Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Can Israel restrain itself?

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

Why is Ukraine caught in a deadly conflict between two global giants, and who halted the peace agreement that could have averted this crisis? This episode features a riveting discussion with renowned scholar, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who enlightens us with his extensive knowledge and gives us a glimpse of the ground realities in Ukraine. We explore the grim aftermath of the war, the subtle power plays behind the scenes, and the role of NATO enlargement, all of which have contributed to escalating the situation. Professor Sachs emphasizes the need for the US to negotiate with Putin and take decisive action to end this bloodshed.Shifting gears to another global conflict, we tackle the divisive situation in Israel and Palestine. We, along with Professor Sachs, traverse the complicated history of this conflict and question the unflinching support of the United States for Israel - a stance that has long sparked controversy. We also address the provocative term "apartheid" used in President Carter's book title and its implications. Delving deeper, we examine the potential role of regional players, the feasibility of a two-state solution, and the pressing need for a paradigm shift in US policy. Join us for this enlightening episode that pushes the boundaries of conventional thought and challenges us to reconsider our perspectives on these global issues.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, November 29th, 2023. Our good friend, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, joins us today. Professor Sachs, thanks very much. We know your time is precious and it's very much appreciated. Great to be with you. likely events to follow it. But before we do, before we get there, what is your understanding of the current military situation in Ukraine? The last we discussed this, there was public feuding between President Zelensky and General Zeluzhny. the borders had been closed so that people subject to the draft couldn't leave. The government is contemplating a draft of age 17 to age 70, 70 of both genders, and elections in 2024 have been canceled. I mean, none of this looks very good, but what's your understanding of the military situation between Russia and Ukraine as we speak?

Ukraine has lost this war, and it's a tragedy because after losing this war, in effect, every day that goes on is a loss of hundreds or sometimes more than a thousand Ukrainians each day to deaths and to grievous wounds on the battlefield. So it's terrible what's happening. The reason for this purported mass mobilization, which they're so far not able to carry out because no one's coming forward, the morale is at bottom, is that the losses that Ukraine has incurred are in the hundreds of thousands. There are a range of estimates. Of course, nobody knows. Maybe even the most insiders don't really know the exact count. But hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been badly wounded. And some estimates say it's 500,000 killed plus wounded.

Others put it at a million or more, but it's a huge number. Ukraine has run through, in fact, several full armies. What equipment was sent has basically been lost. And the much hyped and vaunted counteroffensive that started in June failed. Ukraine took essentially no territory. All of the big claims that it would make its way to the Sea of Azov, that it would cut Crimea from the mainland of Russia were not even close calls. There was nothing of the sort happening. And now the initiative is in Russia's That's why the leaders are feuding. That's why clearly in the U.S. and in Europe, there is great consternation. Biden would love nothing more than for all of this to go away so we can have a reelection campaign. This is a debacle for his administration. with Russia back in March and April 2022, David Arakamia, who heads Zelensky's party in the

Ukrainian parliament, saying clearly something I knew that we've discussed, and I knew it from the inside, but we hear it now from Ukraine's lead negotiator, there was a peace agreement on the table that was stopped by the United States and the UK because they wanted the Ukrainians to fight on. This is the peace agreement that Boris Johnson himself flew to Kiev in order to interfere with. That is correct. There is a general principle in the world that anyone that listens to Boris Johnson doesn't have their head on straight. Honest to God, that's a general principle because that guy really is one of the most irresponsible people to have his moment of political power that we've had in a long time. But he actually went to Kiev in early April, no doubt carrying the message of the United States also, and told them,

no, you don't sign that. We don't have your back on that. We do not accept neutrality. Fight on. Of course, we have our senators who have even written things that are so gross and detestable, like Blumenthal, like Mitt Romney, who said, fight on. This is great value for U.S. money. We're not losing any dead. And we're showing China how strong we are. You know, you cannot make this stuff up. These are supposed to be grownups and deliberators. And so the basic point is, Ukraine is in a terrible situation. We put them there, let's be frank, because they could have had neutrality and they could have had peace. By the way, they could have avoided the war altogether if the United States

