Abbas and the three-state problem
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Kiriakou's starting position on the one-state-versus-two-state argument is that the question is already settled by facts. "There already is one state," he says. "How's that working out for everybody? Not very well." 

Why not two

A two-state solution, in his account, is unavailable partly for reasons on the Palestinian side. His example is the Palestinian Authority's leadership. Mahmoud Abbas is, in a formulation Kiriakou says he always uses, "19 years into a four-year term", and has "suddenly finds himself to be a billionaire despite the fact that his people are among the poorest in the world." 

Elsewhere in the same broadcast he presses the point about elections: the Palestinian Authority does not make things easier for itself by refusing to hold one. 

The third state

The arithmetic Kiriakou says nobody wants to face is not two but three. "You've got the three-state solution, which nobody wants to talk about, because there's really no connection between East Bank, sorry, East Bank, West Bank Palestinians and Gaza Palestinians." 

His conclusion is bleak and evenly distributed: "So, what's the solution? Even the Palestinians don't have a proposed solution." 

The underlying divisions are ones he had set out minutes earlier, after a conversation with a Jordanian embassy intern: that Palestinians in the diaspora are split by generation, by religion, by whether they descend from the refugees of 1948, and by Gulf money. 

The reinvasion

Against that background Kiriakou turned to the day's news, the Israeli reinvasion of Gaza City, and asked what it was for. His own answer: "just so they can kill the people who managed to escape last time and blow up the tunnels that the Israelis were responsible for digging in the first place." 

On the ceasefire deal then on the table, signed off by Hamas, covering the remaining living hostages and the bodies of the dead, with a Friday deadline, Kiriakou was categorical that the reinvasion was the answer to it. "No ceasefire. No way." 

His explanation is Netanyahu's personal position: so long as the war continues and he remains prime minister, he is not prosecuted for corruption. On the hostages, Kiriakou and his co-host agree the Israeli government does not care, and has made that clear from the beginning. 

See also

- The coffee with the Jordanian intern
- Bulldozing the olive orchards
- Benjamin Netanyahu
