Last Week Tonight Angers Everybody: S11, E18: “The West Bank”

It’s Been a Busy Week

One of the most energizing things about Last Week Tonight is how willing John Oliver is to zag when we’re expecting a zig. Oliver did nod toward the withdrawal of President Joe Biden from the rapidly approaching 2024 presidential election, making up for last week’s Last Week Tonight, which went to tape the day before Biden’s Sunday announcement. Oliver , perhaps to dull the sting of getting Sunday scooped, showed a clip of some local anchors abruptly cutting away from their feel-good “Gorgeous Grandmas” puff piece to hurriedly scroll their social media feeds. (“Getting that grandma off the screen was the second time that day when a senior citizen was successfully pushed aside,” noted Oliver.)

And while Oliver went on to note how the Democrats (no matter the manner they pushed out one of the most empirically successful presidents of the century) uncharacteristically had their sh*t together in snapping into line behind Biden-anointed successor Kamala Harris, the host was himself characteristically giddy reporting how Donald Trump’s Republicans have been losing their tiny little minds. If Vice President Harris has proven a record-breakingly popular presidential pick, proposed GOP Veep J.D. Vance has become an immediate and total drag on the Trump ticket. (And just a drag in general.) While Fox News sneering heads flailed away at Harris for supposedly wanting to ban their plastic drinking straws and other vital national issues, Republicans, Oliver explained, had to run defense for a Vice Presidential candidate with majority-repellent extreme views on everything from abortion to women being forced to stay in abusive marriages, to a hacky, middle school-level attack on “childless cat ladies” making U.S. policy. Oh, and there’s the rumor that he f**cked a couch.

As instigated by a confidently false, page-annotated social media post that Vance, in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, admitted to making erotic use of the family sofa and a latex glove, the “J.D. Vance is a sofa-screwer” claim became so widespread that even the staid Associated Press issued a fact check debunking the claim. (An article which was soon deleted, leaving Oliver to speculate not at the AP’s judgement in giving space to some Twitter shenanigans, but in their editorial standards in boldly claiming, “J.D. Vance never had sex with a couch.” As Oliver noted, the AP could claim that Vance never write about having sex with a couch—but there’s no way to prove he’s never done so.)

Is all this top-of-show extending of a dumb, insulting gag a waste of Last Week Tonight‘s time, not to mention its cheeky but substantial reputation for truth in comedy? Well, as Oliver continued to stress, J.D. Vance, apart from definitely displaying big “couch-f**ker energy,” is a fringe right-wing ideologue whose attacks on the rights of women, LGBTQ+ communities, and others comes yoked to rabid election denial, shameless hypocrisy (Vance once called now best pal Trump “America’s Hitler”), and a blend of smugness and complete absence of charisma that just screams “good thing we wrap our sectional in plastic.” As Oliver concluded following a clip of the poll-plummeting Vance leaving an otherwise receptive GOP crowd staring at their shoes in response to the candidate unsuccessfully trying to save a bombing joke, “That make’s Jeb’s ‘Please clap’ look like Showtime at the Apollo.”

Our Main Story Tonight

Would that the world were all happy mockery of unqualified twerps unsuccessfully fending off accusations of couch-f**kery. (Oliver and his staff couldn’t help but phone Vance’s reps for a quote, only to get hung up on.) But no, Oliver’s zag took Last Week Tonight directly into the eternally hemorrhaging heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Or, as Oliver called tonight’s alternately infuriating and sobering top story, “a sentence rated number one in Ways to Instantly Ruin Thanksgiving with Your Family magazine.”

Zigging this time, Oliver steered the conversation about the flashpoint-nearing region away from the embattled Gaza to the less recently discussed but equally fraught West Bank. As ever, viewers were warned by Oliver to strap themselves in, as he promised his signature three-pronged approach (history, present, and what’s to be done) to a story attempting to open eyes, stir emotions, and anger pretty much everyone. Comedy!

Oliver’s thesis is that, while Israel’s ongoing retaliatory assault on the people of Gaza in response to Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2023 remains a one-sided humanitarian disaster/sh*tshow, the situation in the other major Palestinian territory is perhaps as alarming, and unjust. (Not that anyone’s playing “which apartheid-style injustice is more damaging to your soul to even hear about” or anything.) After apologizing for his too-brief (if studiously researched) recap of the bases for the current conflict, Oliver pointed out the glaring historical disconnect between the two parties, in that Israeli’s call the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel “The War of Independence,” while the Palestinians who were forced from their homes en masse, call it the Nakba (“the catastrophe.”) As Oliver noted after a clip of a current-day Israeli settler claiming that occupying Palestinians’ former land “isn’t political,” “Building on stolen land is an inherently political act. It is also [puts up American flag] copyright infringement.”

