John Oliver is the host of the late-night talk-show “Last Week Tonight.” On May 12, after two days of fighting between Hamas and Israel — the war started with a volley of 140 rockets that Hamas, in Gaza, launched against Israel — Oliver delivered his thoughts on the conflict. He came down hard on Israel. Yuval Yoaz reports on Oliver’s palpable want of sympathy for the Jewish State here: “What John Oliver doesn’t get about the war in Gaza,” Times of Israel, May 21, 2021:
“There is a lot to unpack there,” John Oliver began his opening monologue of “Last Week Tonight” last Sunday, where he sharply criticized Israel for its crushing airstrikes on Gaza strip. “From the use of the phrase ‘tit for tat’ war in a conflict in which one side has suffered over 10 times the casualties, something that speaks to the severe power imbalance that played here.” Oliver’s conclusion: this”severe power imbalance“ often “gets obscured by how we choose to talk about it.”
Oliver is, of course, free to criticize Israel, and, although he himself attests to the great difficulty in judging “the latest chapter in a long story you haven’t read” regarding the conflict in the Middle East, he is also free to draw conclusions and formulate a moral position. But Oliver should do this with the same standard he sets for others. Specifically, he’d better avoid obscuring essential facts in the way he chooses to talk about them.
The prism through which Oliver observes the latest flare-up between Israel and Hamas is that of power disparity. Israel has a strong and sophisticated army, fighter jets, and missile defense systems; Hamas does not. This much is true — there are huge, undeniable gaps in military power between Israel and Hamas.
In fact, the common notion is that these gaps are the exact reason the State of Israel exists: had it not built from the ground up a stronger army force than those of its enemies in the region, it is likely that it would have been erased from the map long ago.