Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : How Israel Has Changed

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

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the three issues, the International Criminal Court, the Iranian president, and Julian Assange. We'll start with the International Criminal Court. The chief prosecutor announced that he has requested of a panel of three judges that they accept an indictment and issue an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Golan, as well as three Hamas leaders, one of which is the Hamas negotiator who hops back and forth between Doha and Cairo. What's your take on how this came about? Well, it is a rather amazing indictment, but not unexpected because in the last couple of weeks, it's been known that Netanyahu and others, it turns out to be Gallant, were under imminent indictment. And of course, U.S. senators said that they would retaliate. And today, the U.S. government repudiates or rejects the ICC. The fact of the

matter is the prosecutor, Prosecutor Khan, is doing his job. No doubt Netanyahu and Gallant are committing massive war crimes up to and including genocide, according to the complaint that is now in front of the International Court of Justice. The last couple of weeks have been shocking because after pushing the Gazans to the south, to Rafah, Israel has now attacked Rafah and 800,000, it's estimated, 800,000 people have had to flee for their lives in recent days. So I very much agree with the indictment and very much applaud it. And all of the double standards of the U.S. government will come to the fore now. They like it when the ICC does what the U.S. likes, and they reject the court out of hand when the ICC does something that the U.S. government doesn't like.

Why do you think they indicted Hamas leaders, particularly this fellow who's a negotiator and a friend, a longtime friend of our colleague, Alistair Crook. Was this to placate the Americans? I think it was. I don't know, of course. And I don't know the details of the indictment other than the statement that was issued. But I think that they wanted to convey the message that both sides are at war with each other in a way that is a very dirty war. And the truth is, we need a completely different approach for this crisis. Interestingly, Judge, just a couple of days ago, a meeting in Bahrain, the Arab League put forward a completely different approach that could work. The Arab League actually laid out a diplomatic path for peace based on the two-state solution and based on peacekeeping and mutual security of Israel and

Palestine, but a real Palestine, a Palestine in which Israel is not the occupying power, in which Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem constitute the Palestinian state in which Palestine is sovereign and a member of the United Nations, and as the Arab countries stressed, in a context in which Israel's security as well as Palestine's security would be achieved. So this ICC indictment is also an indictment of a path of war, more generally, as opposed to the path of peace. Unfortunately, the United States, in practical terms, has been the greatest obstacle to the path of peace. Why? Because Biden has done whatever Netanyahu has said. This is the most basic point.

The U.S. government has done the bidding of Israel. It's wrung its hands. It's complained. We've had tears in the eyes of our Secretary of State. But the bottom line is the U.S. has done what Netanyahu has said up until today, also rejecting the ICC, when a path of peace is plainly evident. And the Arab countries are laying it out very clearly. And they're not talking about the destruction of Israel, just the opposite. They're talking about Israel's security alongside a state of Palestine. And this is obvious. And the U.S. needs to stop blocking that. So this is really, we're down to the essence of this crisis. There are the war

parties, of which the U.S. is completely and pathetically, I will add, complicit, because it basically is led by these Israeli extremists. And there is the path of peace. And if we just listen, actually, to what the Arab countries are saying, it refutes everything that Netanyahu claims every day. He claims there's no one to talk to. And they're saying, we're here. We want to make peace with you. We want your security. But you have to acknowledge a state of Palestine alongside Israel. And of course, the whole game of Netanyahu for decades and his extremist colleagues has been to reject that path. And I think it's important to add, and I hope people go to look at it,

the New York Times Magazine ran an astoundingly accurate, I would say unexpected article showing the violent shame of how Israel has ruled the occupied lands with murder, with displacement, with lawlessness, with complete impunity. And the New York Times, which is not exactly an anti-Israel publication, let's put it that way, lays it out in all the brutality. So we are at the crossroads. Do we want peace or war? The ICC has made clear the war path is illegal. And the peace path, the Arab countries have made clear, is open to us. And the United States, I think American citizens should understand, the U.S. is literally the sole obstacle right now because it is under Netanyahu's bidding completely. And the U.S. stood as the sole country blocking the creation of a state of Palestine as the 194th UN member state. And then it stood almost alone in the world in the vote last week

