WATCH: Jon Stewart returns to Daily Show, makes passing reference to Gaza war

After a nine year absence from cable TV, the American comedian Jon Stewart greeted a standing ovation from his chair at Comedy Central’s ‘the Daily Show’ Monday, beginning a once-a-week election-season return to the role he made famous in his 1995-2015 tenure. The twenty-minute monologue was dedicated to the advanced age of both 2024 US presidential candidates. 

After showing a clip of President Joe Biden at a press conference last week, Stewart made his only remark about the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, taking aim at Biden’s statement that he felt Israel’s campaign was “over the top.” 

“By the way,” he said, before returning to the topic at hand, “the response in Gaza has been ‘over the top’? You know, I like how Biden describes Israel's incessant bombing of civilians the same way my mother talks about the Super Bowl Halftime Show.”

Israel's war with Hamas was launched upon the terror group's October 7 invasion of southern Israel, during which members of the terror group and other Gazan attackers intentionally killed more than a thousand people, most of whom were civilians, raped Israeli women, and took about 240 people hostage, including children.

The fighting has led— according to figures from the Hamas-controlled authorities in Gaza, which do not distinguish between civilians and combatants— to the deaths of almost 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza. About 10,000 of these casualties, according to IDF figures, have been combatants, suggesting a ratio of about 2:1 civilians to combatants. The expected ratio in urban warfare is 9:1, according to the Center for Civilians in Conflict.

Vast majority of the episode was about the age of Biden, Trump

The now-grizzled personality made the passing reference to the war in Gaza alongside a nod to the cultural fixation with Taylor Swift and her Super Bowl-playing boyfriend.

But almost the entirety of his 20-minute monologue addressed the particular topic that Stewart returned to the show to cover: the 2024 US Presidential Election, now only nine months away, and looking increasingly set in place as a rematch between President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump.

Specifically, Stewart addressed the elephant (and, in this case, donkey) in the room: the candidates’ ages, which are higher than that of any president in history: Trump is seeking his comeback at 77, while Biden would begin his second term at the age of 82. Biden would be setting a new record— at his inauguration, he beat the previous record, set by Trump— and Trump would be taking second place, beating the current record, set by Biden.

“They are objectively old,” Stewart said. “They are at that age. There are no more age-related milestones to hit. They got the AARP card. They've got Social Security. They've got their movie discounts. There is no, oh, wait till you hit 88. You get to drink and drive.”

The comedian assailed President Biden’s team for declining a Super Bowl interview, traditionally one of the main opportunities for the American president to address a wide swathe of the country, and for the president’s gaffe last week, in which he referred to Egyptian President Abdel Fatteh al-Sisi as “the president of Mexico,” rather than Egypt when discussing the country’s border with Gaza. The verbal slip recalled the issue of the US-Mexico border, which has been a thorn in the administration’s side since its inauguration. 

Stewart also addressed 2014 Gaza War at the time

Stewart, a prominent Jewish-American who frequently refers to his heritage, has made waves in the past for his comments— or elaborate lack thereof— about the Israel/Palestine conflict. 

In 2014, in the days leading up to Israel’s last ground invasion of Gaza, Stewart addressed the fraught environment around commenting about the conflict, with an opening sketch in which the host tried to say something about it, only to have a correspondent jump out from below his desk to berate him every time he opened his mouth. 

That war— set off when Hamas-affiliated Palestinians kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenagers— was the last ground conflict between Israel and Hamas until the terror group invaded Israel’s south on October 7, initiating the current war.  

He eventually did address the war, taking shots at Israel’s means of notifying Gazans before an airstrike, including via its ‘door-knocking’ practice of dropping low-yield or non-explosive devices on the roof of a building prior to bombing it, in order to provide residents time to evacuate the premises. 

“Hmm,” Stewart said. “So the Israeli military warns Gaza residents of imminent bombing with a smaller warning bombing— an amuse-boom, if you will.” He compared this to Israel’s Red Alert app, to allow users on their mobile phones when a Hamas rocket attack was targeting their city. The door-knocking practice has since been adopted by the United States and its allies, during the war against ISIS in Mosul.

He has made references to the topic during discussions of antisemism

In 2022, Stewart addressed the issue of antisemitism in America, jokingly calling himself America’s “spokesjew’ on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Appearing shortly after Kanye West and basketball player Kyrie Irving had made antisemitic comments, Stewart made the case for a less censorious environment around antisemitic rhetoric, saying that “the only way to heal a wound is to open it up and cleanse it. And that stings, that hurts. But you have to expose it to air.”

In this context, Stewart also made reference to the conflict in the Middle East, telling Colbert, “I'm called antisemitic because I'm against Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. I am called other things from other people based on other opinions that I have. But those shut down debates.”

Most recently, Stewart was asked about the conflict by rapper Talib Kweli. Asked what it was like to criticize Israel as a Jew, Stewart said that “one has nothing to do with the other.” He went on to say, "I think the biggest problem is it's to nobody's benefit but the Palestinian people that it get resolved,” citing political advantages he saw for Israel, Palestinian leaders, and other Arab leaders in having the conflict remain at a low burn, adding “The only people who always lose are the day-in-day-out Palestinian people.”

Then, Stewart again closed the subject with appeal to the difficulty of talking about the topic: “That doesn't negate how I feel about anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitism is not the same as [anti-]Zionism,” he said, “but boy, don’t have that conversation.”