Kurdish Nationalism and Statehood: The Fallacy of the Straw Man

Kurdish nationalism has pursued statehood as a national movement for a long history. However, growing chorus of otherwise opposed actors distorts that movement into a foreign plot to fracture the Middle East. This claim can be taken as a case study for the straw man fallacy, which is a rhetorical move in which a reasonable position is first distorted into an extreme version of itself and then attacked as though the distortion were the original claim.

So, we have first to trace the actual historical claim, the Kurdish national movement’s century-long pursuit of self-determination, through both primary intellectual sources (beginning with Ehmedê Xanî) and the secondary scholarship that has documented it (Jwaideh, McDowall, Olson, Kaya, and Beşikçi).

And it is also necessary to examine how this claim is distorted into its “second Israel” caricature, tracing the argument’s spread from its origin in Iranian and Revolutionary Guard, Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein rhetoric through Turkish nationalist politics and, most strikingly, into the PKK’s own recent statements, as well as related framings among post-2025 Rojava political and military figures.

Reading these two halves together makes the fallacy visible: the straw man is not incidental rhetoric but the common ground on which Turkey and the PKK converge to deny the same underlying claim.

This distinction matters beyond correcting a rhetorical error. A straw man lets its user avoid the actual claim: by recasting Kurdish self-determination as a foreign plot, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Iraq, and now the PKK itself are spared the harder task of engaging with the historical and legal basis for Kurdish national aspirations. When the fabricated version of a claim becomes the one debated, no honest outcome is possible, since the thing being argued against is not the thing being asked for. Naming the fallacy is a precondition for any real engagement with Kurdish self-determination, whatever that engagement concludes.

A straw man is a logical fallacy in which someone distorts, exaggerates, or oversimplifies an opposing argument to make it easier to attack. It typically works like this: Person A makes a reasonable, nuanced claim. In this case, that claim is the Kurdish people’s right to self-determination, which statehood would fulfill under international law and the UN Charter, supported by the long history of Kurdish national movements outlined belowand several scholarly works published on the topic. Person B then recasts that claim as an extreme, unreasonable version of itself: here, the claim that Kurdistan’s occupiers in general, and Turkish officials and the PKK in particular, are pursuing not self-determination and historical demand but the creation of a second Israel or an Israeli plan. Finally, Person B attacks this distorted version and behaves as though the original argument has been defeated.

In this case, Turkish government officials and PKK leaders alike dismiss any effort toward an independent Kurdistan as an attempt to establish a second Israel in the region or as a source of tension and war.

Roots of Kurdish nationalism

The roots of Kurdish nationalism reach back at least three centuries, to when Ehmedê Xanî grew troubled watching Kurds serve as soldiers for the Ottoman and Safavid empires, fighting on the land of Kurdistan against one another under the banners of these two powers.

The Kurdish novelist Jan Dost, in his novel Mîrname (inspired by Xanî’s works, specifically Mem û Zîn), retells this story of Kurds fighting Kurds in these battles.

Xanî is widely regarded as an early intellectual pioneer and the spiritual, or foundational father of Kurdish nationalism. Mem û Zîn, his 1692 masterwork, is a tragic romantic epic that uses the separation of two star-crossed lovers as an allegory for the political fragmentation of the Kurdish people and their subjugation under rival empires.

For Xanî, the Mîrs (princes) must protect Kurdish identity if they set aside their internal conflicts and united Kurdistan under a single king. His call to the Kurds was for a self-ruled Kurdish kingdom that could unite them against their enemies, the very enemies the Kurds mistakenly regarded as saviors, lords, and brothers. He criticizes the Mîrs corruption, dependence on their enemies and their selfish behaviors.

While Xanî’s understanding was raw and cannot be characterized as a call for a modern state or modern nationalism, since no such concept yet existed in the region, he nonetheless articulated an early notion of Kurdish nationhood: a recognition of the Kurds’ distinctiveness from their neighbors and of their equal claim to a king and a kingdom. Yet in the period that followed, Kurdistan remained mired in internal tribal conflict, with Kurds continuing to divide along lines of loyalty to their respective occupiers.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, a shift emerged in Kurdish national movements inspired by Xanî, movements led chiefly by Kurdish Mîrs, Sheikhs, and later landlords (Aghas), who held a still-loose understanding of Kurdish nationalism and the importance of statehood. Some of these leaders fought for an independent Kurdistan, while others revolted against the Ottoman and Qajar empires merely to gain a share of power or recognition of semi-autonomous authority over their own regions.

This internal divide is what repeatedly undermined the movement, and it persisted into the era of nation-state building across the Middle East, when Arabs, Persians, and Turks successfully established modern nation-states while the Kurds remained divided among them, a division rooted in leadershipcorruption and rivalries, tribal fragmentation, and regional and international pressures.

The Kurds felt left behind by this process: no longer split between two empires, they now found themselves in a hard situation, divided among four new, so-called modern nation-states (Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran) without the backing of any great power. This made Kurdish unification exceedingly difficult and fractured national movements into prolonged civil wars and conflicts with the central regimes that ruled over them, while also making communication across these new borders extremely hard. Even so, Kurdish national movements have persisted in seeking a share of power, whether federation, autonomy, or, where possible, independence, from their governing states.

