Jon Stewart Offers a Serious Israel-Palestine Peace Plan, Gives It a Very Awkward Name: METO (Me Too) | Video

On Monday’s episode of “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart offered up a serious and quite thoughtful proposal for a potential peace between Israel and Palestine. But Stewart also brought some levity to an otherwise very bleak topic by giving his proposal the worst possible name: METO, pronounced “Me too.”

“Now, obviously I have not worked out the exact verbiage,” Stewart quipped after noting to the audience how his name for a hypothetical NATO analogue in the Middle East was pronounced. We assume you understand the joke here.

As for the proposal itself, it was rooted of course in a “The Daily Show” style of satire, but it wasn’t itself a joke.

Stewart got to this point via a lengthy opening segment examining the various tragedies, hostilities and general horrors of the Israel-Hamas war in a segment called “The Futile Crescent.” The segment also got into the apparent inability of anyone, including Israel’s biggest ally (The USA) or the ostensible biggest allies of Palestinians (Saudi Arabia, Egypt et al) to do anything about it. This culminated with Stewart promising not one, but three possible solutions.

The first was a brief look at a program in Maine that brings Israeli and Palestinian teens together, something Stewart noted “hasn’t been scaled up.” His second proposed solution was “Let’s just ask God… he can tell 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 gonna have egg on our faces.” But Stewart noted God’s “lack of communication over this past, let’s say millennia” as a sign this isn’t workable either. This brought him to the third idea.

“Heaven forbid, I actually think this last one could work. Starting now. No preconditions, no earned trust, no partners for peace. Israel stops bombing, Hamas releases the hostages,” Stewart said.

“The Arab countries who claim Palestine as 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 security for both sides,” he continued.

“Obviously they won’t call it NATO. It’s the Middle East treaty org, it’s Me Too. Tweet it out, Me Too!” He said. “Tonight, people, let’s get this region Me Too’d.”

“Now, obviously I have not worked out the exact verbiage. But anything is better than the clusterf— cycle we have now. Because honestly, what is the alternative?” Stewart concluded, before a clip of a fundamentalist Christian church service about the End Times played.

Watch the whole thing at the top of the page now.

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