The anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas against Israel was on Bill Maher’s mind during Friday night’s “Real Time.” The late-night host, known for his smug delivery of world events as much as for his wit, offered a New Rule “open letter” to singer Chappell Roan and claimed he wanted to educate the singer about the Middle East — but it doesn’t look like he’ll be joining Roan at the Pink Pony Club anytime soon.
Maher praised Roan as “a great new recording artist” — but without missing a beat, he made the tone of his “open letter” clear when he added, “who, like a Hezbollah pager, is blowing up.” Two children and four health care workers were killed when thousands of the devices exploded in Lebanon on Sept. 17.
He noted that he and Roan may agree on some things, but that her opinion on Israel is where they diverge. “This is where we must put to the test your pledge to use critical thinking and to question whether what you’re reading on social media is true, because it isn’t,” Maher said. “There’s a whole history of the Middle East that you and your fans aren’t hearing about.”
Maher said that he did not “learn about the Middle East from TikTok, which is a Chinese company whose totalitarian government would just love to have America’s youth hating America.” While Roan’s popularity has grown thanks to the social platform, Maher didn’t show evidence that her views come from gleaning information about the region from the platform. She has also repeatedly expressed her investment in domestic and international politics.
“I know you’re moved by what you see on there,” Maher continued. Concediting to the horrors of the ongoing war in Israel, he added, “We all are — the dead Palestinian bodies. But it’s odd that your generation didn’t seem nearly as moved by the Jewish bodies on October 7th.”
“My guess is that Gen Z hearts are hardened by the propaganda you see on TikTok, which likes to call the Jews ‘colonizers.’ But colonizers are intruders who have no history in an area, like when Spain conquered the Mayans, or when your mom took over Facebook,” Maher continued with the groaner of a generational joke.
Israel, he said, is the homeland of Jews, something Maher said Roan could “look up” in the Bible, a book that “is horribly wrong about sex ed, slavery, science and cooking,” but is right about “archeology.”
“Chappell, did you know that for 2,000 years, Palestine was like an Uber driver with a three-star rating? Nobody wanted it,” Maher said. “And there was never any Arab country called Palestine. It was an orphan province. And if you ask people what they thought about it back then, they’d say it gave them ‘the ick.’ But after World War II, and after the Jews were very nearly wiped out by an actual attempted genocide, they decided it was time for their historic homeland to be an actual country, so that for once they could defend themselves.”
“And the U.N., we like them, right?” he added, dripping with disdain. “Yeah, they agreed and voted a country for each of the indigenous peoples.”
“One side agreed to that,” Maher said. “But the Arabs had a slightly different proposal. They said, ‘How about we keep it all and wipe you out?’”
During World War I, the Sharif Hussein of Mecca and British High Commissioner Sir Henry McMahon attempted to negotiate an allied agreement against Germany. The sharif insisted that recognition of all Ottoman territories, including Palestine, was a must — something the British ultimately conceded they could not offer.
Britain had also assured the World Zionist Organization that Palestine would be designated “a national home for the Jewish people” in a letter from foreign secretary Lord Balfour — the Balfour Declaration. The World Zionist Organization had sought to establish “for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law,” but under Theodor Herzl had contemplated areas in the east of Africa and in Argentina as potential homes as well.
The Anglo-French declaration of 1918 promised Arab nations “the complete and definite emancipation of the [Arab] peoples … and the establishment of national government and administrations deriving their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous population.” But despite not holding sovereign rights over Palestine at the time (the British established Mandatory Palestine in 1920 and then gained the Mandate for Palestine from the League of Nations in 1922), the British promised Palestine to the World Zionist Organization.
In the years that followed, the former Ottoman Arab nations were subject to three classes of mandates. These nations included Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Transjordan. Three countries — Syria, Lebanon and what would become Jordan in 1946 — gained independence. A commission was appointed by the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and concluded that the indigenous citizens of Palestine requested a “serious modification of the extreme Zionist programme for Palestine of unlimited immigration of Jews” and believed that the Zionist claim “that they have a ‘right’ to Palestine, based on their occupation” over 2,000 years could not be “seriously considered.”
Still, despite the reservations of Balfour himself — who said “that so far as Palestine is concerned, the [Allied] Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong” — the British Mandate, which referred to the nine-tenths-majority Arab population of Palestine as the “non-Jewish communities of Palestine,” pressed forward.
The foundations of that “Jewish national home” began in 1922, with roots reaching back further. As usual, the story of the region always has a further history that illuminates what came next.
You can watch the full clip from “Real Time with Bill Maher” in the video above.
Leave a Reply