Not content with having embarrassed himself when he last discussed Israel in November, John Oliver is back with a 29-minute long Gish Gallop of a rant in which nearly every sentence is misleading. Oliver makes clear throughout that he is interested only in promoting the Palestinian narrative, and that facts contrary to this world view – such as every single missed opportunity the Palestinians have had for independence – have no place in his blame-Israel-first approach.
The main point of his program last Sunday, July 28, was to discuss settlements in the West Bank, a topic he introduces as follows:
Very basically, Israel was founded in 1948, fulfilling the long-held hopes of the Zionist movement, at a time when Jews were reeling from the collective traumas of persecution and genocide in the Holocaust. It was established through what Israel calls the War of Independence and what Palestinians refer to as the “Nakba” or catastrophe. Seven hundred thousand Palestinians suffered their own collective trauma when they fled or were driven out of their homes, amid violence and in some cases massacres of entire villages. Some ended up in neighboring countries as refugees, while others settled in the parts of Palestine now widely known as Gaza and the West Bank. For decades there was significant tension between Israel and its neighbors, and then came the Six-Day War in 1967 in which Israel fought and defeated Egypt, Syria and Jordan and in doing so captured vastly more territory, including the West Bank. Almost immediately it started building settlements there while also annexing East Jerusalem, and to be clear both those actions constitute violations of international law. When you occupy territory as an outcome of war you are not allowed to expel people or move your own citizens in and Israel knew this at the time, its foreign ministry’s own legal advisor warned in a top secret memo the civilian settlements would contravene explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention, but they built settlements anyway and continued for decades, although there was one moment in the ‘90s when it seemed like there might be a possible pathway to a peaceful resolution with the Oslo Accords. That historic peace process set up a new framework for the West Bank dividing it into three distinct areas.
A voiceover from a 2016 Vox documentary then describes Areas A, B, and C, concluding, “Area C remained completely under the Israeli military and government control. It’s about 60 percent of the West Bank.” Oliver then continues:
Right, and that is what the West Bank map looks like today, that is one of the most politically fraught areas on Earth…. Now crucially this whole setup was only ever meant to be temporary while a larger peace deal was hammered out, but after Oslo fell apart, for reasons including but not limited to continued settlement expansion, terror attacks by Palestinian militants, and Israeli hardliners assassinating the Prime Minister who’d brokered the deal, Yitzhak Rabin, that temporary arrangement was basically frozen in place and Israel continued building more and more and more settlements. In fact every single Israeli government has invested significant resources in expanding them, and all of that brings us to where we are today because while there were around 250,000 settlers in the West Bank when Oslo was signed there are currently around 700,000.
Oliver’s poor attempt to explain the background of the West Bank either mischaracterizes or omits:
- Palestinian Arabs rejected the 1947 Partition Plan, which would have given them a state at the same time as Israel was founded.
- In 1948 five Arab armies, assisted by local Palestinian Arab militias, invaded Israel, and this war was the cause of the Palestinian so-called “Nakba.”
- Just as in any war, civilians on both sides were killed in 1948. But there are no reputable sources to support Oliver’s hyperbolic claim of Israeli “massacres of entire villages.” It’s difficult to disprove a claim this vague that is asserted without naming any specific villages or sources, but many such claims have been shown to be fabrications.
- Between 1948 and 1967, Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled Gaza. They were not considered “Palestinian” territory during that time. The “part[] of Palestine now widely known as … the West Bank,” was named as such during the Jordanian occupation, and is also known as Judea and Samaria.
- Prior to 1948, Jews lived in parts of eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and when it fell under Jordanian control they, too, fled or were expelled.
- In the aftermath of the 1948 war, the surrounding Arab countries ethnically cleansed their Jewish populations. Many of those Jews found refuge in Israel, but rather than maintaining perpetual refugee status, they were absorbed and integrated into the country.
