After reading Glenn Greenwald’s scathing rebuke several days ago, Jeffrey Goldberg composed himself enough to respond by inviting Greenwald to visit Iraqi Kurdistan, and let the rest of us know who is in his rolodex:
"As it happens, I was e-mailing yesterday with the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, Barham Salih, and I mentioned Greenwald’s critique."
Goldberg’s contact with Barham Salih represents what is now one of the few tattered survivals of Israel’s ‘Periphery Doctrine,’ in which the Jewish state sought to offset the rejection it experienced from neighboring Arab regimes through alliances with the non-Arab states ringing the Arab world–Turkey, Ethiopia, Iran–and with minorities inside the Arab world like the Kurds and the Maronites. This policy hasn’t had a very good run. It was only a few days ago at Foreign Policy that Leon Hadar actually wrote its obituary.
Israel has systematically lost its friends at the periphery–Iran, Ethiopia and now Turkey. Its adventures and attempts at kingmaking in Lebanon ended with tens of thousands of civilians killed, the Maronites politically emasculated, a decades-long occupation and war which traumatized its army, the politicization and militarization of the Lebanese Shi’ite community and the emergence of Hizbullah. Very recent history has shown Israel’s supporters in the US reacting against Turkey with the hurt and anger of a scorned lover: Goldberg himself stated with perverse glee
"I hope to be blogging more about Turkey’s disgraceful treatment of its Kurdish citizens!"
Mark Arax, among others, has documented the shameful, transparently expedient, volte face that the Israel Lobby took on the issue of the Armenian Genocide post-Flotilla.
One wonders how long this Kurdish-Zionist connection will last. When it does collapse, will Goldberg suddenly look forward to blogging about the treatment of Christian minorities by Kurds in Turkey (which is not good)? Or will other Zionist apologists suddenly discover that it was Kurds who did much of the actual killing on the ground in the Armenian Genocide and not Turks?
One wonders.
