Separating Fact from Fiction in John Oliver’s Controversial Stance on IDF

How John Oliver overlooks the IDF’s remarkable commitment to minimizing civilian casualties.

By Hugh Fitzgerald, Front Page Magazine

Insight into TV pundit John Oliver’s views, and their threadbare relation to reality, can be found here: “John Oliver on Danger That Hamas Will Repeat Oct. 7 Massacre: Oh Well!,” by Karen Bekker, Algemeiner, December 15, 2023:

He said, “I’m not going to get into the thousands of years of generational trauma informing the response to this, including the Holocaust, and the Nakba, or mass violent displacement of Palestinians, during and after Israel’s founding.” Of course there was no mass violent displacement of Palestinians at Israel’s founding. While some Palestinians may have been expelled, most fled from a war that Arab nations started along with their Palestinian Arab allies. His comments also puts the Holocaust on an equal footing with an event of the Palestinian Arabs’ own making.

As Ms. Bekker, the author of this article, notes, Oliver is flatly wrong when he describes the “mass violent displacement of Palestinians” in 1948.

Beginning in late 1947, and continuing right through the 1948 war, Arab leaders and officials outside Mandatory Palestine/Israel broadcast appeals to Arabs inside to leave, to get out of the way of what the Palestinian Arabs were assured would be a short and very violent war, ending with the total defeat and expulsion of the Jews.

They could then return to their homes accompanied by the triumphant Arab armies, and help themselves to the property left behind by Jews who had been murdered or expelled.

Most of the 700,000 Arabs who left Mandatory Palestine, which after May 14, 1948 became Israel, had been urged by other Arabs to do so.

Some Jews, including the Mayor of Haifa, implored their Arab neighbors to stay, but few listened.

And there were a few cases where Jews did harry Arabs out of their villages if they stood athwart a strategic road, or otherwise constituted a threat to Jewish fighters and civilians.

None of this history is hard to find; some minutes of searching the Internet would have turned up the story of the Arab flight from “Palestine.” But it’s not something that John Oliver chose to do.

While Oliver mentioned some of Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad’s comments, he omitted the worst part. He said, “This senior Hamas official, Ghazi Hamad, recently doubled down on the massacre of October 7 by saying, ‘We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do it twice, and three times.’” But Hamad was even more specific, also saying, “the Al-Aqsa Flood [i.e., the October 7 attack] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”

Why didn’t Oliver provide the full, damning quote from Hamad?

Oliver further claimed that, “even if all Palestinians in Gaza did support Hamas, which they do not, [but two-thirds of them do] the relentless bombings of civilians there would still be abhorrent. Collective punishment is a war crime.” But collective punishment is not what is happening. The term “collective punishment” is specifically defined. A bombing campaign targeted towards fighters that, however tragically, civilians are caught up in, does not constitute “collective punishment.” If it did, all war would be a “war crime” and the term would become meaningless.

The IDF makes great efforts to minimize civilian casualties.

It warned residents, by dropping 1.5 million leaflets, to leave northern Gaza when it was about to become a battlefield.

When the IDF turned its attention to southern Gaza, it leafletted and emailed maps to Gazans, showing exactly the neighborhoods to move to, the places that Israel would not be attacking.

It also warns civilians to move out of, or away from, buildings such as schools, apartment buildings, and mosques where Hamas has placed weapons, rocket launchers, command centers, and combatants. Civilians have been killed, but not deliberately, by the IDF.

Their deaths should correctly be attributed to Hamas’ practice of hiding its weapons, and its fighters, inside or near civilian structures and in its network of tunnels.

John Oliver would have you believe Israel is inflicting “collective punishment” when, in reality, it is the only military in the world that warns its enemies of where it is going to strike.

The civilian-to-combatant ratio of those killed in the Gaza war is 10 to 7. According to the UN, since World War II the average ratio of civilians-to-combatants killed in wars has been 9 to 1.

It has been lower when the American and British armies have been involved.

In Iraq, that ratio was 3 to 1; in Afghanistan it was between 3 to 1 and 5 to 1, depending on whether the warfare took place inside a city or in the countryside.

In urban warfare, the ratio was 5 to 1; in the countryside, it was 3 to 1.

Though the Americans and British have much lower civilian-to-combatant ratios, neither has come close to the 10-7 civilian-to-combatant ratio that the IDF has attained in the current war.

Instead of falsely charging the IDF with collective punishment, Oliver might have given his audience a brief lesson in civilian-to-combatant statistics, and explained that the IDF’s ratio of 10 to 7 has no parallel, which is why British Colonel Richard Kemp, who commanded the British forces in Afghanistan, has described the IDF as “the most moral army in the world.”