- The 1967 Six-Day War was also a defensive one for Israel. By the time of its preemptive strike on Egypt, there were 500,000 troops, more than 5,000 tanks, and almost 1,000 fighter planes massed on Israel’s borders. International law only bars acquisition of territory from aggressive wars, not from defensive wars, in order to disincentivize aggressive wars.
- Contrary to what Oliver stated, Israel did not expel Palestinians in the aftermath of the 1967 war.
- Also contrary to what Oliver stated, Israel did not “know at the time” that settlements were illegal. Oliver is taking a single person’s opinion, Theodore Meron, as decisive, even though more senior legal experts disagreed with Meron at that time.
- While Area C may comprise a majority of West Bank territory, the major Palestinian population centers are all in Area A, meaning the majority of Palestinian people in the West Bank live under the Palestinian Authority government.
- The Oslo process “fell apart” because two successive Palestinian Authority Presidents rejected offers of independence, one that was made at Camp David in 2000, and another subsequently in 2008.
Oliver has told only half the story, and his cherry-picked facts, or in some cases outright falsehoods, are designed to lead his viewers to specific conclusions. Whether this is through ignorance or malice, only Oliver himself knows.
The above was only three minutes out of a 29-minute segment. From there, it only got worse.
Oliver on the Settlements and the Territories
To introduce the supposed malevolence of the settlers, Oliver pulls up “viral video from a few years ago in which a Palestinian woman confronts an Israeli settler who was living in the family home that she’d been forcibly evicted from.” What he fails to tell his viewers is that this particular property, which was legally purchased by Jews long before Israel’s independence, was the subject of extensive, years long litigation. The Palestinians who lived in the homes, including the woman in the viral video, were never the owners, but were tenants who refused to pay rent to the Jewish owners.
Oliver then shows clips from a Vox “documentary,” filled with inaccuracies, that CAMERA debunked eight years ago. His main point was to show clips of Israelis who live over the Green Line, and to delegitimize their right to live there, claiming the land is “stolen.” A subject of the Vox video says, of her reasons for living in the West Bank, “it has nothing to do with politics.” Oliver retorts, “well hold on, it has nothing to do with politics? I’m sorry but it very much does. Just because it’s a nice place to live doesn’t make it any less illegal under international law. … building on stolen land is an inherently political act.” Oliver, a comedian, seems to have a lot to learn about international law. The land is not stolen, and it’s not illegal. As mentioned above, Jews lived in Judea and Samaria prior to the capture of that area by Jordan in 1948. Israel regained control of the area in a defensive war in 1967, and its status under international law is disputed. As CAMERA explained previously, Article 49 of the Geneva Convention is inapplicable, and “there is no international law that prohibits Israel from building settlements.”
Notably, Oliver also takes a dig at the U.S.: building settlements, “is also, by the way, copyright infringement, for what it’s worth,” he says as an American flag flashes behind him. Oliver has no problem living here in New York himself, but demonizes Jews who, by his own analogy, are doing the exact same thing as he is.
In addition to the issue of settlements and land acquisition in a defensive war, Oliver seems genuinely confused about other issues of law as well. He complains that “one of the official means by which Israel takes land there is by claiming that if land hasn’t been cultivated within the prior 3 years it can be declared as state land.” But this is because Israel is still applying Ottoman land law, which, as CAMERA has explained before, it must do unless it actually annexes the West Bank. Is that what Oliver is advocating?
Then, later in the segment, he says, “in the midst of all of this [i.e. hostilities in the West Bank post-October 7], Smotrich [Betzalel Smotrich, the Finance Minister] declared nearly four square miles of Palestinian territory to be state land.” Four square miles is about one one-hundredth the size of San Antonio. The West Bank itself is 2,200 square miles. But Oliver tells us this is, “the single largest land grab since the Oslo Accords.” An impartial observer might say this shows that the so-called “land-grabs” are being over-hyped. But not Oliver, who exclaims, “is it any wonder that Israeli Security Chiefs have warned that the West Bank could be on the brink of a major eruption of violence!?”
