Proposals to relocate the Palestinians
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John Kiriakou treats the various schemes for resettling the Palestinian population outside the territory as a single recurring idea that resurfaces in each decade under a new label, and rejects all of them on the same ground.

The 1980s "disputed territory" plan

The version he recalls from his own early career concerned a small wedge of land on the frontier between Saudi Arabia and Iraq. "They used to talk, in the 1980s... along the border of Saudi Arabia and Iraq there was this diamond that was called the disputed territory. And it was a couple of hundred square miles, very, very small. There was talk about just naming that Palestine and moving them all there."

His objection was not political but physical. "The thing is, nothing can live there. I mean, even insects don't live there. It's just dust. It has no water, it has no oil, it has no trees, no shrubs, no shade, no nothing." The proposal died for an unrelated and undramatic reason: "and then the Iraqis and the Saudis came to a border agreement, and that idea went away."

The general objection

Whatever the destination on offer, Kiriakou's verdict on the category is the same, and he states it as a matter of historical precedent rather than of sympathy: "this idea of just picking up an entire people and moving them, it's unprecedented really in the history of the world, and it's just not tenable."

He applies the same reading to the contemporary version. Of Donald Trump's suggestion that Gaza could become "the next Monaco," Kiriakou's response is that the aspiration is unobjectionable and the premise is not: "Gaza can be better than Monaco... but he meant without any Palestinians, and that's a non-starter." He notes that within twenty-four hours of the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, Israeli forces launched a major offensive in the West Bank, which he takes as confirmation that the operative policy is "to either kill or throw out every Palestinian", and again the objection is feasibility: "that is unsustainable. You just can't, it can't work. It won't work."

Having visited Israel twice in the preceding year, he adds a structural observation about what the arrangement already looks like on the ground: "there's no other country on earth like Israel, where you have the first world and the third world living side by side separated only by high walls and barbed wire, and that's not a sustainable model for a state."

See also

- Chas Freeman's 1991 Gaza plan
- Gaza famine
- John Kiriakou
