By the early 1960s, following the outbreak of the Kurdish rebellion against the Iraqi Ba'ath party's Arabisation policies, Molla Mustafa Barzani, father of the current Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, held talks with Israeli officials. These meetings were facilitated by Savak, the Shah of Iran's notorious intelligence service, whose agents had been trained by Israel, the US and the UK.

These days, the Israeli officials involved in those talks paint the relationship as a marriage of convenience that somehow blossomed into a love story. But in reality, realpolitik demanded cooperation. Israeli cooperation with the Kurds was motivated by the fact that Iraq had been an enemy state since Israel's founding in 1948. The ability to gather intelligence from inside Iraq was too good to pass up.

More broadly, cooperation with the Kurds was part of Israel's general foreign policy direction during the 1950s, the principles of which were articulated well before the establishment of Israel by its future leader, David Ben-Gurion. The Arabs were "the primary enemy of the Zionist movement", wrote Ben-Gurion in the 1930s, and in order to counter-balance this, Israel would need to form other allies from among those who oppose "Arab nationalism".

Ben-Gurion also deemed it important to make allies from those minorities who had been oppressed by the Arabs. After 1948, his ideas evolved into policies, as Israel sought allegiances with non-Arab countries which bordered the Arab world — Iran, Turkey, Ethiopia — as well as those beyond, including countries in Asia and Africa. The Kurds fitted the criteria.

For Israel, one of the other key benefits of co-operation with the Kurds was the human link. As a result of the relationship, Israel was able to ensure the safe passage of several thousand Jews fleeing Iraq. Meanwhile in Israel more than 100,000 Kurdish Jews pressured the government to help their brethren and relatives.

Professor Ofra Bengio of Tel Aviv University, an expert on Israeli-Kurdish relations, notes in a recent article for Middle East Quarterly that military supplies were delivered from the late 1950s. In the early 1960s, a permanent Israeli representative was dispatched to Kurdish Iraq. A field hospital was tentatively established. As relations increased, so did military cooperation. Weapons supplies, ranging from small arms and ammunition to anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, began streaming into the region, often through Iran which, together with Turkey, was the first Muslim majority state to recognise Israel when it was established and continued being a close ally until 1979.

In time, Israel also began providing military training to the Kurds, and helped establish Kurdish intelligence cells, information which proved very useful for strategic planners in Jerusalem. But in 1975 disaster struck, in the form of political betrayal. Saddam Hussein, then Iraq's vice-president, reached an agreement with the Shah of Iran which put an end to Iran's arming of the Kurds and by extension to Israel's, as the latter relied on the Iranian land route for transport. The Kurdish rebellion was halted. Iran's reasons for agreeing were that Baghdad promised to define the international border between the two neighbouring countries — who less than six years later would become embroiled in a long and bloody war.