had not pushed this. They've lost a generation of young men. By the way, in addition to the terrible, shocking levels of deaths and wounded, they've lost millions and millions of people, some who have gone to Russia, some who have gone to Western Europe, some who are living in what is now territory governed by Russia. Ukraine itself, we don't even know the population, but the estimates are that between 10 and 20 million people are not there because of migration and the war itself. So it's a terrible situation. They are led by ideologues who outlawed negotiation after coming close to signing it. Now we've heard the truth. You know, it's so rare to hear the truth. It just kind of

gets blurted out. It's obvious if you're on the inside of these things, but when you try to say it on the outside, the official narratives dominate. But we've heard the truth. This is a war over NATO enlargement. That means a war that never should have taken place. The Secretary General of NATO blurted out the truth when he spoke to the European Union Parliament. Now the chief negotiator blurted out the truth. A few months ago, the former prime minister of Israel blurted out the truth that he had to cover his tracks because someone told him, oh, you shouldn't have said that. But the truth is this war never should have happened. The United States pushed Ukraine into this.

It could have stopped right away. And now it's a complete disaster. And to this day, the United States leadership can't get it in their heads to call Putin and say, you know, that NATO enlargement thing, that was really a dumb idea. Can we find a way out of this mess? And that's the call that should happen any moment on a daily basis. I'll do it again. If President Biden needs my Zoom account, I can give him a Zoom account so he can make this call. But he has not picked up the phone or dialed a Zoom so that he can talk to his counterpart and get this disaster ended. Switching to Israel and Gaza, from your experience with and your observations of ceasefires, truces, whatever you want to call them, do they have a way of spreading because of the era of good feeling that happens during them?

Or do the combatants typically regroup, become more lethal, and salivate until they can start killing again? It is clear that basically the vast majority of the world community, that means the nations of the United Nations, the member states, the nations that are in the 15-member UN Security Council, want this ceasefire to turn into peace. And I spoke in the UN Security Council last week, and the desire for this war to end is everywhere, except, I would say, inside the Israeli cabinet. The Israeli cabinet is now a mix of a few normal politicians, Netanyahu, who is god-awful, and some absolute right-wing extremists like the finance minister,

Bezalel Smotrich, and the national security minister, Ben-Gavir, who are telling Netanyahu today, and it's reported in the press again, no more hostage exchanges, no more ceasefires. We got to get in and kill Hamas. And what that means, we know, because it's not a secret, it's a tragedy witnessed every day. That means killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians. They don't care. They don't care. These are war crimes. So how this comes down is what is the United States going to do?

Where is the U.S. leadership? Because Israel can't do this without the United States. Does the president have what a president's supposed to have? And that's the ability to decide something in the world's interest and especially in the American interest. The American interest is for this mass killing and war crimes in Gaza to stop. Does Joe Biden, is he getting cold feet over his wedded at the hip to anything the Israeli cabinet wants to do? Is he beginning to understand what you just described as a world consensus and even as a consensus in the United States? Our politicians, and Joe Biden is nothing if not a politician, have been trained for generations to show no space with Israel.

That's American politics. That's their training. That's their instinct. That's what they reach for. So when Biden basically said at the beginning, we have your back, he was just going with the handbook 101 of U.S. politics and Israel. Now, they're shocked. They're shocked because America is not what they thought. American public opinion is not support Israel on all things. Americans are watching what's happening. They are brokenhearted by the thousands and thousands of deaths of children under the rubble. They're shocked by the grossness of these politicians in Israel, Smotrich and Ben-Gavir and others. How does Ben-Gavir have such power? I mean, he told the IDF not even to permit the Palestinian people to celebrate and to manifest joy when their prisoners have been returned. He must be truly a monster if he thinks he can outlaw joy at normal human happiness. Look, this cabinet of Netanyahu, before it was expanded a little bit as a so-called unity cabinet, was the most right-wing cabinet in Israel's history.

Israel was already coming apart at the seams with hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating against this government. Netanyahu is a scourge for Israel. He's pulling the country apart, was doing so before October 7, and is doing so now. And his government included these extreme rightists who are so vulgar that what they're saying is being taken down by the lawyers as evidence of genocidal intent. That's how extreme the rhetoric is. We have legal institutions in the United States, the Center for Constitutional Rights among them, which are collecting just the verbatim statements of these members of the Netanyahu cabinet as evidence of genocidal intent. That means, boy, you're not watching your mouth. You're doing things that are so outrageous, so vulgar, that the whole world is shocked. And that is the reality right now.

