though, that’s expected to switch over to rain and surface melting on the ice, creating a situation where the glacier is melting from above and below. How fast that happens depends in part on nations’ progress to slow climate change.

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David Lammy seeks emergency boost to aid cash to offset rising cost of migrant hotels

Published

20 mins ago

September 20, 2024

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Britain’s foreign secretary David Lammy is pushing for an emergency top-up to development spending as ballooning costs of supporting asylum seekers threaten to drain overseas aid to its lowest level since 2007.

The UK government spent £4.3bn hosting asylum seekers and refugees in Britain in the last financial year, more than a quarter of its £15.4bn overseas aid budget, according to official data. This more than consumed the £2.5bn increases in the aid budget scheduled between 2022 and 2024 by former Conservative chancellor Jeremy Hunt.

People familiar with Lammy’s thinking say he fears that if Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, resists calls to at least match Hunt’s offer, the aid budget will be further eviscerated, undermining the government’s ambitions on the global stage.

Currently, the housing of asylum seekers in hotels is controlled by the Home Office but largely paid for out of the aid budget, a set-up introduced in 2010 when spending on the programme was relatively modest.

In the longer term, development agencies and some Foreign Office officials want the costs capped or paid for by the Home Office itself.

However, such a move would be politically fraught, the people said, as it would require billions of pounds of extra funding for the Home Office at a time the government is preparing widespread cuts across departments.

Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, is due to attend a string of upcoming international events, starting with the UN general assembly this month, then a Commonwealth summit in Samoa, a G20 meeting in Brazil, and COP-29 climate talks in Azerbaijan later this autumn.

International partners will be looking at these meetings for signs that the change of government in the UK marks a change in direction on development.

Britain’s leading role was eroded by Rishi Sunak after he cut the previously ringfenced spending from 0.7 per cent of gross national income to 0.5 per cent when he was chancellor in 2020.

“When he turns up at the UN next week and the G20 and COP a few weeks later, the PM has a unique opportunity to reintroduce the UK under Labour as a trustworthy partner that sees the opportunity of rebooting and reinvesting in a reformed fairer international financial system,” said Jamie Drummond, co-founder of aid advocacy group One.

“But to be that trusted partner you need to be an intentional investor — not an accidental cutter.”

Speaking on Tuesday in a speech outlining UK ambitions to regain a leading role in the global response to climate change, Lammy said the government wanted to get back to spending 0.7 per cent of GNI on overseas aid but that it could not be done overnight.

“Part of the reason the funding has not been there is because climate has driven a migration crisis,” he said. “We have ended up in this place where we made a choice to spend development aid on housing people across the country and having a huge accommodation and hotel bill as a consequence,” he said.

Under OECD rules, some money spent in-country on support for refugees and asylum seekers can be classified as aid because it constitutes a form of humanitarian assistance.

But the amount the UK has been spending on refugees from its aid budget has shot up from an average of £20mn a year between 2009-2013 to £4.3bn last year, far more than any other OECD donor country, according to Bond, the network of NGOs working in international development.

Spending per refugee from the aid budget has also risen from an average of £1,000 a year in 2009-2013 to around £21,500 in 2021, largely as a result of the use of hotels to accommodate asylum seekers.

The Independent Commission for Aid Impact watchdog argues that the Home Office has had little incentive to manage the funds carefully because they come from a different department’s budget.

In her July 29 speech outlining the dire fiscal straits that Labour inherited from the previous Conservative government, Reeves projected the cost of the asylum system would rise to £6.4bn this year.

Labour was hoping to cut this by at least £800mn, she said, by ending plans to deport migrants to Rwanda. A Home Office official said the government was also ensuring that asylum claims were dealt with faster and those ineligible deported quickly.

But the Foreign Office projects that on current trends, overseas aid as a proportion of UK income (when asylum costs are factored in) will drop to 0.35 per cent of national income by 2028.

Without emergency funding to plug the immediate cost of housing tens of thousands of migrants in hotels, that will happen as soon as this year, according to Bond, bringing overseas aid levels to their lowest as a proportion of national income, since 2007.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said: “The UK’s future [official development assistance] budget will be announced at the Budget. We would not comment on speculation.”

