It took Bill Maher about 30 seconds to prove that the Palestinians have never really wanted a two-state solution.
The topic came up on Maher’s “Club Random” podcast in the spring with Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania as his guest. A clip from that interview about Gaza was reposted over the weekend and went viral.
Maher noted that “freeing” Palestine is the in-vogue cause that celebrities in Hollywood, where he lives, have grabbed ahold of lately.
“As if Palestine would be liberated by living under Hamas,” he first quipped.
“By the way, [Gaza], geniuses educated on TikTok, was liberated in 2005 by Israel. Israel gave it back and said, ‘Here, you have your land again. You do something with it.’ And this is what they did with it: They made it into a fortress, didn’t spend it on the people,” Maher said.
“It could have been Dubai,” he argued, given its prime location on the Mediterranean Sea.
In less than 150 seconds, Bill Maher explains how Israel gave back Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005, and instead of turning it into a Dubai, they chose Hamas and wanted war.
They refused every peace deal Israel offered them. pic.twitter.com/OdUM8FKvxH
— Vivid.🇮🇱 (@VividProwess) August 15, 2026
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Fetterman agreed. He noted that Bill Clinton, while he was president, helped negotiate a deal that would have given the Palestinians nearly all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as their capital, but Palestinian President Yasser Arafat turned it down.
Bill Clinton: “I killed myself trying to give the Palestinians a state. I had a deal they turned down that would have given them all of Gaza and 97% of the West Bank. You name it. They turned it all down.”
The Palestinians never wanted peace.pic.twitter.com/d3iUGiusQ0
— Vivid.🇮🇱 (@VividProwess) March 17, 2026
“They did not want a two-state solution. Their one-state solution, as you always point out, is from the river [to the] sea. What’s in there?” the lawmaker asked Maher.
The answer, of course, is all of modern-day Israel, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
A map of the 12 tribes of Israel as they lived around 1200BC.
On International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, remember: the Jewish people are indigenous to the Land of Israel. 🇮🇱 pic.twitter.com/xVHKPXTkDk
— Hananya Naftali (@HananyaNaftali) August 9, 2026
“People out here, they’re actors. They just want a cause. They want to do something about it: ‘Free Palestine.’ But that’s as far as they’ve looked into it. They don’t look past the buzzwords,” Maher concluded.
As a brief history, Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, which included removing over 9,000 Israeli citizens living in settlements in the region to the pre-1967 Six-Day War boundary.
In 2006, Hamas won a majority in the parliamentary elections, and the following year the terrorist group seized control of Gaza from the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, which administers the semi-autonomous areas of the West Bank, the Associated Press reported.
As part of the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1994, Israeli forces had agreed to a framework for Palestinian self-government.
Violent flare-ups followed, causing Israel to go back into Gaza before withdrawing again in 2005.
Hamas used it as a base of operations for missile strikes against Israel and, ultimately, the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, during which they killed approximately 1,200 Israelis and took 250 people hostage.
Maher and Fetterman know the history. It’s not Israel that has impeded peace. It’s Hamas and the Palestinians who support them.
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