The search for a country to take Gaza
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Asked whether Israel's talks with five countries about accepting Gazans would go anywhere, Kiriakou said no, and gave his reason in one sentence: "This is literally the definition of ethnic cleansing," which is a form of genocide and is illegal under international law. 

The sequence of approaches

Kiriakou lists the attempts in order. "They tried with the Albanians. They tried with the Indonesians. They tried with the Egyptians and the Saudis." The current proposal, he says, is to send two million people to South Sudan, which he calls "the worst place on earth." 

His verdict on the whole enterprise is short: "Ridiculous... You can't do it. It's illegal." 

The countries that had not been asked

Pressed on why any of these states would talk to Israel about it at all, Kiriakou made a distinction that undercuts the premise of the question: "a lot of them haven't actually been asked." 

He gives the Indonesians as the example, their position, in his rendering, being "Whoa, whoa, we never heard of it," and, from his co-host, that they were not giving up an island for two million Palestinians. The Albanian reaction he characterises as incredulity from the poorest country in Europe at the suggestion it take two million more people. 

Genocide as a category

Kiriakou frames the removal proposal within a definition of genocide that does not require killing. He agreed that genocide is not only death camps, that it can include them, and that it is also about making it impossible for people to live in a certain place, "you could have a genocide that might not kill anyone." Forcing people to move to South Sudan is his example of exactly that. 

In the same discussion he recommends a New York Times interview with an expert on the definition of genocide as background reading, and gives his own account of where the word came from. 

Elsewhere in the exchange, Kiriakou returns to a comparison already in circulation, the way the United States distributed released Guantánamo detainees among willing countries, but is careful to note the difference in scale: there were only a few hundred of those. 

See also

- Walking Robert Morgenthau to the hearing room
- Chaos as the Israeli objective
