Often Palestine and Kurdistan are lumped together as if they were fighting the same struggle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Palestine, unlike Kurdistan, is a colony – more specifically, a settler colony; Kurdistan, by contrast, is a region or, for some, a nation divided between four different states. This post analyses how these two struggles, often conflated, rest on entirely different political and socio-economic foundations.
This distinction between the kinds of states oppressing Palestinians and Kurds is crucial. Israel is not merely a capitalist state containing oppressed minorities, like Iran, Iraq, Syria or Turkey. Israel is structurally distinct from any other existing capitalist state because of its settler-colonial nature, created to seize Palestinian land and, as a consequence, deny all Palestinians of their political rights, subjecting them to an apartheid. Palestinians have no state at their disposal, regardless of class: not only is the working class oppressed, but the bourgeoisie too has no prospect of integrating itself into the Israeli state. The only exception is the small comprador stratum enriching itself from the oppression and devastation Israel produces, with Fatah providing a stark illustration of how such collaboration operates. Yet, for the almost totality of Palestinians integration is impossible, as the only choice is either resistance or demise.
By contrast, the Kurdish people are in a very different position. Kurds already live within established states – in fact, four of them – but seek to separate from them. The key difference here is not one of the degree of oppression but of its nature. Palestinians are not simply more oppressed; their oppression occurs at another level altogether. They are stateless: not only their culture, but their entire collective existence, physical and political, is targeted for elimination. Kurds, on the other hand, are citizens of existing states. Their cultural identity may be repressed – as is the case for many nations within capitalist states – but they remain legal citizens, enjoying the same civic rights as non-Kurdish counterparts, and their bourgeoisie can be – and is – integrated into the ruling classes of those states.
In sum: Palestinians confront colonial annihilation, while Kurds confront the contradictions of national minority status within capitalist states.
Also looking at the demands Palestinians and Kurds put forward, one could not find a sharper contrast. For Palestinians, the achievement of a capitalist state would constitute a real step forward, an objective improvement, a progressive development that would sweep away Zionism once and for all. This is all more important because in a country like Palestine, where people are subjected to apartheid, and now targeted by genocide, no path towards socialism is possible without simultaneously confronting and destroying Zionism. To put it in classical Marxist-Leninist terms, Palestine still faces the task of completing its bourgeois-democratic revolution.
Nothing could be more different than the demands for national independence put forward by the Kurds. Having already existing capitalist states at their disposal, the creation of a capitalist Kurdish state would represent no objective progress, since the bourgeois-democratic stage in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey has long been completed. In all such countries, the only step forward is the struggle for socialism. Conversely, the state envisaged by Kurdish nationalists would neither mark the end of colonialism, as in Palestine, nor embody the socialist multinationalism that guaranteed equal rights in the USSR. An independent Kurdistan would simply be another capitalist state: it might (as Öcalan proposed) or might not be built on ethnicity, but in any case it would be an instrument for the Kurdish bourgeoisie to advance its own capitalist and imperialist interests in competition with the ruling classes of neighbouring states.
Thus, at the level of their political demands as well, Palestine and Kurdistan could not be more different: the former expresses an objectively progressive struggle against settler colonialism, while the latter tends toward a regressive pursuit of bourgeois statehood.
This conclusion is reinforced by the classical sources of Marxism-Leninism. Marx supported separation in some contexts, such as Ireland from Britain, but not in others, while Lenin made clear that communists must uphold the right to divorce, but this does not mean always supporting separation in practice; in many cases, they may fight to preserve unity. Such evaluations always depended on the concrete circumstances. And the concrete circumstance is that today, after the end of colonialism and the completion of the bourgeois-democratic phase worldwide, almost no new separation or national independence movement delivers a real blow to imperialism. In the present epoch, where socialism-communism has become a genuine possibility at the global level, separatist projects have generally lost any progressive content and more often function as mechanisms to divide the working class, binding it to “its own” bourgeoisie in conflicts with other national bourgeoisies, with the end of reshuffling imperialist control on a local or regional scale.
The principle of national self-determination is therefore not absolute. In Palestine, it unquestionably applies, since what is at stake is the provision of a state that has been denied altogether. This is not a right to divorce, but a right to exist, to resist, and to destroy the Zionist colonial project. In Kurdistan, by contrast, the demand amounts to a divorce for the sake of smoother capitalist and imperialist integration – and arguably little more.
The call for an independent capitalist state when one already exists is a regressive demand, not only because in such states the struggle for socialism is already possible, but also because any promise of ending national oppression under capitalism is a dangerous illusion. Only socialism, which abolishes exploitation itself, can guarantee equality among nations. A capitalist Kurdistan might somewhat ease the repression of Kurdish culture and language. Yet capitalism, driven by profit, will inevitably generate new forms of oppression, often along national lines – as history has repeatedly shown in the same formerly colonies of Iran, Iraq, Syria, where Kurds were among those targeted.
This regressive nature of Kurdish separation – and of capitalist states more generally – is also evident in how readily imperialism can instrumentalise the demand, bending it to its own ends of accumulation of capital and exploitation of labour. In the epoch of imperialism, all conflicts take on an imperialist dimension, and Palestine is no exception. Imperialist powers manoeuvre around the struggle, seeking to exploit it, while Israel itself is a powerful imperialist state, the forward outpost of US domination in a key zone of global trade and resource extraction. Yet the unique character of Israel as a settler-colonial state means that even with imperialist powers meddling in, their interests inevitably confront the fact that dismantling the colonial state of Israel is an objectively progressive demand.
For this reason, the Israeli state is the enemy of all communists, and the Palestinian struggle for national liberation represents an objectively progressive front in the fight against Zionism. Kurdistan, by contrast, frames national liberation only as the replacement of one capitalist state for another – a path that inevitably narrows and diverts the struggle away from revolutionary horizons.