It was going to be one of those nights when John Oliver and his team, with their pesky insistence on staring inconvenient, even unpalatable truths square in the kisser, make everybody deeply uncomfortable. It’s a measure of Last Week Tonight‘s Emmy-dominating greatness that the show steadfastly adheres to the furiously idealistic judicial maxim, “Let the truth be known though the heaven’s fall.” (And no, Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison did not make up that phrase in JFK.) Here, Oliver laid bare the tangle of racism, right-wing pandering to hard-line Zionists, self-exonerating middle class complacency, and Kafka-esque bureaucratic chicanery keeping the Palestinians of the West Bank a constantly imperiled population.

Noting how this whole conversation traditionally sets everyone’s gauges to red-faced, jaw-clenched extremism,” Oliver braved the fate of Vermont ice cream do-gooders Ben & Jerry’s, who he showed facing boycotts after pulling their products from occupied territories, including the West Bank. (Addressing critics of the move, Oliver mocked, “Yeah, Ben & Jerry’s was accused of failing to move the peace process forward. Which, to be fair, doesn’t seem like something an ice cream can really do.”) Not that anyone else has made much progress on the issue, especially since the 2022 election of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a straight ticket of anti-Palestinian racism and accelerated land-grabbing. (Never a great sign for your government when you choose as your Minister of National Security a guy whose long rap sheet includes convictions for incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist group whose only agenda is driving Palestinians from their lands through violence.)

Oliver studiously noted how both sides of the conflict have a history of mucking up any progress toward a peaceful solution with decidedly anti-peaceful actions, but he also refused to soft-pedal his condemnation concerning how one side has perpetually squeezed the other to the breaking point, and beyond. Regardless of how American viewers rationalize their own homes’ foundations being sunk into stolen land obtained through racist genocide, Oliver was unsparing in laying bare the onerous conditions West Bank settlers live under. The incidents and examples Oliver cites range from the ludicrous (an 11-year-old boy being detained the military for six hours because his soccer ball rolled too close to the towering fence erected to sequester his family’s house from the settlers all around it) to the viscerally terrifying. (A Palestinian commentator takes a thrown beer bottle to the skull while he’s decrying the fact that the city of Hebron literally fences off a settler-occupied upper level from the Palestinians below—and the fact that Israeli settlers routinely pelt the Palestinians with garbage.)

Then there’s the all-too-recognizable banality in the face of evil exhibited by everyday Israeli settlers whose comfy lives in government-subsidized settlements (that the International Court of Justice has declared an illegal violation of human rights as laid out by the Geneva Convention) they defend with all the urgency of suburbanites complaining about their neighbor’s lawn. One young woman, championing the policy of indiscriminate retaliatory hate crimes against Arabs termed “price tag attacks,” is seen supporting race-based vigilante thuggery in what Oliver terms, “the ultra-relaxed tone of a yoga instructor on horse tranquilizers.”

Bringing back up a loaded term from earlier, Oliver unabashedly called the two-tiered application of justice and human rights in Israel as apartheid, offering up a handy dictionary definition alongside similar claims from such fringe, left-wing loonies as [checks notes] a former head of Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad. among other government officials. Maybe it’s stuff like the current law allowing settlers to take over Palestinian lands that have lain dormant for three years while other Israeli laws employ “brain-searing hypocrisy” to deny 95 percent of all Palestinian applications to work that same land. Or how one Palestinian explains that the armed checkpoints separating Palestinians from leaving their home areas mean that medical emergencies routinely end in everything from roadside-delivered babies to unnecessary fatalities.

So, as ever, Oliver ended with the unanswerable—how does this get fixed? Well, not voting for Donald Trump is always a great place to start in any situation, since Trump infamously inflamed the region’s tensions by moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, defied the ICJ’s ruling that all Israeli settlements in the West Bank are by international law illegal, and maintains a chummy, dictators club relationship with Netanyahu (who Trump illegally hosted at his tacky golf club this very week.) Pressuring any U.S. administration to stop tiptoeing around that war crimes ruling from the same court that tried the Nazis is also an option, as Oliver noted how U.S. officials continually water down any semblance of criticism of its longtime ally. (Protesting the U.S.’s massive military aid to Israel would also do something—which is why it will likely never happen.)

