On Monday Jon Stewart made his third appearance since returning to The Daily Show. It hasn’t been an entirely warm welcome back. After his maiden appearance as a Monday-only guest host, he was accused of both-sides-ing Trump and Biden. He spent his second show partly attacking his critics, if not as blisteringly as he did the episode’s real target, his old nemesis Tucker Carlson. So for this third episode, Stewart chose a far chiller subject: the strife between Israel and Palestine.
We’re over five months into the conflict, which has claimed the lives of nearly 30,000 Palestinians, a large chunk of them children. Stewart spent his opening attempting to thread the needle between Israel and Hamas, both of whom want to see the other eradicated completely. Seeing no one else had any other ideas on how to end the horror, he decided to throw his hat in the ring.
“The status quo cycle of provocation and retribution is predicated on some idea that one of these groups is going to go away — and they are not,” Stewart said. He then laid out not one, not two, but three possible “solutions for peace,” in an attempt to create a “safe and free Israel and safe and free Palestine.”
What were they? The first was a small one. It looked at a camp in Maine where nearly a hundred Israeli and Palestinian kids learn to hang out, play games, and get along, in an attempt to “open young minds.” That one, Stewart jokingly admitted, “hasn’t been scaled up yet, and may take longer than we have — unless we bring the whole f*cking region to Maine.”
So what else did Stewart have? His second was “let’s just ask God,” he said. “He started this whole mess…He can tells us who is right. Is it the Jews? Is it the Muslims? Is it the Zoroastrians? If it’s the Scientologists, a lot of us are going to have egg on our faces.” Then again, God, as Stewart pointed out, hasn’t been much of a communicator for, well, “the last millenia.”
Stewart’s third solution was a little more serious:
“Israel stops bombing. Hamas releases the hostages. The Arab countries, who claim Palestine is their top priority, come in and form a demilitarized zone between Israel and a free Palestinian state. The Saudis, Egypt, UAE, Qatar, Jordan — they all form, like, a NATO arrangement, guaranteeing safety for both sides.”
Stewart acknowledged they can’t call it NATO, so he suggested the Middle East Treaty Organization, or METO. “Let’s get this region METO’d,” Stewart joked.
He also admitted that this idea needs some work, but it’s “better than the clusterf*ck cycle we have now.”
You can watch Stewart’s latest Daily Show opener in the video above.