"Every Israeli I ever knew"
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In one of his bluntest passages on Israeli society, John Kiriakou described the attitudes he says he encountered personally, then narrowed the claim as he was making it.

The atmosphere he describes

Asked whether a hostility toward Palestinians was part of a national character, Kiriakou said it was and that it could be perceived directly: "you absorb that as you walk around Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or anywhere else in Israel. You just, you can feel the vibe that people emit as you're walking around."

This is an impressionistic claim and he presents it as one. What follows is not.

The claim and the correction

Kiriakou then began a categorical statement and interrupted himself. "Every Israeli that I ever knew, that's not true," he said, before restarting: "almost every Israeli, every Israeli that I ever knew wanted to utterly destroy the Palestinians, kill them all or exile them all and let the Israelis live happily ever after."

The self-correction is preserved here because it is characteristic of how he handles claims of this kind, reaching for the absolute, catching it, and settling on "almost every."

He extended the observation beyond Israelis to Americans: "almost every Israeli I know, even my American friends who are Jewish and who consider themselves to be Zionist."

The friend on Facebook

He illustrated the point with a specific relationship. One man he had been close to for twenty years, he said, had brought him "just about ready to unfriend him on Facebook because I just can't take his Zionist propaganda anymore." What he found intolerable was the framing rather than the opinions: the friend prefaces every post with a warning that any antisemitism will be permanently blocked, while treating any criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu as antisemitism.

Kiriakou called this "ridiculous," and added that he tries to avoid severing contact because "I like to keep lines of communication open."

The exception

Ted Rall responded that he had known "one or two who were very compassionate to the plight of the Palestinians, viewed them as human beings," and believed in coexistence, but that such people were exceptional. Kiriakou did not contest the exception, and the conversation moved on. The claim he left standing is a claim about a distribution, not about every individual.

See also

- Benjamin Netanyahu
- Israel-United States relations
- Declare victory and go home
- Ted Rall
