Palestine House
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John Kiriakou has pointed to Palestine House as a concrete institutional development in Washington, raised in the course of a discussion about which American organisations he considered effective on Palestinian rights.

What it is

Asked directly what Palestine House was, Kiriakou described it as "a meeting space slash gallery for pro-Palestinian human rights groups, Palestinian artists, Palestinian musicians." It is located on Capitol Hill and, at the time he spoke, had opened only a couple of weeks earlier. He said it runs programming several nights a week.

He named Miko Peled as its head and credited him with "doing yeoman's work" in the role.

How it was funded

Kiriakou gave an unusually specific account of the property arrangement. "One of the city's big property developers, who happens to be Lebanese-American, donated the building," he said, and the organisation also holds a small endowment. On that basis, in his assessment, "they're able to make a go of it."

His appraisal was measured rather than triumphant: "it's small, but my goodness, it's a start."

The context in which he raised it

The mention came at the end of a passage in which Kiriakou was asked which Jewish Americans he considered strongest on the question. He answered that "the only Jews who I know who are really great on this in the United States are people associated with Jewish Voices for Peace or Code Pink or any of the other myriad" of comparable groups, and agreed with his co-host Ted Rall's observation that these are substantial organisations, adding that they are "increasingly vocal" and calling that "absolutely wonderful."

Palestine House was offered as the physical expression of the same trend, not an advocacy campaign but premises: a donated building, an endowment, a calendar of events, and a gallery wall.

Placement in his wider account

Kiriakou's remarks about Palestine House sit inside a longer argument he was making that evening about coalition rather than purity, that people who agree on a question should work together across party lines "and parties be damned." A meeting space open several nights a week to groups, artists and musicians is, in that framing, infrastructure for exactly the kind of broad front he was urging.

See also

- Ted Rall
- John Kiriakou
- Israel-United States relations