in the General Assembly on the same point. So the U.S., if it wants peace, it has to say that the war party in Israel is on the wrong side, and we, the United States, will be on the side of peace. Professor Sachs, is Hamas a terrorist organization or a legitimate, lawful resistor of the occupying forces? It's all things. Let's start with the basic proposition, and that is that the situation facing the people of Gaza and facing the people of the West Bank and facing the Palestinians in general is intolerable. It is a brutal occupation. It is lawless. It is murderous. And that's the backdrop to everything. Now, when Hamas sends its soldiers in and kills innocent civilians, that's terrorism. There's no doubt about it. Horrible. But if we just leave it at that, we miss the bigger picture. And the New York Times, again,

of all places, by the way, it was amazing to read, says explicitly in this magazine article, it didn't start on October 7. This has been decades, decades of impunity and lawlessness in Israel, in its occupation, in murder of people on the West Bank, in murder, outright murder. And then the police come or the IDF forces come when there's an outright murder. And the New York Times says, well, they may interrogate somebody for 20 minutes or they may never show up. And nobody gets prosecuted. Nobody gets prosecuted. Everybody gets pardoned if anyone by any weird chance does get prosecuted. So we have to understand the bigger picture in this.

Terrorism is terrorism. It's awful, terrible. It also shows a desperation, a desperation of illegality and impunity and cruelty that Israel has been waging on the Palestinian people for decades. Returning to the breaking news over the weekend, you'll know who this is and you'll know what he says. Sonia, would you play number 13, please? Do we have it?

We don't. Okay. Benny Gantz. If we are to continue to fight shoulder to shoulder, the cabinet must approve by the 8th of June an action plan that will lead to the realization of our strategic goals. Basically saying if Prime Minister Netanyahu doesn't seriously move toward a ceasefire,

he's going to leave the government. Now, I don't think that collapses the government, but he is the leader of the opposition. He is a member of the War Cabinet. He is the former chief of staff of the IDF. What's your take on this? Is this is he doing the bidding of the Biden administration? Is this a fig leaf or is this a serious threat to Netanyahu?

It's a fundamental reality that there is no strategic plan announced by the government because what they want is unannounceable, if I can put it that way. What this government wants is complete Israeli control over all of Palestine. This is not a secret. This is the most extremist, nationalist, zealot government in Israel's history. And what they want, as the expression goes, they want control from the river to the sea, but they can't announce that. So they don't announce it. So what Benny Gantz is saying is, what's our plan? Well, they have a plan. The plan is ethnic cleansing. The plan is complete destruction of Gaza. The plan is to do whatever they can to create a wider war. The plan is to prove that there could never be a Palestinian state. But this is unannounceable because it would be absolutely unacceptable to everyone except some extremists in Israel. But therefore, Gantz is saying, what's our plan? Well, he knows what the plan is. He has his colleagues, Ben-Gavir and Smotrich.

And as the New York Times reminds us, these are people convicted of violent crimes because these are violent people who are calling for expulsion, ethnic cleansing, apartheid rule that, according to the case before the International Court of Justice, genocide. And so that's why there is no strategic plan. There is one. It just cannot be spoken. And if he does leave the government, this is not a mortal blow to Netanyahu, is it? Well, the days of this government are numbered. a prime minister who is under ICC indictment. Biden will bleed further support in the United States. By the way, everything that's happening is proving day after day that the students are absolutely right. They're protesting criminality. They're protesting war crimes. They know it when they see it. Of course, all of those on the take of the Israel lobby deny it, but we see it before our own eyes. And again, as we've talked about, when you see it before your own eyes, the Congress is trying

to stop you from seeing it before your own eyes by closing down TikTok, where a lot of people see what's going on every day with their own eyes. So stop looking. You can't make this up. You can't make this up. I didn't make the connection with see it with your own eyes and TikTok until you just mentioned it. Well, but you know, even we had a conversation of Mitt Romney explaining. It was amazing. He was so explicit and unabashed. He said, well, this is why we had to close down TikTok, because the young people were seeing things. We don't want them to see them. And now we know, by the way, we had this story also a few days ago of how billionaires in New York were dealing with Mayor Adams from October onward to get the police in to bang the heads of the students and to arrest the students and to get them onto the campuses and so forth. The game of the Israel lobby is to make us not look, but the ICC forces us to look. South Africa forces us to look. TikTok

enables us to see. It enables us to see IDF forces gleeful when they're killing people, when they are blowing up universities, when they're blowing up hospitals, and they're posting and bragging on it on TikTok. And that's why you got to close down TikTok. Is Israel a liberal democracy? Does it accept the values of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution? Of course not. It's barely functional right now, but its ethos is rule by these extremists over millions and millions of people who not only have no vote and have no say, they have no security for their lives day to day. This is a murderous government. That's all. So how can one call that having any kinds of norms right now?

