Declare victory and go home
===========================

Asked how much longer the war in Gaza could run, John Kiriakou set out what he considered the only available Israeli exit and the reasoning that led to it.

The premise

He began by agreeing with Ted Rall's estimate that the time remaining before Israel readmitted the United Nations was "measurable in days." His grounds were material rather than diplomatic: "there's pretty much nothing left to destroy. All there is left to do is kill as many people as you can kill."

That, he had already argued, was not a policy that could be sustained. Earlier in the same exchange he described the objective he attributed to the Israeli government, to kill the Palestinians it could and expel the rest, and rejected it in legal terms: "that's not a viable policy." It is, he said, "a crime against humanity. You can't do that."

The four steps

Kiriakou's prescription was sequential. "The only way that the Israelis can get out of this is to turn back to the United Nations, declare victory, declare Hamas destroyed, and turn it over to the UN." With that done, "you can engage the Saudis and ask them to join the Abraham Accords, and you can negotiate some deal later."

His summary of the whole was blunt: "if the Israelis knew what was good for them, they would declare victory and go home."

The order matters to the argument. The declaration of victory is what makes the handover to the UN survivable domestically; the handover is what makes the Saudi approach possible; and the substantive settlement is deferred to a later negotiation conducted from a position that is no longer deteriorating.

The question of Hamas's leadership

Rall proposed an addition, that Hamas's leadership be offered exile in a third country, with an undertaking that Mossad would not later assassinate them. Kiriakou called that "a good idea" and endorsed it directly: "Yes... And you can go to a third country."

Framing

What distinguishes the passage is that Kiriakou argued the case on Israel's own interest rather than on humanitarian grounds alone. He had already said Israel was "rightfully in a no-win situation" with no endgame available to it. The prescription follows from that assessment: a war with nothing left to take and no achievable further objective is one whose only remaining move is to be declared finished.

See also

- Abraham Accords
- October 7 attack
- The airbridge
- Ted Rall
