For comedic reasons that only he can understand, HBO’s John Oliver devoted most of his time on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight to covering the career of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. During his lengthy diatribe, Oliver would also take aim at one of President Trump’s biggest first term accomplishments: the Abraham Accords. According to Oliver, the accords are to be diminished as a ‘fuck you” to the Palestinians.
Oliver claimed that “Bibi's had a lot of success in pushing America, particularly with Republican presidents, and especially with Donald Trump. In fact, it was during Trump's first term that Netanyahu celebrated what he considered his greatest foreign policy triumph, the Abraham Accords, which normalized diplomatic relations with several Arab states, most notably the UAE and Bahrain. It was a plan supported by Jared Kushner, who Trump, of course, put in charge of 'fixing the Middle East' during his first term, even though he always looks like he just got his hair cut while sitting in a plastic race car chair.”
However, Oliver was not about to start praising this breakthrough, “The thing about the Abraham Accords was they got those other nations to abandon the longstanding condition among many Arab countries that relations with Israel could only come after the establishment of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu's thinking was: If you can just get enough Arab nations to do that, you could basically freeze the Palestinians out. He's been trying to get Saudi Arabia to sign on next, but it's worth knowing many observers have warned these accords were always just going to end up further marginalizing Palestinians.”
Oliver then played a clip from a recent PBS Frontline documentary that featured former left-wing Haaretz journalist Ronen Bergman, “He said, ‘We are going to have peace with Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinians should not have a veto on that.’… Which is, in a different language, from my point of view, ‘The Palestinians can [bleep] off.’ Sorry, but, excuse my French.”
After a digression into his supposed need to say “fuck” on the air, Oliver continued, “Yeah, of course it was a ‘fuck you’ to the Palestinians. That shouldn't be surprising. Everything Netanyahu does has that as a side effect. If he could pour a bowl of cereal in a way that makes conditions in Gaza meaningfully worse, he would do that, and don't think he doesn't have Israel's top geopolitical cereal scientists working on how to make that dream come true.”
The main problem with Oliver’s anti-Netanyahu biography is that it ignores everyone else. There is a reason why Kushner tried something new with the Abraham Accords and why Bahrain and the UAE were willing to abandon conditioning recognition of Israel with the establishment of a Palestinian state and that is that even Arab countries, which portray themselves as the great defenders of the Palestinian cause, are fed up with Palestinian dead enders. October 7, and the reaction to it, doesn’t prove that ignoring the Palestinians was a mistake. It proves the critics of Palestinian statehood correct.
Here is a transcript for the September 28 show:
HBO Last Week Tonight
9/28/2025
11:29 PM ET
JOHN OLIVER: And to be fair, Bibi's had a lot of success in pushing America, particularly with Republican presidents, and especially with Donald Trump. In fact, it was during Trump's first term that Netanyahu celebrated what he considered his greatest foreign policy triumph, the Abraham Accords, which normalized diplomatic relations with several Arab states, most notably the UAE and Bahrain. It was a plan supported by Jared Kushner, who Trump, of course, put in charge of "fixing the Middle East" during his first term, even though he always looks like he just got his hair cut while sitting in a plastic race car chair.
The thing about the Abraham Accords was they got those other nations to abandon the longstanding condition among many Arab countries that relations with Israel could only come after the establishment of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu's thinking was: If you can just get enough Arab nations to do that, you could basically freeze the Palestinians out. He's been trying to get Saudi Arabia to sign on next, but it's worth knowing many observers have warned these accords were always just going to end up further marginalizing Palestinians.
RONEN BERGMAN: He said, "We are going to have peace with Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinians should not have a veto on that."
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU [2023]: I've long sought to make peace with the Palestinians. But I also believe that we must not give the Palestinians a veto over new peace treaties with Arab states.
BERGMAN: Which is, in a different language, from my point of view, "The Palestinians can [bleep] off." Sorry, but, excuse my French.
OLIVER: I'm sorry, I will not excuse your French. The only person allowed to say "Fuck" while discussing diplomatic complexities on TV is me. Because if I lose that, I'm little more than a streamer "Explaining the news" so that a dead-eyed 14-year-old can swipe past me without noticing that, unlike most streamers, I'm in a very expensive room.
But, second: Yeah, of course it was a ‘Fuck you’ to the Palestinians. That shouldn't be surprising. Everything Netanyahu does has that as a side effect. If he could pour a bowl of cereal in a way that makes conditions in Gaza meaningfully worse, he would do that, and don't think he doesn't have Israel's top geopolitical cereal scientists working on how to make that dream come true.