Two sets of numbers for you, Professor Sachs. Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that more women and children have been killed in eight weeks in Gaza than have been killed in 18 months in Ukraine. Second set of figures. The Israelis have released about 35 to 40 Palestinian prisoners. They have arrested, according to Al Jazeera this morning, 133 Palestinians while walking on the streets of the West Bank, three times the number they have released. The war in Ukraine, which is a tragedy which could end today if Biden would recognize his blunders, stopped the NATO enlargement, has by and large been a war of armies attacking armies or of missiles against industrial infrastructure. And of course, thousands of people have been killed, but they have not been targeted. And this observation that

has been made in recent days, that the killings of civilians in Gaza exceed the civilian deaths, as best as we know, in all of the Ukraine war is because Israel knew Gaza is a tightly packed place of people living in crowded areas, and they bombed the hell out of them. And they bombed the schools, and they bombed the clinics, and they bombed the hospitals. They knew. Now, they say it's to fight Hamas, but they also, whether that is what they're doing or what they're thinking or not thinking, they also said that their goal was to make Gaza uninhabitable. And they're doing that. Northern Gaza has basically been half or more destroyed. People can't go back.

Their homes are in rubble right now. And now they're talking, at least as Smotrich and Ben-Gavir, and I'm sure it's Netanyahu's instinct also. And they're, you know, although Netanyahu looks to the United States, which could stop this, but they're talking about going into southern Gaza, where the people have fled, and doing the same thing, killing them there. So this is what we're facing right now. Has the Israeli government lost, or is it on the verge of losing, the PR war in the West. And if they lose the PR war in the U.S., how critical is that to them? Well, first of all, Israel cannot carry this war one day without the United States. And that is really the responsibility of the United States. We've been through this many times, by the way, you know, in 1973, in the so-called Yom Kippur War, after Egypt made the initial surprise breakthrough, Israel responded, retaliated, crossed the Suez Canal, could have made its way onto Cairo. Henry Kissinger stopped it, saying, don't do that, make peace. And Kissinger played an extremely constructive role then. But what it illustrates is the United States can stop this. That is what a president is hired to do, actually. That's in America's security interest, actually in Israel's security interest as well.

So that's what a president's supposed to do, and it could be done. What is Israel doing? These extremists think, for whatever reason, and I can think of some of these reasons, none of them justified, they think we don't have to listen to public opinion at all. Any way America will have our back, any way we do what we want, the world's always against us, and so forth. The world's not always against Israel. That is so phony and so wrong. The world is against what Israel is doing right now, not against Israel. But this idea that we don't have to listen because they hate us anyway, which is phony,

just these people don't get out of, I don't know, they don't understand the world. I see it every day because I'm all over the world. Anyway, the point is Israel is deeply endangering itself. To save Israel, in my view, what I called for last week in the UN Security Council, and I'm calling for it again. Today, the UN Security Council should recognize the state of Palestine as a UN member state. We'll stop this 50-year-plus drama, have the state of Palestine recognized as has been part of UN Security Council resolutions going back actually to 1967 to just after the Six-Day War and then have the two sides live side by side and have UN peacekeepers there to help make that possible of course you know the United States will veto that in the Security Council. I want to play a clip for you.

This is from 2006. You have seen this before, I know. You'll recognize the person immediately, and you'll agree with what he has to say. Cut number three, Chris. His new book is called Palestine, Peace, Not Apartheid. And President Carter, why did you use the word apartheid in the book's title? Well, let's look at the entire title, if you don't mind. The first word is Palestine, which involves the land that belongs to the Palestinians, not the Israelis.

I didn't refer to Israel because there's no semblance of anything relating to apartheid within the nation of Israel. And I also emphasize the word not, that is peace and not apartheid. That's what I hope to accomplish with this book is some move toward that goal. But there's no doubt that within the occupied territories, Palestinian land, that there is a horrendous example of apartheid. The occupation of Palestinian land, the confiscation of that land that doesn't belong to Israel, the building of settlements on it, the colonization of that land, and then the connection of those isolated but multiple settlements, more than 200 of them, with each other by highways on which Palestinians can't travel and quite often where Palestinians cannot even cross.