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AI translation now ‘good enough’ for Economist to deploy

Published

23 mins ago

September 20, 2024

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AI translation now 'good enough' for Economist to deploy

Preview of The Economist's Espresso app and Ludwig Siegele, The Economist's senior editor, AI initiatives. Pictures: The Economist — Preview of The Economist’s Espresso app and Ludwig Siegele, The Economist’s senior editor, AI initiatives. Pictures: The Economist

The Economist has deployed AI-translated content on its budget-friendly “snack-sized” app Espresso after deciding the technology had reached the “good enough” mark.

Ludwig Siegele, senior editor for AI initiatives at The Economist, told Press Gazette that AI translation will never be a “solved problem”, especially in journalism because it is difficult to translate well due to its cultural specificities.

However he said it has reached the point where it is good enough to have introduced AI-powered, in-app translations in French, German, Mandarin and Spanish on The Economist’s “bite-sized”, cut-price app Espresso (which has just over 20,000 subscribers).

Espresso has also just been made free to high school and university students aged 16 and older globally as part of a project by The Economist to make its journalism more accessible to audiences around the world.

Siegele said that amid “lots of hype” about AI, the questions to ask are: “What is it good for? Does it work? And does it work with what we’re trying to do?”

He added that the project to make The Economist’s content “more accessible to more people” via Espresso was a “good point to start”.

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“The big challenge of AI is the technology, at least for us, is not good enough,” he continued. “It’s interesting, but to really develop a product, I think in many cases, it’s not good enough yet. But in that case, it worked.

“I wouldn’t say that translation is a solved problem, it is never going to be a solved problem, especially in journalism, because journalism is really difficult to translate. But it’s good enough for that type of content.”

The Economist is using AI translation tool DeepL alongside its own tech on the backend.

“It’s quite complicated,” Siegele said. “The translation is the least of it at this point. The translation isn’t perfect. If you look at it closely it has its quirks, but it’s pretty good. And we’re working on a kind of second workflow which makes it even better.”

The AI-translated text is not edited by humans because, Siegele said, the “workflow is so tight” on Espresso which updates around 20 times a day.

“There is no natural thing where we can say ‘okay, now everything is done. Let’s translate, and let’s look at the translations and make sure they’re perfect’. That doesn’t work… The only thing we can do is, if it’s really embarrassing, we’ll take it down and the next version in 20 minutes will be better.”

One embarrassing example, Siegele admitted, is that the tool turned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz into a woman.

But Siegele said a French reader has already got in touch to say: “I don’t read English. This is great. Finally, I can read The Economist without having to put it into Google Translate and get bad translations.”

The Economist simultaneously launched AI-translated videos on its social platforms in the same four languages.

The videos are all a maximum of 90 seconds meaning it is not too much work to check them – crucial as, unlike the Espresso article translations, they are edited by humans (native language speakers working for The Economist) taking about 15 minutes per video.

For the videos The Economist is using AI video tool Hey Gen. Siegele said: “The way that works is you give them the original video and they do a provisional translation and then you can proofread the translation. So whereas the translations for the app are basically automatic – I mean, we can take them down and we will be able to change them, but at this point, they’re completely automatic – videos are proofread, and so in this way we can make sure that the translations are really good.”

In addition they are using “voice clones” which means journalists who speak in a video have some snippets of themselves given to Hey Gen to build and that is used to create the finished product.

The voice clones are not essential, Siegele explained, as translations can be done automatically regardless. Journalists can opt out of having their voices used in this way, and any data stored will be deleted if the employee leaves The Economist. But the clones do mean the quality is “much better”.

They have a labelling system for the app articles and videos that can show they are “AI translated” or “AI transformed”. But, Siegele said, they are “not going to have a long list of AI things we may have used to build this article for brainstorming or fact checking or whatever, because in the end it’s like a tool, it’s like Google search. We are still responsible, and there’s almost always a human except for edge cases like the Espresso translations or with podcast transcripts…”

Economist ‘will be strategic’ when choosing how to roll out AI

Asked whether the text translation could be rolled out to more Economist products, Siegele said: “That’s of course a goal but it remains to be seen.”