The killing has to stop. There has to be a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel. These zealots, by the way, who some of them described in the New York Times magazine article, even find the state of Israel illegitimate because it's not radical enough. So yes, so this is a group of zealots that wants to blow up the mosque on the Temple Mount, that wants to rebuild the Third Temple. In other words, religious messianism that is so utterly extreme that they say that even this murderous government isn't tough enough, isn't doing what it should be doing, where only Jews should live and only Jews should live the way that this group says they should live. This is incredible extremism of an ingrown, oh, I don't know, a fantasy world that is so dangerous

right now, but it expresses itself in cabinet ministers that actually are responsible for deaths. When members of Congress, mainly Republicans, but in both parties, say Israel is our strongest ally, there's no argument whatsoever to support that, is there? Israel is a vassal state of the United States. Or we are a v because we are letting Israel call the shots and we give them the guns to make the shots, we give them the bombs, we wring our hands, we say, oh, don't do that, that's not nice, don't invade Rafah, don't bomb innocent people, and yet we are tens of thousands of deaths because of American complicity in all of this. So by the way, it's bipartisan. It's not Republicans or Democrats. It's actually a competition between the two parties to show how they can cozy up to war crimes. It's horrible.

All they have to do is open their eyes. All they have to do now is read the New York Times. All they have to do is read the South African application in the International Court of Justice. All they have to do is read the prosecutor's indictment today to understand reality. And we need more exposure of billionaires siding with the police to crack down on students who are fully aware of what these realities are and trying to help the rest of America understand them. Also today, breaking news, a British court two months ago told Julian Assange's lawyers that it would order his extradition if the United States promised that he'd receive a fair trial. He'd have the same defenses as an American citizen.

He wouldn't get the death penalty, and he could assert the First Amendment protections, which in my view and your view are absolute in this case under the Pentagon Papers case. And they wanted the United States to make a representation to that effect. Rather than sending lawyers into a courtroom who would have an ethical obligation to tell the truth, the United States had a political appointee in the embassy in London send a letter to the court making those representations, which the court didn't accept or believe, and basically said he gets another repeal, limited to these four topics, but he can go to the highest court in the land. What do you make of that? Well, I think, again, we need to understand the backdrop. The backdrop is we live

in an imperial state where the security services, the CIA, National Security Council, Pentagon, the big arms contractors determine foreign policy, in which Congress is almost completely suborned by large campaign contributions from the military-industrial complex. So we live in an imperial state where the foreign policy is not the values of the American people. When you live in such a state, secrecy above all is necessary so that the government can tell us lies every day. In such circumstances, those who reveal the lies are therefore the worst enemy, not the ones who make the lies, not the ones who tell the narratives, but for the government's point of view, the ones who expose the lies. That's what Julian Assange was doing and has been doing. And so he is enemy number one of the U.S. government because the U.S. government is

not interested in our right to know. It's not interested in the First Amendment. It's not interested in the truth. Quite the opposite. It is interested in having its narrative be the only narrative available. One of the points that I like to emphasize about Julian Assange is because of Julian Assange, we understand the real roots of the Ukraine war, how this was a U.S. concoction and provocation knowingly made. And we would not know that other than Julian Assange, because our current CIA director, Bill Burns, in 2008 was our ambassador to Russia. And in that capacity, he explained completely why the Bush administration, which then became the Obama, Trump, and Biden administration's policies to expand NATO to Ukraine was going to be a disaster. And he wrote a powerful memo that you and I and all of the

rest of the American people never would have seen, but for Julian Assange. And they hate him for that. We know the truth. And that's the problem with Julian Assange, is he exposed the lies of the U.S. government. And the Obama administration, to President Obama's and Eric Holder's credit, said we're not going to indict him. The Pentagon Papers case makes this lawful. President Obama commuted the sentence of the young person that actually gave the documents to Julian Assange. And then the Trump administration came by and indicted him.

And then Trump said he was going to pardon him, and then he never did. And now he's been in solitary confinement for eight years. Transitioning to Ukraine. I don't even have to tell you who this is, but she's back. Cut number six. Uh-oh. I think if the attacks are coming directly from over the line in Russia, that those bases ought to be fair game, whether they are where missiles are being launched from or where they are, where troops are being supplied from.

