Jerusalem Gave a Kurdish Alliance Pitch Zero Seats

Yehuda Ben-Yosef’s Jerusalem Will Succeed list took 2,818 votes and zero seats in the 27 February 2024 municipal election. He had spent that campaign arguing that Kurdistan could be Israel’s next Azerbaijan.

The foreign minister later used the same friendship language in London. The prime minister in Erbil, on camera, said the relationship does not exist.

A Jerusalem List Lost Its Two Seats

Ben-Yosef, president of the Israeli Kurdish Community and chairman of the Israel-Kurdistan Friendship Association, headed the list marked yud-bet. He had sat on the 31-member council after 2018, when the same list held two seats. Turnout on council night was 33.76 percent of 690,707 registered voters, and 229,521 ballots were valid.

THE COUNCIL NIGHT

• His tally: 2,818 votes, 1.23 percent, zero seats.
• The drop: both seats from 2018 gone in one round.
• The ceiling: Degel HaTorah took 43,985 votes (19.16 percent, six seats) and Shas took 41,856 (18.24 percent, six seats).
• His mayor: the list endorsed Moshe Lion, who won the mayoral race with 81.07 percent.

Those two ultra-Orthodox lists alone took more than a third of the council vote. A neighbourhood education slate that also talked about Kurdistan never got near the Haredi machine that actually runs the chamber. Ben-Yosef had represented Armon Hanatziv from 1997 until that 2018 win, and he had built Beit Hatzayar, a high school for youth with behavioural disorders. None of that showed up in the 2024 pile.

He is a sixth-generation Jerusalemite, born in 1960 on Havatzelet Street, a veteran of the IDF Education Corps. Over dinner in Mamilla, in a block that once sat in a Kurdish neighbourhood facing Jordanian snipers, he told interviewers, “I want a united Jerusalem.” The city kept Lion. It did not keep him.

What Azerbaijan Built That Erbil Cannot Copy

After 7 October 2023, Ben-Yosef’s pitch got sharper. If the Kurds had a country, he said, “it could be Israel’s next Azerbaijan. They can be our ambassadors to the Muslim world.” He put about 6.5 million people in the Kurdistan Region and up to 45 million Kurds worldwide, including some 300,000 Jewish Kurds in Israel. Those figures are his.

Azerbaijan is a state with a capital, a pipeline, and a building in Tel Aviv. Iraqi Kurdistan is a federal region whose citizens carry Iraqi passports. The gap is not a vibe. It is infrastructure.

TWO PARTNERS, TWO RULEBOOKS

SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state oil company, also holds 10 percent of the Tamar gas field. That is what a Muslim-majority partner looks like when it can sign contracts. Ben-Yosef was offering volunteers, folk dance, and Zoom calls with diaspora leaders in Europe, the United States, and Canada. “Dozens of Kurds want to volunteer in Israel,” he said, but Iraqi passport rules blocked them and, in his words, were “directly harming” the relationship.

He also said Kurds “prioritize inclusivity, regardless of religion or ethnicity,” and that both peoples face Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. Inclusivity does not issue visas. Baku does not need them.

Mossad Doctors and the 1975 Collapse

The friendship he wanted to put on a Jerusalem ballot is older than the ballot. Israel’s periphery thinking in the 1960s treated non-Arab minorities as a way to tie down Baghdad. Scott Abramson’s study of early Kurdish-Israeli contacts tracks years of false starts before that logic hardened into guns, money, and a field hospital.

THE FILE THAT NEVER WENT PUBLIC

1. 1965: David Ben-Gurion authorises Mossad to move money and anti-aircraft weapons to Mustafa Barzani’s peshmerga, with Iran as the land bridge.
2. 1968: Barzani visits Israel and is photographed with Moshe Dayan, Abba Eban, and Mossad director Meir Amit.
3. 1973: Barzani returns to Israel while Israeli trainers and doctors are still in the mountains.
4. September 1980: Menachem Begin tells reporters that Israel supplied Iraqi Kurds with weapons and trainers from 1965 to 1975.
5. March 1975: The Algiers Agreement between the shah and Baghdad ends Iranian cover; the aid stops and the revolt collapses within weeks.
6. 2014 to 2017: Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel supports the Kurdish people’s effort to achieve a state; after a 93 percent independence vote, Israel is the only state in the region to back it, and Iraqi forces then retake Kurdish-held ground.

The pattern is stable. Warmth in the mountains, silence in the chancery, and a cutoff the moment a neighbour makes a deal. Ben-Yosef was asking a city council race to do what cabinets would not put on paper.

What Iraq’s 2022 Law Does to Volunteers

Iraqi Law No. 1 of 2022, the Law of Criminalizing the Normalization with the Zionist Entity, was published in Official Gazette issue 4680 on 20 June 2022 after 275 of 329 lawmakers voted for it. The statute reaches the Kurdistan Region. It is why a solidarity mission and a volunteer pipeline stall at the stamp window.

