The fate of Rojava shows exactly why Jews need Israel

On 12 October 2025, I went to Rojava, the de facto autonomous Kurdish region of Syria, to report on the situation there under former al-Qaeda leader and now Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa. It was a tense period. Sharaa was trying to integrate Kurdish territory back into the Syrian state, and he felt that the Kurds were being demanding. 

As I travelled around Rojava, visiting cities like Qamishli and Al-Hasakah, I saw alongside Kurdish shops, hotels and restaurants, Kurdish military, Kurdish police, Kurdish courts, and Kurdish local government buildings: everything that indicated that this was a state in all but name.

On 13 January 2026, 93 days after I entered Rojava, and following the collapse of the integration talks, Ahmad al-Sharaa launched military operations against the Kurds.

Within two weeks, it was over. What had looked so permanent proved to be ephemeral.

From 2014-2017 Syria’s Kurds had played a leading role on the ground in the battle against Daesh, or ISIS, one of the most vicious jihadist groups of the century. With allied air cover, they fought a grinding and bloody campaign against the Daesh butchers. The Kurds suffered heavily, but thanks to them, the West defeated – in the field at least – one of the greatest threats not just to the Middle East, but to the West.

After Sharaa began his attack, the Kurds turned to their Western partners, especially the United States, for help, but none came. None ever does.

The Kurds, who did so much to help us, were betrayed again.

The Kurdish state is gone. And nobody cares.

The Kurds must now rely on Syrian laws, infrastructure and policy for daily life; and for their very survival on someone else’s protection and goodwill.

This is, I remember reflecting, what happens when you don’t have a state of your own. This is what happens when you don’t have sovereignty. When you don’t have a powerful army, an effective intelligence service, nuclear weapons or an independent economy.

This is why Jews need the state of Israel. It is a lesson delivered by the Holocaust and by every atrocity and injustice meted out to the powerless ever since. Israel must hold. And its situation is precarious. It is tiny and vastly outnumbered by its enemies. Around 15km wide at its narrowest point, the country has no strategic depth, nowhere for it to retreat to in the event of a military defeat.

So Israel must fight to survive. It can never rest or become complacent. It must be powerful.

But it must also be smart. Tactical brilliance must be accompanied by the kind of strategic and political foresight that has been unforgivably absent for far too long.

And central to this is finding an accommodation, not just with Iran – when the pathologically murderous Islamic Republic is finally gone – but with another of the world’s stateless people: the Palestinians. Right now, there is no leadership – on either side – to make this possible. But Israel cannot abandon peace, not just because it is a moral imperative, but because it is a strategic one.

It is here that my mind returns to a line from, of all things, the TV series The Wire. Gang leader Avon Barksdale is standing by the hospital bed of a comatose friend, talking to his nephew D’Angelo Barksdale about the inescapable logic of “the game” – the brutal ​​system in which they all live. “The thing is, you only gotta f*** up once. Be a little slow, be a little late, just once,” he says. “And how you ain’t gon’ never be slow? Never be late?”

From Rojava to Baltimore to Gaza and Tehran the point is the same: to survive in “the game” – be it drug dealing or the far more brutal world of geopolitics – being strong is unignorably necessary. But it is not sufficient. Avon knows that his only future is jail or death. Thankfully, Israel’s options are broader. But it must internalise Avon’s words – because no one wins every war forever. At some point, you will be slow, you will be late. You must defeat your enemies. But you must also make peace with them – or you will never find peace yourself.