Comedian Bill Maher discussed the Israel-Hamas conflict on Friday, suggesting that Palestinians get used to the fact that Israel isn’t going anywhere, and there’s no way for Israel to negotiate with Palestine in good faith when the other side’s position is “you all die and disappear.”
“Things change. Countries, boundaries, empires,” said Maher, citing various historical instances where other groups of people accepted regional defeat and moved on. “In 1950, the little town of Bethlehem was 86 percent Christian, now it’s overwhelmingly Muslim.”
While failing to address international calls for Israel to dial back civilian deaths in dealing with Hamas (out of optics, not genuine concern – we assure you), Maher’s position is essentially – deal with it.
“After World War II, 12 million ethnic Germans got shoved out of Russia, and Poland, and Czechoslovakia because being German had become kind of unpopular,” Maher continued. “People get moved, and yes, colonized. Nobody was a bigger colonizer than the Muslim army that swept out of the Arabian desert and took over much of the world in a single century.”
He also noted that there were several missed opportunities for deals with Israel in years past.
“There were deals on the table to share the land called Palestine… And East Jerusalem could have been the capital of a Palestinian state that today might look more like Dubai than Gaza,” Maher pointed out, noting that “Arafat was offered 95 percent of the West Bank, and said no.”
Maher then used a map to show how the slogan “from the river to the sea” is a call for either the death of all Jews, or at minimum – to move all of them out.
“Look at what Mexico used to own… but no Mexican is out there chanting, ‘From the Rio Grande to Portland, Oregon.‘”
“Get used to it…”
After laying out historical examples, Maher got to his point – that Israel isn’t going anywhere, noting that it’s “one of the most powerful countries in the world with the 500-billion-dollar economy, the world’s second largest tech sector after Silicon Valley, and nuclear weapons. They’re here, they like their bagel with a shmear, get used to it.“
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