Kurds and Jews come together at Westminster
A panel discussion “Reconnecting with Roots: History and Culture of Kurdistan’s Jews and their Impact on Israeli-Kurdish Relations,” attracted 80 people in the UK Parliament on 19 March 2025. The event was organized by the Jewish-Kurdish Network and the Centre for Kurdish Progress. Report in the Militant by Ögmundur Jónsson:
“Ten years ago, when Kurds were battling Islamic State, many Jews showed up at demonstrations in support,” said Lyn Julius, who chaired the panel. “Now Kurds are showing up at demonstrations against attacks on Jews.”
Julius is the founder of Harif, the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa.
“It’s a joy to be with fellow Kurds here,” Yehuda Ben-Yosef told the audience of 80 people. He’s the president of the Jewish Community of Kurdistan in Israel and chairman of the Israeli Kurdish Friendship Organization.
“In 1936 my grandfather moved from Duhok,” in the Kurdish region of Iraq, to what became Israel, he said. Thousands more Kurdish Jews arrived there after Israel’s founding and today over 200,000 live there.
“Oct. 7, 2023, was the worst pogrom Jews have faced since the Holocaust,” he said. “Many Kurds serve in the IDF, including in the highest ranks.” Ben-Yosef is an officer in the reserves.
“Kurds are the largest nation without a country,” he noted. There are over 30 million Kurds, in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, with millions of others spread throughout the world. He pointed to gains the Kurdish struggle for a homeland has made over recent decades. These include carving out an autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq.
Ofra Bengio, director of the Kurdish studies program at Tel Aviv University, said, “Jews and Kurds in the Middle East have something in common: the fight for a state of their own.”
Given decades of military collaboration between the governments of Israel and Turkey, and ties between Kurdish groups and armed Palestinian organizations, relations between Kurds in Turkey and Israel were frozen for many years.
But alignments in the Middle East are changing rapidly after the Oct. 7 pogrom, with Israel dealing serious blows to Tehran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah and the overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship in Syria.
Edwin Shuker, a self-described Babylonian Jew who now lives in the UK, described how he grew up in Baghdad, a third of whose population was Jewish in the first half of the 20th century. That community existed for 2,500 years.
“The first eight years of my life were bliss, the next eight years were hell,” after the Jew-hating Ba’ath Party launched a coup in Iraq in 1963, he said. It led to the establishment of the bloody Saddam Hussein tyranny some years later.
On Jan. 27, 1969, 14 people were hanged in a public square in Baghdad, nine of them Jews. “On their front it said ‘Jew,’ on their back their name and address,” Shuker said.
“Our lives were saved thanks to the brave Kurdish people,” Shuker said. In 1971, he was among a large group of Jews from Baghdad who were led over the mountains into Iran by Kurdish Peshmerga forces, providing safe passage from the Iraqi regime’s assaults. One of the escorts was Masoud Barzani, who became the first president of the Kurdistan Regional Government when Kurds in Iraq won autonomy in 2004.
“They saved 1,900 Jews this way,” Shuker said.
One audience member pointed out that both Kurds and Jews had been promised land by the British ruling class, and in both cases were betrayed.
“And by the U.S.!” Bengio responded. In 2017 the Kurdistan Regional Government held a referendum on independence, which passed overwhelmingly. The Iraqi government, backed by both Washington and Tehran, responded with the armed seizure of one-third of KRG territory, including oil-rich Kirkuk. Israel was the only state that supported the outcome of the referendum.
Weysi Dag, a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said the infamous 1941 Farhud pogrom in Baghdad, which heralded the persecution of Jews in Iraq, did not extend to the Kurdish areas*. But after the Iraqi rulers declared war on Israel in 1948, Jews across the country, including in Kurdish areas, fled.
Shuker said all the belongings of Jews in Baghdad were taken as they were expelled from the country. “But Kurdish Jews were not robbed, and their homes in Kurdistan are still locked to this day. The tomb of prophet Nahum is protected by Peshmerga in Alqosh.”
*Although the menacing atmosphere did not lead to violence in the Kurdish north of Iraq, nevertheless Jews felt threatened at the time of the 1941 Farhud and their sense of security was eroded.
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