Whoever establishes any diplomatic, economic, political, military, security, cultural or any other kind of relationship with the Zionist entity shall be punished with the death penalty or life imprisonment.

Law No. 1 of 2022, Iraqi Official Gazette

A later article of the same text extends that death penalty or life imprisonment to communication and promotion, including conferences, publications, and social media. An Iraqi Kurd who posts a selfie from Tel Aviv is not doing cultural diplomacy. He is handing a prosecutor a file.

THE TWO-WAY FREEZE

• Iraqi passports: KRG residents travel on Iraqi documents that do not recognise Israel, so the volunteer Ben-Yosef wanted cannot legally land.
• Israeli law: the National Security Council’s travel rules impose a ban on Israelis visiting Iraq, including the Kurdish north, under the infiltration statute.
• KRG practice: Erbil airports have accepted Israeli passports in the past, which only makes the federal crime more explosive when it is noticed in Baghdad.
• Heritage work: the Region’s 2015 minority rights law on Judaism created a Jewish-affairs post in the endowments ministry, a local gesture that the 2022 statute now overshadows.

Ben-Yosef could host virtual meetings. He could not host the people.

No Relationship With Israel, Barzani Said

On 8 August 2026, Kurdistan Region Prime Minister Masrour Barzani sat with Al Jazeera and shut the door in public.

We have no relationship with Israel, and national foreign policy is a prerogative of the federal government.

Masrour Barzani, Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, to Al Jazeera, 8 August 2026

He also said no outside party had pushed the Region into the wider war, that Erbil had taken more than 1,000 missile and drone attacks from Iran or from militias inside Iraq, and that ties with Turkey were “very good.” That is the sentence a man says when Iranian drones have already come over the ridge and Ankara is the other neighbour.

The denial is not a secret about feelings in the bazaar. It is a constitutional alibi. As long as foreign policy sits in Baghdad, Barzani can tell militias, Turkey, and the federal court that there is nothing to raid. The London conference can toast Jewish-Kurdish brotherhood. He cannot.

Gideon Sa’ar Took the Same Line to London

Israel’s foreign minister has been saying Ben-Yosef’s line with a state seal. At his handover in November 2024, Gideon Sa’ar called the Kurds “our natural ally,” “a great nation, one of the great nations without political independence,” a national minority in four countries with de facto autonomy in Syria and de jure autonomy under Iraq’s constitution, and “a victim of oppression and aggression from Iran and Turkey.”

The Kurdish people are a great nation, one of the great nations without political independence. They are our natural ally.

Gideon Sa’ar, foreign minister, at his handover, November 2024

On 6 September 2026 he sent a video to a Jewish-Kurdish conference in London and asked for stronger ties between the two communities. The clip moved through Kurdish timelines the same day. Some users treated it as overdue backing from a country that, unlike the Arab states, does not need Kurds to disappear. At least one Kurdish user answered the same clip by saying he hated Israel. The friendship is real in diaspora halls. It is not a consensus in Kurdish politics, and it is radioactive in Baghdad.

Sa’ar can say “natural ally” because he does not live under Law No. 1. Barzani cannot say it because he does. Ben-Yosef tried to split the difference by running in Jerusalem, where the voters were Israeli and the subject was street lighting and schools, and still lost the seat.

A Large Community and a Tiny Jerusalem Vote

Ben-Yosef’s 300,000 Jewish Kurds are a national figure, not a Jerusalem electoral roll. They include National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. “Not that I am happy about it, but, you know, he is of Kurdish descent,” Ben-Yosef said, with a wink, when the interview turned to that fact. Pride in a cabinet Kurd did not become a machine for yud-bet.

Mamilla’s Kurdish families were moved after 1967 toward outer districts such as the Katamonim. The old geography is gone. The council that replaced it is built on Degel and Shas turnout. A list that talked about peshmerga and Azerbaijan was always going to be a rounding error in that math.

He has not dropped the cause. On Nowruz in 2025 he wished Kurds in Israel and abroad renewal, freedom, and hope, and “next year in a free and united Kurdistan.”

חג נורוז שמח!
מאחל לכל בני העם הכורדי בארץ ובעולם התחדשות, חירות ותקווה.
שהאש תמשיך להאיר את דרכנו – ובשנה הבאה בכורדיסתאן החופשית והמאוחדת.

שלכם,
יהודה בן יוסף
נשיא העדה הכורדית בישראל#נורוז #כורדיסתאן #חירות #ישראל #Nowruz #Kurdistan #Freedom pic.twitter.com/3PbYtTHBE0

— Yehuda Ben Yosef (@yby4040) March 22, 2025

In September 2026 he was still taking meetings as president of the community. The title survived the count. The seat did not.

The volunteers he wanted still cannot stamp an Iraqi passport for Tel Aviv. Israelis still cannot legally fly to Erbil to meet them. Sa’ar can film a greeting for London. Barzani still has to tell Al Jazeera that there is no relationship at all.