POLITICS OF HOPE AND POPULIST BACKLASH: KURDS IN Turkey AND PALESTINIANS IN Israel

ABSTRACT

Turkey and Israel are known, respectively, for profound conflicts with their Kurdish and Palestinian minorities. Economic and legal liberalization waves raised hopes for expanded civic and socioeconomic inclusion but instead both countries swayed to populism. “Why were the Kurdish and Palestinian politics of hope destroyed and what did it take to do so?” We argue that the HDP and Joint List’s electoral in the 2010s threatened Erdoğan’s and Netanyahu’s authoritarian ambitions and in their endeavours to doom Kurdish and Palestinian aspirations, these leaders and their parties drew on practices and sentiments from the toolkit of populism. While the repression of the HDP has not abated, Netanyahu’s replacement in June 2021 with a diverse coalition, including an Islamic party, has dented Israeli populism but simultaneously forestalled aspirations for civic equality. Despite the dissimilarities between the cases, our comparison teases out the common trends of populist politics that threaten domestic minorities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ We understand liberalization as state deregulation of a range of private activities in the markets (though not neoliberal marketization across the board) and reforming the legal system to endow citizenship with more effective rights by institutionalizing additional rights and protections.

² See for example Aytaç and Elçi 2019; Dinçşahin 2012; Eksi and Wood 2019; Türk 2018; Yilmaz 2018; Yilmaz and Erturk 2021 on Turkey and see for example: Filc 2010, 2011; Leslie 2017; Naama Weiss Yaniv 2017; Talshir 2018 on Israel. A notable exception is Rogenhofer and Panievsky 2020

³ For detailed discussions on the regional aspects of the Palestinian and the Kurdish cases please see Bocco 2010; Husain and Shumock 2006; Jongerden 2001; Yadirgi 2017.

⁴ Israel’s Palestinians were absent from the Israeli Statistical Bureau’s yearbooks and other publications as long as they lived under military government and were later listed as ‘non-Jews’. More recent tables include a breakdown by religion and/or nationality and consequently provide abundant statistical data on their social circumstances. Private surveys present their opinions. According to these data Palestinians constitute 21.1% of Israel (Calculated from Table 2.1:Central Bureau of Statistics 2022). In contrast, this study’s major methodological challenge was finding statistical data on the Kurdish minority. The Turkish state does not query ethnic origins and until recently, an ethnic group called ‘Kurds’ was unacknowledged. Even today, Kurds are not identified in state-collected data, though liberalization over the past two decades has allowed non-state research centres to collect such data, commonly using mother tongue instead of ethnicity to identify Kurds. Since this data also is not collected via regular surveys, it is not always continuous. However, the Kurdish Institute estimates Kurds constitute 25% of the population in Turkey (Foundation Institute Kurde de Paris 2017).

⁵ A military campaign, Tunc El Operation, took place between March 1937 and September 1938 against parts of the province of Tunceli, formerly Dersim, Turkey, that had not been brought under the control of the Turkish state. It resulted in a death of many thousands of civilians and renaming of the city named after the military operation. For more information please see (Kieser 2011)

⁶ On 28 February 2015, representatives of HDP and AKP met in the historic Dolmabahce Palace and agreed on ten broad principles for negotiations, known as the Dolmabahce Consensus. While the prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, stated that the consensus amounted to a new phase in the peace process and end to the armed conflict, Erdogan rejected the consensus only one month after its declaration (Bia News Desk 2021). For further information (Martin 2017).

⁷ Israeli Supreme Court, Bagatz 6698/95, Qaadan vs. ILA, Katzir.

⁸ Though this survey has not been repeated after 2011, it captures the public opinion at the time of the peace process.

⁹ Also known as the Gulen Movement, its members refer to it as Hizmet. After the coup attempt it also became known as Fetullahist Terrorist Organization (FETO). It is named after its US-based Islamic cleric leader, Fetullah Gulen. While it is not a political party but a self-proclaimed Islamist faith-inspired movement, it is deeply involved in Turkish and regional politics (PEW Research Center 2010).