It is therefore reasonable to argue that the Kurdish pursuit of nationhood and statehood has a long history that cannot be dismissed as an externally engineered plan. It emerged instead from the Kurds’ own social, political, cultural, geographic, and economic differences from their neighbors.

There is also a growing current of Kurdish national consciousness oriented toward the decolonization of Kurdistan. Driven by Kurdish nationalism, it can be understood as a new wave of nationalism that looks toward Kurdistan’s independence. This current has spread across all parts of Kurdistan and, as the Turkish sociologist İsmail Beşikçi articulated in his work International Colony Kurdistan, views Kurdistan as a colony divided among Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. It is often captured in the phrase “2+2=1,” a geopolitical symbol representing Kurdish unity and the rejection of Kurdistan’s division into four parts.

Conspiracy claims

At the same time, a different and growing narrative frames the Kurdish desire for statehood as an outside scheme designed to sow regional discord: to divide the nations of Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq and cause suffering, including among Kurds themselves, in service of outside interests. This narrative points to Israel, and at times the United States, as the outside powers allegedly backing an independent Kurdistan, casting a future Kurdish state as a “second Israel” or as an instrument of Israeli and American policy.

The Islamic Republic of Iran and Iraqi officials before 2003, were the original architects of this framing. It has since become a staple of Turkish government rhetoric and has been echoed by Syrian and Iraqi politicians, Hezbollah, and other militant groups. More surprisingly, it has also become common among PKK figures (leaders, commanders, and several former Kurdish prisoners) who now describe the idea of a Kurdish state as a “second Israel” or as part of an Israeli plan for further regional division.

Several Kurdish figures from Rojava (the part of greater Kurdistan in Syria) have adopted a similar stance against Kurdish nationalism since their setback in 2025, when they lost their autonomous region in fighting against Syrian government forces and entered a process of integration with the very regime they had long resisted. This shared framing has become common ground among apparently opposed actors, united in their opposition to the Kurdish national movement’s pursuit of an independent Kurdistan.

Surprisingly, the PKK was founded on Kurdish national premises, with the goal of establishing a Kurdish nation-state on Greater Kurdistan’s land. Its Greater Kurdistan identity produced and spread the hope that the party would bring Kurds together and unite them for a common cause. It attracted thousands of youths from all parts of Kurdistan, who hoped to fight the colonial powers, decolonize Kurdistan, liberate their homeland, and establish an independent Kurdish state. However, this goal was distorted by a new ideological shift in Öcalan’s view of the Kurds’ fate, a few years after his arrest by the Turkish state.

In prison, Öcalan abandoned the idea of a Kurdish nation-state and took a hard, near-total reversal of his earlier position. His call became one for democratic confederalism: a non-state, and by some accounts idealistic or even utopian, political model that prioritizes local self-governance, direct democracy, gender equality, and ecological sustainability, while rejecting all conventional political systems, including the nation-state, federation, confederation, and consociational models. It poses no threat to Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, respects the integrity of these states, and only encourages the Kurds to shift from statehood or any power sharing system toward a democratic sort of assimilation into these countries.

However, in Syria, the PKK has been unable to realize this vision; it is just too idealistic and does not work. Its failure was proved in Rojava. It now presents abandoning arms and integrating into Turkish society as the most plausible option available. It could not even fulfill the initial promise of a democratic order that democratic confederalism made to its followers. It therefore now treats integration as the most viable form of surrender, in order to avoid further failure. Its ideology takes no responsibility for this failure to achieve the goals of a democratic society. Instead, it attacks anyone who criticizes its defeat and its choice of integration, as well as nationalists who continue to advocate for Kurdistan’s independence.

Self-determination and statehood

Several scholars treat Kurdish nationalism as a historical struggle for national self-determination that, at key moments, has included an aspiration to independent statehood.

Wadie Jwaideh, in The Kurdish National Movement: Its Origins and Development, traces the emergence of modern Kurdish national consciousness from the decline of the Kurdish principalities under Ottoman and Persian rule through twentieth-century nationalist movements, presenting the pursuit of political unity and self-rule as an increasingly central element of Kurdish nationalism.

David McDowall, in A Modern History of the Kurds, similarly frames modern Kurdish history as a recurring confrontation between Kurdish demands for political self-determination and the centralizing nation-states that absorbed Kurdistan after the Ottoman collapse; in his account, Kurdish movements repeatedly pursued autonomy and, at particular moments, independence, even as internal divisions and regional and international politics obstructed any unified state-building project.

Robert Olson, particularly in The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and the Sheikh Said Rebellion, 1880-1925, links the rise of Kurdish nationalism in the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican periods to emerging demands for an independent Kurdish political entity, interpreting the Sheikh Said rebellion as aimed, in part, at establishing an independent Kurdish state.