He said that although translation for Espresso is automated, it would not be the goal to do the same throughout The Economist.

He also said they still have to find out if people are “actually interested” and if they can “develop a translation engine that is good enough”.

“But I don’t think we will become a multi-linguistic, multi-language publication anytime soon. We will be much more strategic with what we what we translate… But I think there is globally a lot of demand for good journalism, and if the technology makes it possible, why not expand the access to our content?

“If it’s not too expensive – and it was too expensive before. It’s no longer.”

Other ways The Economist is experimenting with AI, although they have not yet been implemented, include a style bot and fact-checking.

Expect to see “some kind of summarisation” of articles, Siegele continued, “which probably will go beyond the five bullet points or three bullet points you increasingly see, because that’s kind of table stakes. People expect that. But there are other ways of doing it”.

He also suggested some kind of chatbot but “not an Economist GPT – that’s difficult and people are not that interested in that. Perhaps more narrow chatbots”. And said versioning, or repurposing articles for different audiences or different languages, could also follow.

“The usual stuff,” Siegele said. “There’s only so many good ideas out there. We’re working on all of them.” But he said he wants colleagues to come up with solutions to their problems rather than him as “the AI guy” imposing things.

Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our “Letters Page” blog

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Kentucky sheriff held over fatal shooting of judge in court

Published

44 mins ago

September 20, 2024

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Kentucky sheriff held over fatal shooting of judge in court

A Kentucky sheriff has been arrested after fatally shooting a judge in his chambers, police say.

District Judge Kevin Mullins died at the scene after being shot multiple times in the Letcher County Courthouse, Kentucky State Police said.

Letcher County Sheriff Shawn Stines, 43, has been charged with one count of first-degree murder.

The shooting happened on Thursday after an argument inside the court, police said, but they have not yet revealed a motive.

Officials said Mullins, 54, was shot multiple times at around 14:00 local time on Thursday at the court in Whitesburg, Kentucky, a small rural town about 150 miles (240km) south-east of Lexington.

Sheriff Stines was arrested at the scene without incident, Kentucky State Police said. They did not reveal the nature of the argument before the shooting.

According to local newspaper the Mountain Eagle, Sheriff Stines walked into the judge’s outer office and told court employees that he needed to speak alone with Mullins.

The two entered the judge’s chambers, closing the door behind them. Those outside heard gun shots, the newspaper reported.

Sheriff Stines reportedly walked out with his hands up and surrendered to police. He was handcuffed in the courthouse foyer.

The state attorney general, Russell Coleman, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that his office “will fully investigate and pursue justice”.

Kentucky State Police spokesman Matt Gayheart told a news conference that the town was shocked by the incident

“This community is small in nature, and we’re all shook,” he said.

Mr Gayheart said that 50 employees were inside the court building when the shooting occurred.

No-one else was hurt. A school in the area was briefly placed on lockdown.

Kentucky Supreme Court Chief Justice Laurance B VanMeter said he was “shocked by this act of violence”.

Announcing Judge Mullins’ death on social media, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said: “There is far too much violence in this world, and I pray there is a path to a better tomorrow.”

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Chinese EV makers boost Hong Kong stock index

Published

52 mins ago

September 20, 2024

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Electric-vehicle makers boosted Hong Kong stocks on Friday, as major indices rose across the board in the wake of the US Federal Reserve’s interest rate cut.

The Hang Seng index rose 1.8 per cent, with Chinese EV companies Xpeng and Geely Auto adding 9 per cent and 4.8 per cent, respectively.

Japan’s Topix rose 1.5 per cent, while South Korea’s Kospi added 1 per cent.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.4 per cent, led by clinical trial groups Euren Pharmaceuticals and Telix Pharmaceuticals, which gained as much as 6.7 per cent and 4.9 per cent, respectively.

On Thursday, the S&P 500 gained 1.7 per cent, hitting a new record after the Fed’s half-point rate cut announcement on Wednesday.

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