Oliver complains that, “Israel controls building permits in the West Bank, and by its own admission, it rejects over 95 percent of Palestinian permit requests, so it’s not that Palestinians don’t want to use the land it’s that they’re frequently not allowed to, which is different. … What this means is that even as Israel has been heavily incentivizing construction for Israelis in the West Bank, when it comes to Palestinian homes, this is what’s been happening for years. Authorities have ordered hundreds of Palestinian homes to be demolished because they were built without the proper permits, which are almost impossible for Palestinians to get.”
But for the second time, Oliver has omitted that Palestinians could today be in their 24th year of independence and self-rule in the West Bank, had they simply accepted the offer made at Camp David. Or in their 76th year of independence and self-rule in an even larger area, had they accepted the U.N. Partition Plan. Moreover, Palestinians who live in Area A, which, again, is the majority of the population, don’t have to apply to Israel for permits, as they live under the civil control of the Palestinian Authority.
Whitewashing the Effects of Terrorism
Oliver blasts the West Bank security barrier and the checkpoints without mentioning how many lives they have saved. Over 1,000 Israelis, including over 700 civilians, were killed by terror attacks in the Second Intifada, and the security barrier, which began construction in 2003, effectively ended it. But Oliver doesn’t care about that.
Oliver goes to a clip of Issa Amro, who is labeled a “Hebron Human Rights Activist,” but who is a professional agitator who was convicted of assault charges in 2021. Amro tells his interviewer, “you can’t come to my house, you know the checkpoint, they close it, [at] night, it’s only Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday, one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening, we are allowed to pass the checkpoint. No visitors, no ambulances, no kindergartens, no schools, no jobs.” The interviewer asks, “if there’s an emergency what do you do?” Amro replies, “nothing, die.”
“Holy shit!” responds Oliver, seemingly shocked. But Jews and Israelis dying because of terror attacks is apparently neither shocking nor worthy of expletives. Oliver does not seem able to comprehend the cause-and-effect relationship between terrorism and checkpoints.
Amro’s quote is misleading in any event, as the anti-occupation group B’Tselem reports that dozens of checkpoints are staffed permanently and not intermittently.
Later in the segment, again, Oliver blames the lack of prospects for a two-state solution solely on Israel, quoting the Mayor of Ramallah who complains of having to remove his clothing at a checkpoint, and the lack of human dignity this entails. The fact that so many Palestinians crossed over into Israel wearing suicide vests during the Second Intifada, which saw more than 130 suicide bombings, is irrelevant in this analysis. The right of Palestinians to dignity is important, the right of Israelis not to be killed by a suicide bomber, irrelevant. Dignity, Oliver claims, “has to be a prerequisite for negotiating anything.” Survival, not so much.
After the clip of Amro, is a clip from a CBS segment about an Arab family that lives in east Jerusalem (not in the West Bank), whose home is encircled by a fence and their own checkpoint. Their situation, to be sure, is absurd. But as many news segments as the family has been the subject of, it seems to be unique. In the CBS report from which Oliver pulled the clip, readers learn that the resident “said the [neighbors] have offered to pay him whatever he wants to leave,” but he chooses to stay, a point that Oliver omits. The CBS article specifies that the family lives in eastern Jerusalem, but Oliver described them as living in the West Bank (though to be fair, he copied this mistake from CBS’s headline). He uses this unfortunate family to segue to his complaints about the Israeli criminal system in the West Bank.
Comparing Apples to Oranges
Oliver complains that, if accused of crimes, Palestinians who live in the West Bank are tried in military courts, not seeming to understand that he is making an argument for Israeli annexation of the territory. (When Oliver later complains, “Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich openly advocates for Israeli annexation of the West Bank,” he seems oblivious that, by decrying the separate systems of law that are applied to Palestinians and Israeli citizens, he himself had advocated for exactly that.)
