In The Arab World, Everyone Loves A Pariah

I've heard it said that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was good for the Arab world, which needs the distraction from their own incompetence in government--but I never heard this idea stated quite like this:

It's absolutely astonishing to me how interested the world is in Israel's failings. This is the source of a bitter but hilarious observation I once heard a Kurdish leader make: He was complaining to me that his people were cursed, and I asked him what he meant: Cursed by geography, cursed by their proximity to Kurd-hating Arabs, what? He said the Kurds were cursed because they didn't have Jewish enemies. Only with Jewish enemies would the world pay attention to their plight. [emphasis added]

This is also a different approach to being a pariah than I wrote about yesterday--quoting Tunku Varadarajan, who basically believes that being a pariah means never having to say you're sorry.

But if the Kurds do not have Jewish enemies, they have only themselves to blame. In Remembered in Kurdistan, Zvi Bar'el wrote about his experience in Northern Iraq:

The ties between Israel and the Kurds were severed almost in one fell swoop in the mid-1970s, and since then Israel has vanished from the scene. But not the memories.

At every corner, office, street and booth where I could say I was from Israel, the response was a thumbs-up, sometimes with both thumbs, or the word "brothers," spoken in English. Some spoke of a feeling of betrayal or abandonment, others as though they had lost family.

At every opportunity, someone spoke longingly about a Jewish friend or neighbor who had emigrated to Israel, and one person even had images from Israel as his screen saver.

In the Arab World, they may enjoy having Israel around as a pariah, but the Kurds understand that in Israel they have an example of a minority that can succeed under the most inhospitable of conditions.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Kurds.