So the persecution of the Palestinians now under the occupying territories is under the occupation forces is one of the worst examples of human rights deprivation that I know. Jeff, that was 17 years ago and every word of it is relevant today, is it not? Or was relevant on October 6th when Gaza existed. It also brings tears to my eyes to tell you the truth, because what a wonderful human being Jimmy Carter is, and what a remarkable peacemaker he was at Camp David when he brought Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat together, and they made peace between Egypt and Israel and showed how it could be done. And I happened to be in Egypt the following summer, and everywhere I went,

and with the peasant farmers, Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat. They just loved him for this peacemaking. So he speaks the truth and he spoke the truth then. This is an apartheid system. Of course, it's an apartheid system. It's Israel ruling over occupied territories and by design settling hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the occupied territories, something that the U. And the United States basically backed Israel explicitly or implicitly in all of these recent years. And again, we need a president of the United States who does the job. Where do you see this going? I mean, the truce or ceasefire, I guess ceasefire has legal implications. The truce will soon be over. They keep extending it. The Qataris are doing their best to make this permanent. Netanyahu was under tremendous pressure from the right wing in his cabinet. Ben-Gavir even threatened to wreck the government by leaving the cabinet, leaving the government, and somehow depriving Netanyahu of a majority. Bless him. That would be the greatest contribution to Israel possible. Let this government fall. This is a miserable government. Israel needs a government that represents its real interests, not this miserable right-wing government.

So let him leave. Of course, it's obvious. Netanyahu should have stepped down the first day after that terrible Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, because that was a failure of security, and Netanyahu should have taken responsibility. Of course, he shouldn't have been there for months before that because he was wrecking the society and dividing Israel deeply. And that's one of the reasons why its guard was down on October 7 was all of the divisions within the country. So if Ben-Gavir says, I threaten to leave, bless him, leave, break the government, let a government come in that represents Israel's real interests. That would be democracy at work. But if he stays, and if at the end of the truce for the purpose of exchanging hostages, prisoners.

Why are the Palestinians in Israeli jails called prisoners? They haven't had any due process. And the kidnapped Israelis called hostages. They're both hostages, but whatever. It's aurelian, the use of words. But once the battle resumes, what's going to happen? Are regional players going to get involved? Is President Erdogan of Turkey going to sit back and let the Palestinian people be eradicated? the overwhelming world opinion will, and the U.S. public opinion, will force the U.S. to realize that it can no longer protect such war crimes and this kind of behavior for Israel's

own good, let me emphasize. So I think that the U.S. will change. When I was in the Security Council last week, it's obvious that basically there's 14 to 1. The U.S. is backstopping Israel, but understanding more and more, it's an untenable situation. Of course, the U.K. will do whatever the U.S. wants. That's also another rule of politics that doesn't quite make sense. But I think the US will change and we will see peace be put into reality, actually, because not only does world opinion want that, but all of Israel's neighbors want it also. It's not as if the Arab countries are rejectionist. The Arab and Islamic leaders said in Riyadh, and we talked about it, that a two-state solution also means security for both Israel and Palestine, and it means a normalization of relations between the Arab states and Israel. So we're not far from peace, but that will not happen with the likes of Smotrich and Ben-Gavir or Netanyahu leading the show. They want something else, but that's not what the Israeli people want or need. And it's certainly not what the Arab neighbors will accept. And it's not what the United States should ever accept. Professor Jeffrey Sachs from the other side of

the world, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for your time. Thanks for your analysis. Thanks for your passion. Great to be with you. We'll see you again soon. All the best. We'll see you next week. Thank you. Thanks.

Bye-bye. Bye. Coming up later today, Phil Giraldi at 3 o'clock Eastern, Professor John Mearsheimer at 4 o'clock Eastern, and a special guest at 5 o'clock Eastern, Max Bl Mearsheimer at four o'clock Eastern, and a special guest at five o'clock Eastern, Max Blumenthal. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.