Kiriakou opens the segment by explaining where the thought came from. He had had “a really lovely coffee meeting this morning with a young intern from the Jordanian embassy.” The intern watched the programme and had reached out on LinkedIn; Kiriakou’s stated reason for accepting is characteristically small — “I can never say no to a cup of coffee.” He describes the conversation as delightful. [1]
What he was reminded of
The substance was something Kiriakou says he had “pushed back into the recesses of my brain”: that many Palestinians, especially in the diaspora and especially in the Middle Eastern diaspora, do not like each other. [2]
He breaks the divisions down. Part of it is generational. Part of it is religious: it used to be, he says, that ten per cent of Palestinians in Palestine were Christian, split roughly eighty-twenty between Orthodox and Catholic. Most of the Palestinian Christians have since emigrated to the West — most of them to the United States or Australia — leaving, in his phrase, “a lot of very angry refugees in the region.” [3]
Jordan
Jordan is his worked example. Fifty per cent of the population of Jordan is Palestinian, Kiriakou says, but that population is itself divided — by generation, and by whether people are descendants of the 1948 refugees of the Nakba or are recent arrivals. [3]
He adds a class dimension. Some Palestinians went to the Persian Gulf, worked for thirty years, made a great deal of money, and have returned — “and now all of a sudden they’re doing better than most Jordanians are doing.” [4]
The correction aimed at his own side
The intern’s observation, as Kiriakou relays it, was pointed at Western sympathisers rather than at opponents: what he had noticed in the West, and especially in the United States, is that “even those of us — or especially those of us — who are pro-Palestinian” hold an idea that Palestinians are monolithic. [5]
Kiriakou endorses the criticism without qualification: “And they’re not.” [5]
Where the conversation had started
The route to the subject was the one-state-versus-two-state argument. Kiriakou’s own position, as he restates it, is that there already is one state — “How’s that working out for everybody? Not very well” — and that a two-state solution is unavailable for reasons on the Palestinian side as well as the Israeli. [5]