The
most honorable thing that the State of Israel could do is warn the
Kurds not to make the same error we did and become a state.
Rather
than wanting to become a state and having to make the moral compromises
to the int'l military-industrial complex that come with becoming a
state, stateless peoples should form a Federation of their own and forge
a new kind of cooperation.
I
would not want to see the Kurds and the many other stateless Peoples in
the world in the position of Israel - and I know that as a small state,
they too would be forced to do "odd jobs" - as would the Palestinians
and any other People who became a small state.
Iceland
could do much to help forge such an alliance - together with the Basque
People (who put together Mondragon) and other stateless Peoples.
I
never, ever want to see a stateless people in the position we are in
because they think that statehood is the only way to defend their right
to exist and live on land. No one should ever have to make the kinds of
moral compromises to survive that Israel did - and it need not be.
Statelessness affords the freedom to forge a new path. They should embrace that with open arms.
The
dream of statehood is alluring and intoxicating with its delusions of
self-determination and flowering of one's culture in repose - but it
ends in tragedy because a state must form alliances and alliances are
military in nature when they involve other states. There is no way to be
a state without realpolitik and military-industrial business and it is
ugly. Let no one make Israel's mistakes again.
I read a lot of
the Zionist literature when I was studying Jewish Philosophy. Very few
of the Zionists were militant. Most of the Zionists were effete
intellectuals who were carried off by the heady promise of a genteel
return to our cultural and moral ideals, together with some gardening
for balance, and the hopes of becoming a normalized People living in
serenity and security high on the lofty hills of the Zion of the
Prophets. They envisioned the creation of a Golden Age of morality,
culture and physical restoration. They envisioned a return of the
scattered throughout the Diaspora - each carrying the intellectual and
cultural treasures they had gleaned from throughout the world and the
sharing of their knowledge and experience one with the other.
I too saw it that way. All very seductive stuff. They meant it too. So did I.
Then reality hit.
Geographically,
Israel was far away from European anti-Semitism. Yet, we could not
escape having to come under Western influence. They managed to cook up
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from across the sea.
The
Kurds are right in the thick of the geographic area of their
traditional tormentors. How could they possible avoid ongoing,
inter-generational war?