Kiriakou's mother's 2008 trip to Israel
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John Kiriakou recounts his mother's 2008 trip to Israel with a church group, during which she was struck by the stark contrast between first-world Tel Aviv, she compared it to Miami Beach, and a Palestinian town that "looked like hell on Earth," surrounded by walls topped with barbed wire and mined along their bases to keep Palestinians out of Israel. In another retelling, Kiriakou says his mother and sister took the church-organized trip in 2008, a year after his own father's death, and that she came back describing entering the Palestinian areas as "like going into a prison," with literal walls topped in barbed wire.

Kiriakou also recounts his mother witnessing an IDF soldier at a checkpoint snatch a pulp-fiction novel from a Palestinian bus driver's hands, accuse it of being "PLO propaganda," tear its pages out, and throw them in the driver's face. He identifies the driver, in a fuller retelling, as a Palestinian Christian who had made the same tour many times; at the checkpoint an IDF soldier tore a page bearing a picture of Yasser Arafat out of the man's novel, declaring "no picture of Arafat on this page", before tearing up the whole book and throwing it at him. His mother told him this was not an isolated incident: it happened, she said, every time their van was stopped.

Kiriakou's own 2022 trips

John Kiriakou has also described his own two trips to Israel in 2022, the first of them to cover the country's elections. On his last day in the country that trip, with a free stretch of time, he visited the Virgin Mary's tomb and the Garden of Gethsemane, located directly across from the Dome of the Rock, just outside the old city walls. Winded and sweating from the walk back up from the valley, he sat down on a bench near the old city's Iron Gate next to a woman visiting from Brooklyn. As they talked, a Palestinian man standing nearby pulled out a knife and stabbed a nearby IDF soldier twice in the stomach; another guard immediately shot and killed the attacker roughly 20 feet from where Kiriakou was sitting. Afterward, watching Israeli television coverage of the incident, Kiriakou saw it framed as an assassination attempt, with Israelis interviewed on air saying Palestinians "hate us more than they love life itself", a disconnect he found emblematic of the country as a whole.

See also

- October 7 attack
- Itamar Ben-Gvir