If Palestinians are accused of crimes, Oliver says, “they’re tried in military courts, which have, to put it mildly, significantly fewer protections and boast a roughly 99 percent conviction rate.” As CAMERA has noted before, the main source for this claim is a 2011 report from Haaretz, which cites “data in the military courts’ annual report, which has been obtained by Haaretz.” There is no link to the report, nor any title given to identify it, and it does not appear to be publicly available. The statistic is based on a single year of data, which is now 13 years old. Beyond that, however, the numbers alone, devoid of context, don’t give the full picture of the process in the Israeli military courts in the territories. Criminal prosecutions differ from civil (that is, non-criminal) cases in one very important respect: unlike civil plaintiffs, a criminal prosecutor has an obligation to bring only those cases in which there is substantial evidence to support a conviction. If prosecutors are living up to this obligation, one would expect a very high conviction rate. Indeed, according to a 2011 report discussing conviction rates in 2010 (the same year as the Haaretz data) the U.S. military’s “conviction rate for all crimes is more than 90 percent.” This rate includes convictions for all crimes including sexual assaults; the sexual assault conviction rate was only 27 percent, bringing the total conviction rate down. In U.S. federal civilian criminal courts, the conviction rate is slightly higher.
In the Israeli military system in the West Bank, a defendant who is acquitted is entitled to both damages and attorney’s fees, paid from the public purse. For this reason, IDF prosecutors are extremely careful about which cases they bring, and they only bring indictments in cases in which they have a high chance of success. With such exacting standards for indictment, one would expect that the vast majority of criminal defendants would accept plea deals rather than gamble on a trial, and in fact that is exactly what happens. The total number of convictions actually consists of two types of cases: cases in which a conviction was reached after trial, and cases that ultimately result in plea deals. It is this system, and not, as Oliver claims, a lack of due process, that results in a high conviction rate.
Oliver then proceeds to make an apples-to-oranges comparison when he compares the conviction rate in cases in which charges were brought against Palestinians to the conviction rate in all cases in which someone has complained against an Israeli living in the West Bank, regardless of whether or not charges were brought. From this, he concludes, there is “clearly,” yes, he says, “cleary, [a] separate and unequal two-tier justice system.”
“And look I am not a lawyer or a statistician,” says Oliver. Indeed.
Misleading About Hebron and Other Claims
Oliver then turns to Hebron, one of the most contentious areas of the West Bank. Again, he relies on Issa Amro. But again, Oliver tells only a small part of the story. You would never know from his telling that Hebron is the location of the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah are believed to be buried, that when the British took over the Palestine Mandate, Jews were barred from the holy site, that Hebron was ethnically cleansed of Jews after the 1929 pogrom there, or that under Jordanian control from 1948-1967, the holy site continued to remain off-limits for Jews.
Oliver then makes another apples-to-oranges comparison, acknowledging that “it is true that over the last 16 years 150 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians in the West Bank, though it is worth noting that in that same period more than ten times that many Palestinians were killed by Israelis, the vast majority directly by Israeli Security Forces.” Oliver here is comparing innocent civilians who were targeted in terror attacks to those who were killed during riots or while committing attacks. And while he rightly blasts settler “price tag” attacks for targeting innocent Palestinian people, he seems blithely unaware that Palestinian terror attacks do the exact same thing to Israelis.
Oliver then quotes several individuals who promote the apartheid libel, something CAMERA has discussed extensively. None of these claims from biased NGOs have held up to scrutiny, because they are simply false. Naturally Oliver also repeats the claims made by the ICJ, calling it “the world’s highest court,” but the ICJ is just a political body, controlled by non-democratic states. Nor is it “interpreting international law accurately.”
Oliver also turns to “the U.S.’s role in this whole situation, because it is considerable. America opposes settlements officially, but very much soft pedals its criticism of them as both Republican and Democratic presidents have referred to them as ‘illegitimate’ but declined to call them ‘illegal,’ to avoid the possibility Israel would face international sanctions.” Again, as CAMERA has discussed extensively, the argument that settlements are illegal is shaky. That is the reason most U.S. administrations have declined to label them as such. Moreover, Oliver seems happy to go along with the assumption that it is fine to bar Jews from living in certain geographic areas, without even grappling with the question of whether this is any different than discriminatory housing practices that the U.S. left behind decades ago.
