John Oliver waded into the war between Israel and Hamas on Sunday evening, with a particular focus on the leadership undergirding the conflict. There wasn’t enough time to talk about the history of the Middle East – “I’m actually technically a comedy show, I just hide it better than most,” said Oliver on Last Week Tonight – or recap “thousands of years of generational trauma informing the response to this, including the Holocaust and the Nakba or mass violent displacement of Palestinians during and after Israel’s founding”.
“I’m also not going to do a historical blow by blow of how Palestinians came to live in Gaza and the West Bank right now. You can Google that for yourselves,” he continued.
Instead, Oliver sought to zero in on “one of the biggest misconceptions” bandied about over the last month: “The tendency to collapse leaders and citizens when discussing this. To assume that Netanyahu speaks for all Israelis, or that Hamas speaks for all Palestinians, because that is emphatically not the case.”
Oliver started with Hamas, which was founded in 1987 and has been in charge of Gaza for 17 years. Many commentators in Israel and the US have dismissed all Gazans as supportive of Hamas with the claim that Gazans elected them to power. “It is true that at one point, Gazans did elect Hamas,” Oliver noted, “But if you think that makes them all complicit in war crimes their government commits, then boy do I have some bad news for you about decades of US foreign policy.”
There are some “huge asterisks” about Gazans’ election of Hamas, such as that it was elected in 2006 without a referendum since; that children born after the election make up roughly half of Gaza’s population; and that Hamas won only a plurality of votes by presenting itself as a moderate organization against a rival party, Fatah, widely known for corruption.
“Hamas is a terrible organization that in no way kept its promises, because in the years following, that tone of open-minded freedom clearly fell away,” Oliver explained. “Not only has there not been another election; most people in Gaza don’t believe they have the freedom to speak openly.” Under Hamas rule, 68% believe that the right to peaceful protest is not protected, according to Foreign Affairs. “The truth is, many Gazans will say that they don’t want Hamas in charge,” Oliver noted, citing a poll conducted just before the 7 October attacks by Hamas which found that 73% of Gazans favored a peaceful settlement of the conflict with Israel.
Still, “even if all Palestinians in Gaza did support Hamas – which they do not – the relentless bombings of civilians there would still be abhorrent,” Oliver argued. “Collective punishment is a war crime. But the fact is, there is much more criticism of Hamas in Gaza than Americans in general and these dipshits in particular are willing to admit. Palestinians in Gaza are not a monolith and nor, importantly, are Israelis.”
Oliver then turned to Israel’s long-controversial prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is widely unpopular; polls found that around 76% of Israelis want him gone, and many blame him for the security lapses that led to the Hamas attack.
Netanyahu “has always been hard right”, Oliver emphasized, “but it’s worth taking a minute to underscore just how extreme his current government is”. In his most recent election, Netanyahu assembled the most rightwing government in Israel’s history, with a cabinet “stocked with extremists”. One top minister has said “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people” and advocated for a massive expansion of settlements – seizing Palestinian land – against international law.
And Netanyahu has covertly funded Hamas to play them off their more organized and legitimate rival, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. “Netanyahu took the risk of betting that he could control Hamas, and use them to his own ends, and he was horribly wrong about that,” Oliver explained.
In sum, “Palestinians and Israelis have both been relentlessly let down by their leaders and the result has been a decades-long cycle of extremism, violence, retaliation and more extremism,” Oliver said. Palestinians have experienced that twice over – “subject to the inadequacies and cruelties of a Hamas government and the punishing isolation and daily miseries of an Israeli one”, trapping them in what has been called an “open air prison” by many humanitarian groups.
And the US has “emphatically picked a side” with $3.8bn in annual aid to Israel, including many, many weapons used to bomb Gaza. Oliver refused to show any footage of the atrocities in Gaza, and instead played clips of displaced Palestinian children expressing their confusion in a refugee camp. “It should be impossible to see those kids and not feel shattered,” he said. “There is a natural human impulse to protect children – to grab a toddler you don’t know if you see them running into traffic. And if that impulse is broken or dis-incentivized by a government, then there is absolutely a humanitarian crisis no matter what any asshole has to say about it.”
Oliver didn’t have a solution for peace in the Middle East, and acknowledged that even if he did, “this really would be the worst voice in which to relay that message. But it does seem to me personally that a ceasefire has to be the first step,” he said. “Continuing down this path only creates more extremists, which is the last thing that anybody needs.
“Any conversation around this has to begin with empathy, or we’re just fucked,” he concluded. “We know that dehumanizing people leads to violence. We know that violence leads to even more brutality and destruction, and we know that crucially, breaking that cycle is unfortunately going to require leadership significantly different than the ones currently in place.”
