Jacobin62%
The Politics of Kurdish-Palestinian Solidarity 71%
By Kerem Schamberger0%
7/19/2026, 8:55:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 33 faulty reasoning types, including Post Hoc (False Cause), Unattributed Quote, and Hasty Generalization, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 30.4% saturation with 582 hits. Analysis detected 4,219 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,916 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 64.7% and a BS Rank of 71% (5,302 of 18,226 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 70.90% of the article peer group.
When the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote this poem more than twenty years ago, he was not claiming that the Kurdish and Palestinian experiences were identical.
Rather, he was writing from a shared experience of displacement, exile, and decades of denial.
In these verses, the Kurds are not another Palestine.
They are a people carried by the same wind: sustained by hope, battered by colonial and regional powers, and repeatedly forced to redefine their place in the world.
The kinship Darwish describes was more than a poetic gesture.
Both the Kurdish and Palestinian national movements emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when neither people achieved self-determination.
Instead, they were occupied, annexed, or divided among rival powers.
Today Darwish’s poem is often read as a symbol of solidarity between Palestine and Kurdistan.
But that solidarity was never automatic or free of contradiction.
It emerged through political encounters in exile, militant training camps, and international networks, while also being shaped by rivalries, geopolitical pressures, and repeated disappointments.
As the historian Abdel Razzaq Takriti argues, solidarity had to be built and continually renegotiated.
Both movements were repeatedly cast into competing geopolitical narratives: the Kurdish movement was accused of serving Western interests, while the Palestinian movement was portrayed as dependent on regional powers, from Ba’athist regimes to Turkey.
The conditions under which each movement has fought have also produced different visions of liberation.
The Palestinian movement remains largely committed to national sovereignty and statehood.
Much of the Kurdish movement, by contrast, now emphasizes social autonomy, decentralization, and democratic self-government beyond the nation-state.
What follows is an internationalist perspective on both struggles.
It is no coincidence that Darwish writes of the wind that brings exiled lives together.
He dedicated this poem to his close friend, the Kurdish author and poet Selîm Berekat, out of a shared experience of exile.
When Palestinian and Kurdish activists came together politically in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it did not happen in Ramallah, Diyarbakır, or Erbil, but elsewhere — primarily in Beirut and Damascus.
At the time, Lebanon was a center of revolutionary internationalism.
After reorganizing in the wake of the 1967 war, the Palestinian liberation movement made armed struggle central to its strategy and trained members of liberation movements from around the world in camps, especially in the Beqaa Valley.
Among them were early members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
After fleeing Turkey ahead of the 1980 military coup, the PKK’s founder, Abdullah Öcalan, and several comrades found refuge in Syria and Lebanon.
These relationships reflected an era when Vietnam, Algeria, and Palestine symbolized a global struggle against colonialism.
Kurdistan sought to become part of that tradition.
But the alliance was complicated from the beginning.
Supporting the Kurdish cause meant that Palestinian organizations had to balance their ties with the Ba’athist governments of Syria and Iraq, both of which viewed Kurdish resistance as a separatist threat.
Arab nationalism, which also influenced parts of the Palestinian movement, reproduced the same nation-state logic that much of the Kurdish movement opposed.
States act according to strategic interests, not moral principles.
This fragile architecture was destroyed, if not before, then certainly with the 1980 military coup in Turkey and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
The first PKK cadres lost their lives fighting alongside their Palestinian comrades in southern Lebanon against the Israeli army; several were imprisoned and released only years later.
The PKK continues to honor this memory to this day.
But with the expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization from Beirut, one of the most important venues for Palestinian-Kurdish encounters disappeared.
During the 1990s, the two struggles followed increasingly separate paths.
In northern Iraq, the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan emerged as a proto-state, while the PKK focused its armed struggle on Turkey, shifting its attention away from Palestine.
The Palestinian movement also entered a new phase with the Oslo process beginning in 1993.
A liberation movement increasingly became an administration operating under conditions of occupation.
The language of revolution gave way to the language of statehood and security.
The political split was not only geopolitical but ideological.
In Palestine, secular nationalist and left-wing organizations gradually lost ground as Islamist forces gained influence.
The PKK, by contrast, abandoned its commitment to a Kurdish nation-state.
Since the early 2000s, it has embraced democratic confederalism, arguing that liberation lies not in creating a new state but in building grassroots democracy, multiethnic coexistence, and gender equality beyond the nation-state.
Today, as state violence against both Palestinians and Kurds reaches new heights, internationalists — particularly in Europe — have begun drawing connections between the two struggles once again.
As in Darwish’s poem, it is the wind that brings these stories back together: an erratic, contradictory element that manages to forge connections without obscuring political divisions.
Solidarity has also been shown from the Kurdish side, for example through the participation of Kurdish activists in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in the summer of 2025.
On the Palestinian side, it was particularly the leading Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine politician Leila Khaled who has expressed her solidarity with Rojava in recent years.
At the same time, no one from the Palestinian movement has yet spoken out regarding the Syrian-Turkish attacks on Rojava in early 2026.
With the uprisings in Syria in 2011 and the resulting withdrawal of state control from the north of the country, the question of Palestinian-Kurdish solidarity resurfaced under new conditions.
