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]