Comedian Jon Stewart devoted his monologue on the Daily Show Monday evening to criticizing Israel’s response to the Hamas terror attack, and mocking the Biden administration for not clamping down on what he called a five-month bombing campaign.
The show was Stewart’s third since returning from an extensive hiatus to take the reins on a weekly basis, on Monday evenings.
Stewart mocked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan for postwar Gaza: “So your peace plan is a siege?” He claimed, falsely, that Netanyahu was trying to end the “idea” of Hamas, likening it to George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished” in Iraq.
(The Israeli leader has said that he wants to end Hamas’s military and governing capacity, not to eliminate the “idea” of Hamas.)
Stewart claimed that Israel sought to “destroy” Gaza: “Your plan to eliminate Hamas by destroying all of Gaza… doesn’t that just make more Hamases?” he joked.
The audience laughed and applauded when Stewart called for an immediate end to the war. He also implied a comparison between Russia’s unprovoked bombing of Ukraine and Israel’s attacks on Hamas in Gaza.
Though he admitted that there was no “diplomatic leeway in the Hamas position,” he also criticized what he called a lack of aid to Gaza. He then mocked Christian pastor John Hagee, a prominent supporter of Israel within the evangelical movement.
A “safe and free Israel” and a “safe and free Palestine,” Stewart said, required each side to accept the presence of the other — a point that the vast majority of Israelis have already accepted, but which large portions of Palestinian society evidently have not.
As a “solution,” Stewart said that Israel should stop fighting Hamas, Hamas should release all the Israeli hostages it holds, and the Arab nations of the region should come together to form a regional “NATO” to provide security to both sides in the conflict.
Nearly two-thirds of Israelis oppose a two-state solution today, a reversal from a decade ago, when nearly two-thirds backed one.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
