On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that if we were going to do a land acknowledgment in Israel like people do for Native American land in the U.S., they would acknowledge the land belongs to Israel and wondered, “why does this work for Indians but not Jews?” He also wondered why Israel is the only country that is expected to cede land it won in a war.
Maher said, “Colonizers, okay, this is, again, this has become like, in the media, we just call the Israelis [colonizers]. It’s not a colonizing. Colonizing is when one country that had nothing to do with another country, like the British or the Dutch in South Africa, marched in with an army and took over a place that they had no connection to. Israel has quite a connection to Israel.”
He added, “If you did a land acknowledgment, like we do in this country, I’m standing on ground that was — I’m standing on ground, that, 3,000 years ago, was King David’s capital of Jerusalem.”
Maher further stated, “And if that land acknowledgment means we honor who originally had the land, why does this work for Indians but not Jews?”
Later on, after the discussion turned to Israel winning possession of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War, Maher stated, “They’re the only people who, when they win a war, people go, oh, okay, do-over, give it back. We tried to take it from you, and we failed, go back to the day before the war started.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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