More recently, Zeynep N. Kaya’s Mapping Kurdistan: Territory, Self-Determination and Nationalism places statehood at the center of the evolving Kurdish nationalist imagination, showing how the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Wilsonian self-determination, and later decolonization raised Kurdish hopes of obtaining a state of their own, hopes reinforced by maps of a “Greater Kurdistan” that helped turn an imagined homeland into a concrete territorial claim. Kaya stresses that these aspirations were historically shaped and shifted alongside changing international norms, rather than representing some fixed, unchanging Kurdish goal; even so, she finds that decolonization strengthened Kurdish hopes for statehood and encouraged Kurdish movements across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria to invoke the right of national self-determination.

Beşikçi, a Turkish sociologist and one of the pioneering scholars of Kurdish studies in Turkey, interprets the Kurdish question fundamentally as one of denied nationhood, territorial partition, and blocked self-determination. His clearest formulation appears in International Colony Kurdistan, originally published in Turkish in 1990. Rather than treating Kurds simply as an ethnic minority seeking greater rights within existing states, Beşikçi argues that Kurdistan is a territorially divided country and that the Kurds are a nation prevented from determining their own political future. He describes Kurdistan as an “international” or “inter-state colony,” its territory divided among Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria and absorbed into internationally recognized states that, despite their political rivalries, share a common interest in denying Kurdish nationhood and self-determination.

These scholars and many others, present Kurdish nationalism not merely as a struggle for cultural recognition, but as a historically evolving national movement in which self-determination, territorial sovereignty, autonomy, and, at crucial periods, independent Kurdish statehood have been central political aspirations, even as the precise goal has varied considerably across Kurdish organizations, countries, and historical periods.

“Second Israel!”

Turn now to Person B, the straw man. Veysi Aktaş, who spent roughly ten years imprisoned alongside Abdullah Öcalan on İmralı Island, explained Öcalan’s thinking in August 2026 through what he called the “proto-Israel/post-Israel” theory. He stated: “Today, for Israel to maintain its existence, it needs a Kurdistan in the Middle East and it needs a second Israel.” He immediately added: “PKK did not accept this. Öcalan rejected it.” Aktaş explained that what was supposedly demanded was a “nationalist nation-state,” precisely the model Öcalan opposes, given his rejection of nationalism and the nation-state form itself.

Öcalan argues that Israel sought the development of a Kurdish nation-state, particularly through forces associated with the KDP, as a second strategic formation in the region. His proposed alternative holds that “the Kurds and Kurdistan will be neither a second Israel nor like other nation-states,” but will instead pursue his imaginary and utopian model of democratic modernity and confederalism. A striking January 2026 account also captures Öcalan’s more recent position.

According to a report reproducing his remarks, Öcalan argued that Israel has a fundamental geopolitical interest in the Kurds and described a possible Kurdish state as a “post-Israel state model,” believing that Israel “needs a Kurdish state as a geopolitical pillar” for regional dominance.

Sipan Hamo, Syria’s deputy minister of defense for the eastern region, has also stated that Israel has a plan against Syria and that we, as Syrian stands against it. This does not directly invoke the “second Israel” argument, but it still recycles the same underlying plot: casting a domestic or regional issue as an externally engineered Israeli scheme.

Devlet Bahçeli, a Turkish politician and economist who chairs the far-right, ultranationalist Nationalist Movement Party, has used the “second Israel” formulation even more explicitly. In 2019, he accused the United States of backing the YPG/PKK in Syria in order to build the infrastructure for what he called a “so-called Kurdistan, namely a second Israel state.” While PKK has never had a plan and desire to establish a Kurdish state, he repeated it to mobilize the Turks against the Kurds.

Doğu Perinçek has perhaps pushed the argument to its most extreme form in Turkish politics: in 2018, he declared that America’s project was to establish a “so-called Kurdistan, in reality a second Israel.” Turkish and other regional nationalist actors have long used this framing to portray Kurdish independence as a Western or Israeli project that threatens the territorial integrity of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria.

The straw man argument has become common ground between Turkey and the PKK: a distorted, exaggerated, and oversimplified position against Kurdish nationalism and the desire for statehood, constructed to make that desire easier to attack.

This straw man disregards the entire historical background of the Kurdish national movement and its basic right to self-determination, resting instead on an argument with little real foundation, since Israel’s actual position on an independent Kurdistan has never moved beyond political rhetoric.

Despite repeated rhetorical statements of support, most notably by Netanyahu in 2014 and again in 2017, Israel has never taken the kind of formal step it took with Somaliland.

However, the Kurds could benefit from their relations with any state that may help them to fulfill their desire for statehood. Attacking Kurdish nationalism and its movement to establish a state, encouraging the continuation of the Sykes-Picot order, and pushing for the integration (that is, the democratic assimilation) of Kurds into the nation-states that have suppressed them for over a century, under the cover of this fallacious argument, has become the common ground shared by Turkey, Iran, Syria, the Iraqi regime, and the PKK, providing them with a mutual understanding against the Kurds’ national right to self-determination, which statehood would fulfill, regardless of howfar-reaching it is.