Kurdistan and Palestine

Kurds live under imposed borders and know occupation firsthand. People shaped by displacement do not romanticize occupation or occupiers as allies. Kurdish writer Egultekin’s words cut through decades of propaganda that has painted Kurdish movements as Israeli proxies. The truth is simpler and far more painful: the “Kurdish-Israeli alliance” is a narrative weapon wielded by the very states that carved up Kurdistan, designed to turn regional solidarity into suspicion and transform indigenous resistance into foreign conspiracy.

As a result, Kurdish and Palestinian struggles have been deliberately misunderstood as competing, when in fact they share a common root. Both of their people live as the largest stateless populations in the world, their identities fractured across borders drawn by colonial powers who never asked for their consent. The Kurds estimated number is 40 to 45 million across Turkey (Bakur), Syria (Rojava), Iraq (Başȗr), Iran (Rojhilat) – names the Kurds use for their own lands– as well as in diaspora. Palestinians number 15.5 million, scattered across Palestine and the diaspora. Both peoples have lived and survived through genocide, displacement, and the systematic erasure of their existence, still fighting, relentlessly, just to assert their right to exist.

The Architecture of Fragmenting

Kurdistan is often described as if it were an absence, a land that does not exist because it does not appear on official maps. This absence is political, not historical. What appears today as four separate “minority” populations spread across widely recognized nation-states was once a connected social, linguistic, and cultural landscape where the Kurds lived as the indigenous people of the mountains, which is where the famous saying comes from, “No friends but the mountains,” a phrase born from watching these mountains given to different countries while the Kurds themselves were denied the ability to move through land that had always been theirs. Those same mountains were also pathways for commerce, escape, and cover for those fleeing or fighting.

Many Kurds lived as Koçers–a Kurdish word related to families’ seasonal migration with their belongings, their sheep and goats, between lowland winters and highland summers. Their routes never knew the borders that would later claim to define them. Borders that would turn their ancestral movement into crime, making them “illegal” on land their ancestors had traversed freely for generations.

To understand the ties between Palestine and Kurdistan, we must trace the borders that fractured them. In 1916, Britain and France signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement, dividing Bilad al-Sham, the Levant. They partitioned what had been a living geography of different tribes, faiths, and peoples into Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon, carving nations from what was once one land. The same lines fractured Kurdistan across Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, leaving its people stateless across four different borders. The agreement laid the ground for the Balfour Declaration the following year, which promised Palestine to a European Zionist movement while Palestinian hands still worked its soil, cultivating the land while it’s being promised away.

These colonial borders made Kurdish existence itself a threat to four different nation-states simultaneously, which means attempts at autonomy have been met with violent repression to this day. Because acknowledging Kurdish identity challenges the legitimacy of the borders themselves, and challenging the story these states tell about who belongs and who doesn’t, also challenging who controls the resources beneath their feet. Kurdish lands, recognized as one of the world’s most significant untapped energy frontiers, holding massive reserves of oil, gas, minerals, and fertile agricultural land, none of which has benefited Kurdish populations. In Iraq alone, Kurdish regions sit on an estimated 45 billion barrels of oil reserves, resources that all four states have consistently fought to keep out of Kurdish hands. Taken together, control over these resources has allowed these states to determine who holds political power and who remains outside it; who sits at the table, and who is never invited.

So when we ask why the mere existence of Kurdish identity remains so threatening to the states built on their erasure, the answer lies in understanding how statelessness becomes not just a condition but a tool. Israel’s interest in Kurdish movements has nothing to do with self-determination and everything to do with weakening Iran, fragmenting Iraq. The same imperial logic that created Kurdish statelessness is now offered back as an alliance.

Rojava: Liberation, ethnic and gender justice movement

In 2012, amid the Syrian civil war and the withdrawal of regime forces from Kurdish-majority areas, Kurdish political forces in northern Syria began to organize autonomous self-governance. While defending their territories against ISIS, they initiated a political project grounded in grassroots democracy. This radical resistance movement evolved into what is known today as the Autonomous Administration of North Syria.