He calls the Trump administration’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem in 2018 “an incredibly provocative act.” He should ask himself why people are so angry that the US has moved its Israeli embassy to the Israeli capital, just like any other embassy to any other country. Indeed, the definition of an embassy, what distinguishes it from a consulate, is that it is in a country’s capital. Palestinians have never had sovereignty over Jerusalem, nor has it ever been an Arab capital, and Oliver would do well to ask why people are so angry about this move.
He repeats the common refrain that the current government of Israel is “the most right-wing government in Israel’s history,” which may be true, but doesn’t mean much when you consider that for most of Israel’s history, it had socialist-leaning governments. Nor does Oliver seem aware of the role of Palestinian terrorism in both discrediting the Israeli left and in torpedoing peace talks. Instead, he blames the failure of peace talks solely on “relentless expansion” of settlements.
“So things were already getting bad and then the appalling attacks of October 7th happened and since then things have gotten considerably worse,” Oliver says. The attacks did not simply “happen.” They were planned and executed by Hamas, with intent to torture, rape, murder and kidnap Israeli adults and children. Again, Oliver seems to think that Israel should simply absorb the attacks on itself without responding.
Oliver also claimed, early in the segment, that “Israel’s war in Gaza … has killed tens of thousands of civilians,” a claim for which there is no evidence whatsoever, as the casualty figures that Hamas is reporting out of Gaza do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. At this time, there is no way to know how many of the dead are civilians and how many were fighters. But as Oliver begins to reach his conclusion, he engages in Holocaust inversion, saying, “a phrase that gets brought up a lot with regard to Israel is ‘never again,’ an anti-genocide slogan often invoked in memory of the Holocaust, and it’s always been open to two interpretations. There’s the one that means, this must never again happen to the Jewish people and the one that means, this must never again happen to any people anywhere and in the West Bank as in Gaza right now it’s pretty clear which one the Israeli government has favored.” The claim that Israel is committing “genocide” in either Gaza or the West Bank is nothing more than an antisemitic libel, no matter how many times it is repeated or by how many people, or how many people applaud when it’s said.
Oliver mocks CUFI and Evangelical religious beliefs, turning interfaith cooperation into a joke. In addition, early in the segment he mocked those who criticized the Ben & Jerry’s boycott of Israel, showing a single clip that stated, “critics of the move say it does not move the peace process forward,” and retorting, “Yeah Ben and Jerry’s was accused of failing to move the peace process forward, which, to be fair, it doesn’t seem like something an ice cream can really do.” But the point of Ben & Jerry’s critics was that boycotting Israel does not move the peace process forward. In claiming that it’s obvious that ice cream can’t move the peace process forward, Oliver is in fact agreeing with critics of BDS, yet he portrays those critics as obtuse.
To conclude the segment, Oliver returns to the ice cream issue. He says that settlements are not only illegal but immoral – but redlining, deciding that a certain group of people are allowed to live here, but not there, apparently, is moral to Oliver. Oliver wants the U.S. government to “have as much backbone” as Ben and Jerry’s, in other words, to take foreign policy prescriptions from ice cream manufacturers who, when asked why they boycott Israeli settlements but not Texas or Georgia, literally said, “… I dunno.” Boycotting Israel, as Oliver said, can’t move the peace process forward, but neither does he, with his one-sided, ignorant rant.
Of course, no single piece can capture the entirety of this conflict, and everyone will leave something out. But Oliver has intentionally painted a picture that, in promoting one side of the story only, is highly misleading. His viewers come to him to be entertained, and many may not know much about this conflict at all. Such viewers may be entertained by his crass jokes about Shrek, but they will come away from his segment misinformed and with a poor understanding of reality.