Beginning in 2012, a political project emerged in Rojava that, while rooted in the tradition of anti-colonial movements, also seeks to learn from their mistakes.
The fight against ISIS made Rojava an international symbol of left-wing resistance.
Volunteers from all over the world traveled to the region, and images of Kurdish female fighters circulated as examples of a radically different Middle East.
In particular, the many internationalists who have participated in the construction and defense of self-administration over the past fourteen years drew on that history in which Palestine had once served as a reference point for revolutionary internationalism.
Yet this symbolic affinity existed alongside a far more complicated political reality.
Rojava depended on tactical military cooperation with the United States as part of the campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS), while Israel’s occupation of Palestine remains heavily backed by Washington.
At the same time, Rojava itself has faced constant military attacks from Turkey, a NATO member whose policies have also enjoyed Western support.
The Palestinian movement remains committed to national sovereignty and statehood.
Much of the Kurdish movement, by contrast, now emphasizes social autonomy, decentralization, and democratic self-government beyond the nation-state.
This contradiction helps explain why the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), founded in 2015 to fight ISIS, have maintained limited channels of communication with Israel.
These contacts do not reflect a strategic alliance so much as an attempt to gain leverage against Turkey and preserve room for diplomatic maneuver.
They reflect the balance of power in today’s Middle East, not Kurdish support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.
As political scientist Hamit Bozarslan argued earlier this year, the two should not be confused.
Israel’s approval of the Syrian offensive against Rojava earlier this year underscores a basic reality of international politics: states act according to strategic interests, not moral principles.
Official expressions of solidarity from Israeli leaders toward the Syrian Kurds do not change that reality, any more than Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s rhetorical support for Palestine offsets Turkey’s policies toward the Kurds.
But even though there was a strong reference to Palestine among internationalists in Rojava, today’s Kurdish-Palestinian solidarity is no longer underpinned by a shared anti-imperialist, transnational project.
Rather, it links fragmented struggles that overlap only in part.
Rojava and Gaza stand side by side as points of reference for leftist politics in the midst of a Middle East in upheaval.
Yet there are still similarities in the state violence experienced by both groups.
Whether it is the Turkish and Syrian attacks on Rojava or the Israeli bombings of the Gaza Strip — these are different faces of the same state logic of oppression.
It is not without reason that Abdullah Öcalan, in the prison talks currently taking place, warns against a “Gazafication” — that is, the brutal destruction of Kurdish cities and the entire region, followed by pacification through a neoliberal reconstruction policy.
Elements of that scenario are already visible in Syria.
In Gaza, meanwhile, proposals to turn the devastated enclave into a “Gaza Riviera” reveal the same willingness to treat destruction as an opportunity for redevelopment.
Both Kurds and Palestinians know from decades of experience what it means to be unrecognized and subjected to systematic oppression.
But it is not only the oppressed who learn from one another — the oppressors do as well: when the new Syrian regime, backed by Turkey, cracked down violently on the autonomous administration earlier this year, it justified the violence against Aleppo’s civilian population by claiming that military tunnels were located beneath hospitals and other civilian facilities.
Only media outlets that reinforced this narrative, such as Al Jazeera, were allowed to report on the siege from the ground.
This tactic is already familiar from Israeli attacks on Gaza and makes it clear that disinformation campaigns and other instruments of oppression are being copied among repressive states.
This is precisely why Palestinian-Kurdish solidarity is a political necessity today.
In Gaza, violence is unfolding that renders any abstract debate about liberation obsolete, while in Kurdistan, political projects are under massive attack amid military pressure, regional power struggles, and international indifference.
Solidarity requires shared normative and political foundations — yet it is precisely these that are eroding amid the current geopolitical upheaval.
Therefore, the central question is not why tactical channels of communication exist between the Kurdish movement and Israel but whether we can succeed in changing global power dynamics in such a way that the Kurdish freedom movement can develop new points of reference.
The history of Palestinian-Kurdish solidarity remains contested.
It can serve as a resource for bringing today’s struggles into dialogue with one another, or it can obscure contradictions.
Whether it becomes politically productive depends on whether solidarity is conceived as a conflict-laden practice — including acknowledging one’s own entanglements and complicities.
Celebrating isolated gestures of support is not enough if it ignores unequal power relations or the role Arab nationalism has sometimes played in legitimizing state violence against the Kurds.
It is not only the oppressed who learn from one another — the oppressors do as well.
Any renewed solidarity must begin by recognizing that Rojava and Gaza confront fundamentally different realities.
Rojava struggles to preserve a shrinking space for democratic self-government.
Gaza’s population is fighting simply to survive under blockade, bombardment, and displacement.
In the past, solidarity emerged through shared political work, intellectual exchange, and, at times, common military struggle.
It was built through practical cooperation, not abstract declarations.
The same must be true today.
Solidarity has to take concrete form: for example, in the defense of political prisoners, the joint critique of militarization and border regimes, and the rejection of orders that establish security for some through the annihilation of others.
Palestine and Kurdistan are not identical struggles.
Together, however, they raise a larger question: whether liberation can still be conceived today as a political practice that treats difference not as an obstacle to solidarity but as its starting point.
We must set Darwish’s wind in motion once more, so that both peoples can meet once again and embrace — a bond of strength and hope.
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