Crucially, what began in predominantly Kurdish areas expanded to include Arabs, Assyrians, Armenians, Turkmens, and other communities as they joined the autonomous regions. The system adapted a council-based structure extending from local communes to district and regional assemblies. Representation is based not on ethnicity nor religion, but on a shared participation in self-governance.

In a region marked by unresolved national questions and sectarian fragmentation, this model represents both a rupture and a possibility; challenging the nation-state through decentralization and multi-ethnic coexistence. Crucially, gender equality is not an addendum but the structure itself.

The women’s movement within the revolution has transformed social and political life, placing women’s liberation at the center of democratic transformation. In this way, every governing body in Rojava operates under mandatory co-leadership between a woman and a man, with a minimum 40% quota for women’s participation across all institutions, and women’s councils hold autonomous veto power over community decisions, meaning that no law, no policy, or local decision can ever be moved forward without women’s consent.

One of the most notable accomplishments perhaps is how the administration has banned polygamy, child marriage, and forced marriage. Equally significant, it criminalized honor killings and gender-based violence –transforming what were once dismissed as private cultural matters into prosecutable violations. Alongside this legal transformation, women formed their own armed units, the YPJ (Women’s Protection Units), founded in 2013 as an autonomous military formation that fought ISIS on the frontlines as independent fighters, defying the narrative of women fighters as auxiliaries to male forces by becoming instrumental in the liberation of Kobani and the rescue of thousands of Yazidis from genocide on Mount Sinjar.

Beyond military defense, Kurdish women established their own justice system through Mala Jin (Women’s Houses), a network of more than 60 centers across the region. Here, women resolve disputes, address domestic violence, and challenge patriarchal practices without state or male mediation; offering reconciliation and mediation processes at the community level, instead of through courts or police. Educational academies followed, training women in everything from political theory to cooperative economics, and in the process, they created the infrastructure for women’s autonomous power.

In the spirit of women resisting together, Leila Khaled, the Palestinian revolutionary and PFLP member, has consistently recognized the Kurdish struggle as inseparable from Palestine’s. Khaled visited Leyla Güven, a Kurdish parliamentarian imprisoned for opposing Turkish incursions into Syria, during Güven’s hunger strike demanding an end to the isolation of imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan. Khaled draws direct parallels between the partition of Palestine and the partition of Kurdistan, between the denial of Palestinian return and the denial of Kurdish movement through their mountains.

A Bijî Kurdistan & Free Palestine

Kurdish writer Özlem Goner’s words map the liberation path forward when she wrote: “Kurds and Palestinians in this particular context have suffered various forms of colonial violence at the hands of Turkey and Israel respectively, and it is our alliance, together with all the other colonized and oppressed populations of the Middle East and beyond, that can bring justice and peace. From learning to self-defend together, to invaluable moments of solidarity.”

Daily resistance is not always courageous. Sometimes it is a compromise you’re willing to take in simply choosing not to disappear. In both Kurdish and Palestinian contexts, resistance then, is a condition of existence, perhaps the only one available when your whole being is read as a political stance.

The question has never been whether there will be one state or two, but whether that state will be based on equality or continue to be based on domination. The map with further fragmentation of lands promises resolution while preserving the very architecture of oppression.

So, until the maps and borders reflect justice rather than colonial division, until Kurds can traverse their mountains and Palestinians can return to their lands, the project of liberation remains unfinished.

Liberation will emerge, if at all, from the recognition that to be Kurdish, to be Palestinian, is to have one’s very existence made political by those who drew borders to erase it, and that survival itself no state has managed to extinguish. From women governing in Rojava to families returning to olive groves in Palestine, the stubborn refusal to stop being who we are is the political act no state or borders can legislate away.