This weekend, on September 5 and 6, the second Jewish and Kurdish diaspora gathering met, and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar sent a message. For his office, it was a small courtesy. For us it was not small at all, and it is worth explaining why a paragraph from Jerusalem lands so heavily on a people of 40 million.
Kurds are the largest unrecognized nation on earth. Not unrepresented, which is a lesser condition. Unrecognized. There is no seat, no flag at Turtle Bay, no ministry anywhere that receives our envoys as envoys.
Compare us to almost any other stateless national claim and the asymmetry is immediate: Palestinians hold observer status at the United Nations and full diplomatic representation across most of the Western world, and their cause commands parliamentary time in capitals that could not locate Kurdistan on a map.
I do not raise this to diminish anyone’s claim. I raise it because the same international system that found room for one has found none for a nation four times larger.
What that absence looks like on the ground is worth spelling out, because it is not abstract.
In Turkey, when Kurdish is spoken in parliament, whether by an elected member or by a citizen addressing a committee, the official record has entered it as speech “in an unknown language.” The state broadcaster runs a Kurdish channel, TRT Kurdî, funded by the same government whose parliamentary stenographers cannot name the language it broadcasts in.
That is not repression at its most violent. It is repression at its most absurd, and the absurdity is the point: a century of policy has been built on the proposition that we are a clerical error.
The reach extends past Turkey’s borders. In Germany, Kurdish parents holding Turkish passports have found their children’s names constrained by what Turkish law permits, because German registry practice deferred to the naming rules of the applicant’s state of nationality.
Turkish orthography excludes the letters Q, W, and X. Kurdish requires them. So a Kurdish family in Cologne discovers that Ankara has a say in what their daughter is called. Denial of identity does not stop at a frontier. It travels in the passport.
Against that background, consider what Jerusalem has just proved it is willing to do. In December 2025, Israel became the first state in the world to recognize Somaliland. Sa’ar flew there in January. Ambassadors were exchanged by the spring.
Israel looked at a functioning, self-governing people that the international system had spent three decades pretending not to see, and decided that the pretense was not binding. Mogadishu objected. Israel proceeded anyway.
Kurds noticed.
Asking for advocacy
I am not asking for a declaration tomorrow, and I am not going to pretend we have earned one on our present performance. Israel represents its people. We cannot yet say the same. Our political factions have not produced a national congress or any body with standing to speak for the nation, and until they do, no partner has an address to write to.
That failure is ours. I have said so in these pages before, and I will keep saying it, because a movement that will not name its own weakness has no business asking anyone to invest in its strength.
But the fracture is in Kurdish politics, not in Kurdish identity. Where our politicians have failed to build a representative body, our people have not failed to remain a people. And the place where that distinction can be turned into something usable is the diaspora.
This is familiar ground for Jewish readers. The State of Israel was conceived in exile, argued into existence in Basel and Vienna and London long before it was defended at home. Kurds are at the beginning of that road, second generation at most in the societies we now live in, where Jewish communities are measured in centuries.
We are not equals in this. But we are in the same rooms, which is new, and the gatherings of the past two years are where it is happening.
So the practical proposal is narrow. The Jewish Diaspora is the most effective advocacy network any group of people has ever built, and Sa’ar has spent his term strengthening precisely those ties, most recently at the J50 Forum in Jerusalem five days before our own gathering met.
That machinery, turned even partly toward the Kurdish question, would do more for our international standing in a decade than we have managed in a century of asking. Not charity. Advocacy for a cause that pays.
Because it does pay. The governments that guarantee Kurds never see daylight are, with striking consistency, the same governments organized around Israel’s disappearance. Relations with Ankara are at their lowest point in the history of the two states; Sa’ar himself described the Turkish foreign minister’s remarks this July as a call for genocide.
Whatever deference to Turkish sensitivities once constrained Israeli policy toward Kurds, it is difficult to see what remains of it now.
Kurds have been misled and abandoned by Western partners often enough to be careful about who we thank. This is not one of those cases. Israel is doing the one thing we cannot do for ourselves: treating us as a nation in public, at cost, without asking permission. More is possible, and Somaliland is the proof that it is possible.
Israel has been bold before, and recently. Kurds will answer boldness.
The writer, based in Vancouver, is a commentator on Kurdish affairs, Kurdistan, and international politics.