'We’ll pretend like it’s only us and God and the Promised Land'

Assaf Harel is a comedian who hosted the long running 'Good Night' program. This was his last monolgue before the show ended. It's eerily prescient, and mainly just makes me feel sad.

Dear subscribers,

I was looking for a March 1st speech, and this 2017 television monologue from Israeli Assaf Harel comedian jumped out as something unusual in its time, and devastating in this moment.

I say unusual, because it take some courage to leave a show with a broadside against your own nation. It has a little of the feel of Jon Stewart’s last The Daily Show monologue ‘Bullshit is everywhere’, (before the return this year!) but it’s even more pointed, and opened Harel to such criticism in his country.

I’ve very conscious that this sentence: ‘On one side, the extremists kill, and on the other side, the ‘extremists’ talk. On one side, the extremists burn people alive, and on the other side, the extremists demand human rights’, won’t sit with people who have lived through the bloodbath of October 7th, who still have friends and relatives who are hostages to Hamas. So some things have changed since 2017.

But it’s an amazing monologue.

Assaf Harel: 'Apartheid has been here for ages!', last monolgue, Layla Tov with Assaf Harel - 2017

1 March 2017, Channel 10, Israel

I don’t want to dedicate this last monologue to a specific issue from the last few days, but to something more general: If you look at our life in Israel, it’s pretty great. Yeah, it’s expensive, and we’re far from earning what we would have liked. Clearly, the healthcare system could be better, and yeah, the politicians could be more impressive and less embarrassing, but if you look at our life from a bird’s eye view, we’re doing pretty great. Great weather, great food, great people, great beaches. It’s not so bad here, in general, and that’s exactly the point: that we’re doing great, but there are a couple of million people that we’re responsible for, and they’re in a horrible state. Infrastructure, food, healthcare, education. Millions who are living in abject poverty. Gaza is on the verge of plague. Hours on end without electricity or water. Israel controls everything that goes in or out.

“But they chose Hamas! Let them pay for it! Humanness? What does that have to do with us? What are we? Arab lovers?” Ever since the right wing took power, more and more voices are warning of apartheid. Are you kidding? Apartheid has been here for ages. Ages. It’s just that we’re on its good side, so it doesn’t really bother us. We’ve been abusing the Palestinians on a daily basis for years, denying them their basic rights. In Judea and Samaria, we’re taking their lands from them. Once, we used the Jewish National Fund to raise money to buy the lands. Today? We just pass a law saying we can just take their lands and that’s it. Soldiers shoot at stone-throwers because they’re a real threat, but if in Israel, someone throws stones, they won’t even be charged. Palestinian journalists are put on administrative detention without trial, because they wrote something. Every time we have a holiday, they’re under closure. God forbid they ruin it for us. For years, we’ve been deepening the hatred, the same hatred that we later complain about in peace talks. “Why do you incite your children against us?” “Why don’t you teach them to love us?”