I think it's time for that because Russia has obviously escalated this war, including, as you said at the beginning, attacking Russia's second city, Kharkiv, which is not on the front lines and trying to decimate it without ever having to put a boot on the ground. So I think it is time to give the Ukrainians more help hitting these bases inside Russia. These bases inside Russia. I thought she was a fellow faculty member of yours at Columbia University. University Professor Sachs. Whoa, whoa, whoa. She seems so utterly determined in her completely bloody-minded and ham-fisted way to lead us to nuclear war. She has been the point person that has done more to bring us to this disaster and to bring Ukraine to a complete disaster of 500,000 dead and the Russians moving across Ukraine, not because they wanted this, but because the United States, with her connivance in the lead, provoked, provoked, provoked with every kind of threat, with the NATO enlargement, and with Victoria

Nuland's role in the coup in February 2014 that brought down a government that wanted neutrality and that got this war going. And then she was the point person in the Biden administration of all places, because it's unbelievable. If you want to understand the U.S. security state, understand that she was Dick Cheney's deputy security advisor. She was George W. Bush Jr.'s NATO ambassador. She was Hillary Clinton's spokesperson. She was Barack Obama's assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs. And she was Biden's undersecretary of state for political affairs. Oh my God, you want to talk about permanent state? There you have it. But she's been there from the beginning

to the point where this has escalated to hundreds of thousands of deaths, destruction of Ukraine, and she still can't tell the truth one day except to say, we need to escalate. That's the only line she's had in the last 15 years. How precarious is the Ukraine government and the Ukraine military as we speak? From my understanding, Professor Sachs, as of midnight tonight, Central European time, President Zelensky is out of office. His term has expired. He canceled elections, so nobody was elected to replace him. Does the military respect him? Do foreign leaders engage with him after tonight? Yeah, he will become de facto, meaning unconstitutional as of tonight. The constitutionalism is a little bit shaky.

His term expired already, but as president, he was under the rules, was able to extend martial law for an extra 90 days. And I think it's 90, 60 or 90, but anyway, it ends tonight. After that, there's not even a claim of constitutionality. For Russia, they say now every day, we don't recognize him as the president of Ukraine after this. He's not any longer president of Ukraine. The United States will lie and do whatever it needs to do. But of course, he's vulnerable because Ukraine is dying on the battlefield right now. And his only answer is no negotiations. He outlawed negotiations, if this could conceivably make sense. And as those of us who follow this by the hour and by the day know, they are rounding up people forcibly, essentially abducting them off the streets and with minimal or no preparation, sending them to

the front lines now where units are losing 60, 70 percent of their soldiers, men and women or girls and boys, to death and wounds within days. This is a bloodbath right now. And the United States, first of all, should acknowledge that because we're fundamentally the ones that keep pushing them into battle, fighting to the last Ukrainian, as the horrible expression goes. And we have senators like Blumenthal and Romney who have said again in their unguarded moments, what a great bargain. No Americans are dying, as if Ukrainian deaths don't mean something. Last question. Do you think the West understands that when Putin says something, he's not bluffing? They don't listen because we are not interested in the truth. There has been a project for 30 years. The project has been U.S. unipolarity,

that the U.S. should do what it wants, be where it wants, go where it wants, overthrow any government that it wants. That's a deep project. That's a deep state project. That's a CIA project. That is a military industrial establishment project. That's been going on for and even into Georgia, which is also in unrest right now with the U.S. stoking that unrest. The deep state doesn't apologize. It doesn't count the deaths of Ukrainians. It doesn't count the billions and tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars, trillions, in fact, that it has spent of our money in wasted wars during this period. So they're not listening to Putin.

They want to win. And if it's Ukraine that ends up getting destroyed, they'll go on to another project eventually. But as they've done, whether it's Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos or Afghanistan or Syria or Libya, now it's Ukraine. So there you have it. They don't count the dead of the others. Professor Sachs, thank you very much. Thank you for your analysis. Some of this on the fly, because these events just happened in the past several hours, but deeply appreciated. I look forward to seeing you the next time we're together. Terrific. Great. See you soon. Thank you all the best. Bye-bye.

Bye. Coming up remaining today at three o'clock Eastern Colonel Douglas McGregor at four 30 Eastern Scott Ritter, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. We'll see you next time. Thank you.