Ghazali Street glows multicoloured amid the darkness of Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
A starburst of neon, the street speaks to the collective ambition of this part of the world: luxury brands such as Mercedes-Benz rub up against local food stalls and shop windows filled with local goods.
Nanduz Grilled Chicken glows pink by a flickering “Peri Peri” sign: if the street looks toward the West, it does so with a Middle Eastern gaze.
I’ve come to have tea with an Iraqi Kurd who wishes to be known only as “Mohammed”. A former
Peshmerga who fought against ISIS, he is now a businessman, and he has strong ideas about the future.
“We Kurds have fought many military battles. Now it’s time to move forward — we have economic and commercial battles to win. It’s time to normalise.”
Normalisation has become something of a political trend in the Middle East as Arab states have lined up to make peace with Israel, the one state that was for so long considered not only abnormal but impermissible.
But now, after the Abraham Accords, Israel is at peace with the UAE, Morocco and Sudan. Could Iraq be next?
It’s a fraught question. Iraq was once home to an ancient Jewish community, pretty much all of whom — including my own family — were forced to flee in the 1940s and 1950s following the establishment of the state of Israel.
Iraq fought Israel in the 1948 War of Independence (as well as in 1967 and 1973) and was the only Arab country not to sign a ceasefire agreement after the war ended. The two countries have technically been in a continuous state of war ever since.
Little surprise then that when the possibility of an Iraq-Israel peace was debated at a conference in September in Iraqi Kurdistan, not far from where I sat that evening with Mohammed, it caused a storm.
Central government in Baghdad demanded the participants be arrested; local Kurdish authorities refused to hand them over.
Then came the depressingly inevitable wave of death threats — not least by some of Iraq’s many Iranian-backed militias.
Joseph Braude, founder and chief executive of US nonprofit the Center for Peace Communications that sponsored the conference, was defiant in the New York Times: “We knew that this would trigger enormous controversy and a backlash.
"We nonetheless did it because the people in Iraq who wanted to do this asked for our help.”
“I honestly don’t see any threat in having a relationship with Israel,” says Mohammed. “And I don’t actually even understand the reasoning of any possible threat.
"Even if you want to talk about religion Islam doesn’t say that you should not have a relationship with Jews, who are people of the book and who, from the very beginnings of Islam, Muslim rulers have traded and had dealings with.”
He continues: “It’s more of a political issue than an ideological one. The problem is the other countries in the region. The government in Baghdad might be afraid to normalise because of outside pressure.”
I point out several Arab states have made peace with Israel — there is even talk of Saudi Arabia joining them. He pauses and smiles — perhaps a little ruefully. “Indeed,” he replies.
“But then everyone knows that Iran has, we might say, a certain amount of influence on the Iraqi government.”
People in Iraq’s Kurdistan region want to move forward and normalise. It’s clear from the many conversations I had that peace with Israel is very much a part of that process.
But there is also a feeling that a variety of foreign interests exert influence on the country that is not in Iraq’s best interests.
As our conversation draws to a close, I ask Mohammed if he believes that relations with Israel would be good for Iraq. “Well, that depends on the level of the sovereignty enjoyed by the government.
"If it was relations between Israel and ‘real Iraq’ with full governmental sovereignty that would be one thing.”
Mohammed pauses a final time. “But if it’s as things are now, and it became something like Israel and — indirectly — Iran, it would look very different.
“So, in the end it comes down to who is really controlling Iraq.”
