After Al-Monitor’s Mustafa Akyol opened the debate by asking, “Is there a Turkish Kurdistan?” and another contributor, Cengiz Candar, continued the conversation with “part of Turkey’s territory is Kurdistan,” it may actually be time to ask yet another question: Why is Kurdistan different from Palestine?
This is not to suggest that there is any copy-paste parallel between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Turkey’s Kurdish issue, but the obvious fact is that since Ottoman times, both Palestine and Kurdistan have defined lands without borders. Neither has ever claimed sovereignty in any time in history, nor have either's people been regarded as a nation.
Palestine is entitled to claim statehood on the land that takes its name because of a United Nations decision, the same body that recognized the foundation of the Jewish state and accepted it into the ranks of the world's countries.
Turks from all political backgrounds react strongly whenever they hear about this resemblance between Palestine and Kurdistan, because of their perception of Israel. When Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan defines it as a terrorist state that “knows best how to kill,” he gives voice to the feelings of the average person on Turkey’s streets. No one sees any justification for Israel’s fight against Hamas or Hezbollah, any comparison between that and Turkey’s fight against the Kurdish separatist terrorist organization, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK). The idea is that Israel is an artificially created state by the Jewish immigrants from all over the world in the heart of the Middle East, an occupier state.
Turks prefer not to question to how Ottoman Empire once expanded its territories, and whether it had been considered an occupying force — but surely that is how it was perceived, especially in the Arab lands.