Oliver concluded by hammering the lid closed with righteous emphasis, telling viewers it’s time to publicly criticize these settlements as “not just illegitimate, or even just illegal, they’re immoral.” Earlier, Oliver joked that Last Week Tonight often feels akin to “a civics textbook that someone’s drawn a lot of penises on,” and that’s pretty apt. John Oliver the comedian has a knack for greeting the myriad maddening horrors of this world with explosively funny cathartic vulgarity. John Oliver the human being in with the late-night show couches his global civics lessons in digressive silliness to make the much-needed medicine go down easier. Any discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict attracts jackasses with bad-faith arguments. John Oliver steadfastly baits such braying, opportunistic hypocrites, bigots, and the willfully ignorant with hot-button topics he dissects with outraged scrupulousness. It’s a degree of difficulty most comics—including the nightly purveyors of sometimes glib one-liners—simply don’t have the stomach for.

And Now This…

Two interludes broke up the heavy sh*t tonight. In the first and cleverer, Oliver’s take on the “J.D. Vance f**ks his couch” theme saw Last Week Tonight voiceover guy David Kaye announce, “For No Particular Reason, Some Home Furnishing ads.” The ensuring clips from people hawking their living room wares saw salespeople innocently stroking fabric while hyping up features such as “the naked sack underneath” a bean-bag chair, promising their furnishings can stand up to “any abuse imaginable,” and purring that their loveseats are “so soft when I’m touching them,” all while porn music plays in the background. Look, if you can’t make juvenile sport of a truly despicable person by insinuating that they routinely get busy with inanimate objects, then what are we doing here?

Late, it was time to enjoy Last Week Tonight‘s ongoing exposé of how our local anchors and chipper talking heads’ vapid on-air chatter is the stuff of, well, Last Week Tonight comedy montages. Here, the clip show was titled, “The Olympics Have Made Everyone a Little Too Eager to Speak French,” and it was a fine enough palate cleanser. Remember folks: Putting on an exaggerated accent to purse your lips and say, “Oui oui,” is only going to net you eye rolls—and the occasional late-night mockery session.

Cardus Endus

The Olympics kicked off this week with an opening ceremony whose avant-garde Frenchness perhaps inevitably cheesed off conservative Americans with its flamboyant appropriation of religious iconography and its insistence that LGBTQ+ people exist. It also provoked laughable outrage from red state viewers whose banned textbooks might have once told them who Marie Antionette was. Regardless, tonight’s title card saw no less illustrious figure than Snoop Dogg happily holding aloft this year’s Olympic torch, which no less than every single person on earth has noted looks suspiciously like a hand-rolled and smoldering doobie. “Blazeum” if you goteum.

Last Lines Tonight

“That is almost a parody of right-wing fear-mongering nonsense. ‘She’ll take your straws, she’ll take your burgers, and brother, if you like eating your burgers through a straw, say goodbye to your whole life.'”

ON “best they can do” anti-harris attacks from Ted Cruz, naturally

“There is a clear difference between property that nobody is using and property that nobody owns. It’s why we call those big things outside of stores parking lots and not help yourself car buffets.”

on israeli settlers justifying seizing unoccupied palestinian land

“It’s like being called a hot mess by the f**king Hindenburg. I’m not taking that from you in particular, you gassy bitch.”

ON Palestinians being told their homes are illegal after being denied all legal means to obtain legal permits

“Does apartheid actually have a smell? Because to be honest, until now I was pretty sure it had only produced the one kind of Musk.”

over a picture of Elon Musk, naturally

“You know, I guess that makes sense. Some friends drive you to the airport. Others see your suffering as their ticket to getting Christ-blasted by a flying Rapture-Jesus.”

on netanyahu proclaiming friendship with evangelicals who only support israel as part of their apocalyptic told-you-so fantasy

“Wow. ‘I decide what the law is and your actions are illegal.’ That is a bold f**king attitude. It’s the sort of thing an American cop would only be comfortable tattooing above their sleeve line.”

after a clip of an Israeli officer mocking a palestinian man