USA President Donald J. Trump is rightfully committed to diplomatic resolution of hot conflicts around the world, but US diplomacy also needs to become visionary and preemptive in the sense as preventing future wars around the world from breaking out at all. One such risk of war breaking out in the future is between Israel and Turkey. A war between Israel and Turkey would be immensely costly in both lives and public coffer and would destabilize the region. There are many sentimental reasons why Israel supports the Kurds, including gratitude to the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in Erbil for helping secure Iraqi Kurdish Jewish immigration to Israel in the early 1950s. Similarly sentimental gratitude to the heirs of the Ottoman Empire for receiving Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s until recently formed a powerful sentimental basis for the Israeli-Turkish diplomatic relationship.
However the fact is that the existence of Kurdish statelets in the Fertile Crescent provides Israel with immense strategic depth. Thus was Israel profoundly strategically weakened in the period of 1974-92 when there was no Kurdish autonomy in Iraqi Kurdistan. Israel becoming a regional superpower is in part connected to the establishment of the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of Northern and Eastern Syria (AANES) Thus Turkish attempts at destroying the three Kurdish statelets (PYD, KDP and PUK) along Turkey’s southern borders would strike a severe strategic blow against Israel’s strategic depth and strategic posture in the region as a the regional superpower. Turkey must respect Syria’s regional majority ethnic communities and their growing alliances with Israel as they all increasingly contribute to Israel’s strategic depth as their cooperation with Israel deepens and widens. Ahmed Shara’a should consider that if he opposes federalism and decentralization now, full autonomy will be established for Israel’s allies in the future, something which the Kurds and Druze in fact already have.
Another contemporary aspect is that Erdogan’s very public Jew hatred has destroyed the formerly sentimental basis for the Israeli-Turkish relationship and has been replaced by an Israeli alliance with the Kurds in Turkey. The three Kurdish statelets along Turkey’s southern border does not in any way threaten Turkish national security, however there is potential for Israeli-Turkish conflagration should Turkey and its Damascus proxy act in a manner that would hurt Israel’s growing strategic depth. However it needs to be emphasized that Israel’s strategic depth and geostrategic posture as a regional superpower is a regionally stabilizing factor which contributes to Jewish-Arab reconciliation throughout the region and hence strongly serves American interests.
Aliyah Organization 