On last week’s episode of his show Last Week Tonight, Oliver focused on what is happening in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank, where events have been largely overlooked because of the horrendous genocidal behavior of Israel in Gaza. In the West Bank, there has been a steady effort to expropriate Palestinian land and hand them over to Jewish settlers by heavily subsidizing them so that they move there.
In the clip, he shows how the settlers rationalize their behavior, by pretending that they are only taking land that was not being used by Palestinians, ignoring the fact that it is the Israeli authorities that refuse to grant permits to Palestinians to build homes or grow crops. He shows one settler being confronted by a Palestinian woman who asks him how he can live with himself knowing that he is living in her home that was forcibly taken away from her. He smugly replies that if he does not live there, some other settler will, as if that makes it ok.
I already knew that the situation in the West Bank was appalling. Oliver’s show makes me even more furious at the horrific injustice that the US government is complicit in.
There are quite a number of Israel supporters that try to say that supporting the Palestinians is the same as supporting Hamas. This is not at all, IMHO, the case. The Israeli military has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza who were not Hamas, and have driven hundreds of thousands out of their homes. Feeling sympathy for these people does not make one a Hamas supporter.
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So, this garbage has been going on for decades. Other countries (particularly the USA) just pretend not to see, because to recognize it brings forth shrieks of “Antisemitism!”
Meanwhile, because Israel is committing atrocities on its neighbors AGAIN (the latest is killing a Hamas peace negotiator in Iran), the USA is sending in ships, fighter jets, and American lives to defend them. Again.
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/03/nx-s1-5062390/us-military-deployment-middle-east-israel-iran
He shows one settler being confronted by a Palestinian woman who asks him how he can live with himself knowing that he is living in her home that was forcibly taken away from her. He smugly replies that if he does not live there, some other settler will, as if that makes it ok.
I saw footage of a very similar confrontation where the “Israeli” settler/receiver-of-stolen-land was an AMERICAN, maybe from Brooklyn. They’re bringing in American settlers, either to bribe Americans to support their policy of conquest and genocide, or because they can’t find enough Israelis to volunteer for it.