'It's apartheid': John Oliver complains Israel is building 'illegal' settlements in the West Bank

In a thirty-minute segment of Last Week Tonight by John Oliver aired on Monday, Oliver went into detail about West Bank “settlements” and the crimes he claims Israel’s military commits in the West Bank. 

At the beginning of the episode, Oliver explained that the issue of West Bank “settlements” is extremely contentious, to the point that “even small details concerning it can make headlines."  

He highlighted a headline reported in 2021: “Ben and Jerry’s to stop sales in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” 

Throughout the episode, he discussed Palestinian displacement by “Jewish settlers,” discussed how legal cases for Jews and Palestinians are treated differently, and hardships experienced by Palestinians due to checkpoints in the West Bank. 

Oliver argued there is a system of apartheid in the area, Israel is building on stolen land, and Israel is breaking international law by permitting Israeli settlements in the West Bank. 

Although Oliver said the issue is contentious, he did not discuss the ideology of why many Jews support settlements in the West Bank and did not provide any criticism of the Palestinian leadership. There was no mention of the “pay for slay” government policy that financially rewards terrorists for committing attacks against Jews in the West Bank. 

Attacks against Jews vs against Palestinians

In his brief mention of terror attacks against Jews, he highlighted that “over the last 16 years, 150 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians in the West Bank, though it is worth noting that in that same period more than ten times that many Palestinians were killed by Israelis.” It is unclear whether that number includes terrorists that have been killed or only civilians, as he failed to cite his source.

He did, however, discuss “price tag attacks,” defined as an act of revenge after terrorists kill Jews, where, in response, Jews attack a Palestinian, regardless of who he is. Oliver described these attacks as “hate crimes.”

In the segment, Oliver displayed clips of Jewish West Bank residents discussing how nice it is to live in settlements. He then tells his audience, “Just because it's a nice place to live doesn't make it any less illegal under international law. It's not like the Geneva Convention says the occupying power shall not transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies unless there's like really convenient shopping and a super manageable commute to Jerusalem.” 

Early in the episode, Oliver tells a brief history of the establishment of settlements in the West Bank and how Israel gained territory in the Six-Day War in 1967. Oliver mentioned the establishment of Israel as a result of the Holocaust, though he did not mention the thousand-year history of antisemitism throughout the world. 

He mentioned the Holocaust again at the end of the episode, where he stated, “A phrase that gets brought up a lot with regard to Israel is never again–an anti-genocide slogan often invoked in memory of the Holocaust, and it's always been open to two interpretations. There's the one that means this must never again happen to the Jewish people and the one that means this must never again happen to any people anywhere, and in the West Bank, as in Gaza right now, it's pretty clear which one the Israeli government has favored.”

Throughout the segment, Palestinian oppression by Israel’s government and military took center stage. 

“Jewish settlers enjoy access to civilian law due process and the full protection of civil rights, but Palestinians live under Israeli military law, so if they're accused of a crime, they're tried in military courts which have—to put it mildly—significantly fewer protections and boast a roughly 99% conviction rate. That clearly separate and unequal two-tier justice system means Palestinians also have little recourse when they're the victims of a crime, because despite both Israeli and international law saying Israeli soldiers have an obligation to protect Palestinian residents of the West Bank, in practice, when it comes to attacks by settlers on Palestinians, there has been a history of silence, avoidance, and abetment by Israeli officials,” Oliver stated.

Towards the end of the episode, he played a clip of Dror Etkes, described as a researcher of settlement land policy. Etkes argues, “There are two groups that live in the same territory, and they are officially separated in terms of political, economic, and legal rights,  and the key to this separation is completely arbitrary, [based on] whether you were born to an Arab mother or not. What would you call that?  If it smells like apartheid, looks like apartheid,  sounds like apartheid, then it's apartheid.”

Oliver then commented, “He’s right.”

Oliver has commented on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict numerous times in the past, most recently in November 2023, when he argued that "any conversation around this has to begin with empathy" and endorsed a ceasefire as the first step to solving the war with Hamas that began in October.