Bill Maher, host of “Real Time,” decided to explore the history that ultimately led up to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. The host’s comments were made in the final episode of the show’s season.
Maher suggested that there is no group of people who know more “about being pushed off land than the Jews,” adding that it was “unjust” that a “single Arab family was forced to move.” However, he went on to say that it is not wholly uncommon for populations of people to have to move in times of military conflict.
“[Israel is] one of the most powerful countries in the world with a $500 billion economy, the world’s second-largest tech sector after Silicon Valley, and nuclear weapons,” Maher said. “They’re here, they like their bagel with schmear, get used to it.”
Maher kicked off the segment by saying that he has noticed a lot of nativity scenes this Christmas season, which is not all that uncommon. And he added that he could not help wondering where “that manger really is.”
“It’s in the West Bank, on Palestinian land controlled by the Palestinian Authority,” he continued. “In 1950, the little town of Bethlehem was 86% Christian. Now, it’s overwhelmingly Muslim. And that’s my point tonight: things change.”
“To 2.3 billion Christians, there can be no more sacred site than where their savior was born, but they don’t have it anymore. And yet, no crusader army has geared up to take it back,” the host added. “Things change: countries, boundaries, empires.”
Maher proceeded to provide several examples about people groups who have fought over land, and he concluded that “everybody comes to an accommodation… except the Palestinians.”
Bethlehem is an important location for the three Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. For Muslims, Jesus and his mother Mary were important prophets; for Jews, the city is believed to be where King David was born; and for Christians, it is where Jesus was born, The Wrap reported.
Maher continued by providing examples of when people have had to move out of their homeland due to military conflict, saying: “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.”
“A million Greeks were shoved out of Turkey in 1923. A million Ghanaians out of Nigeria in 1983. Almost a million French out of Algeria in 1962. Nearly a million Syrian refugees moved to Germany eight years ago. Was that a perfect fit?” Maher said.
“And no one knows more about being pushed off land than the Jews, including being almost wholly kicked out of every Arab country they once lived in. Yes, TikTok fans: ethnic cleansing happened both ways,” he went on.
The host said that there has never been 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.”
“There were deals on the table to share the land called Palestine, in 1947, ’93, ’95, ’98, 2000, 2008, and East Jerusalem could have been the capital of a Palestinian state, that today might look more like Dubai than Gaza.”
Despite attempts to uproot Jews out of Israel, the efforts have failed many times over the past century.
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