Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Trump and Palestinian Freedom.

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Trump and Palestinian Freedom.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. With courses available online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, January 29th, 2025. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now, as he does every week. Professor, thank you very much for taking the time to chat with us. Great to be with you. In your view, does Donald Trump share the contempt for the freedom of the Palestinian

people that Joe Biden has manifested? We don't know yet. We're about to find out. You know, during the first term of Trump, there was no interest or attention to the Palestinian people. The idea was that in the diplomatic process called the Abraham Accords, that Arab countries would normalize relations with Israel, irrespective of there being no solution to the Palestinian question. And I think probably Trump has come back to office thinking that he would continue that. It's just not possible anymore. He will find out very, very quickly. The whole world is now united after this awful war, the tens of thousands of people dead, the mass displacement of populations, the destruction of Gaza, the violence in the West Bank. The world is united to say there needs to be a state of Palestine. Israel cannot go on ruling over people, killing these people, pushing them out of their homes, destroying their land. And Donald Trump

will find that out very quickly. What he plans to do about it, we're going to find out quite soon. But I do think it's a very different world from the one that he faced when he left office on January 20th, 2021. He will hear from the Saudis, he will hear from countries all over the world. There can be no peace, there will be no peace, there will be no normalization, unless there is a state of Palestine. Were you as scandalized as I when he rather matter-of-factly said, oh, Gaza's a mess, we have to clean it out and redevelop it, and the Palestinians will send them to Egypt and to Jordan. I mean, that comment is what provoked my question to you about his disrespect for the freedom of the Palestinian people. He said it's a demolition zone, which it absolutely

is. That was the whole point of the Israeli operations. They said it. They wanted to make Gaza completely unlivable for the two million people there. Those are war crimes. Those are crimes against humanity. That's why Netanyahu has been issued an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court. That's why there is a case pending against Israel in the International Court of Justice for the crime of genocide, which I think the court will most likely find soon when it issues its ruling. So now, the entire purpose, I would say, of the extremists, the violent extremists in the Israeli government, and we've discussed them repeatedly, Smotrich and Ben-Gavir, the two most extreme, is precisely to kill or ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population. They say it absolutely

explicitly. When Donald Trump said, well, why don't they go to Jordan or Egypt? Immediately, Smotrich said, that's a splendid idea, because that was the plan. Of course, this is massive war crimes. And I don't know what Trump realizes about that or not. We're in the very early days of an administration. So I'm not taking anything as definitive because we haven't heard anything definitive. But immediately when he said those words, the Egyptians said, no way, we're not going to have what the Arabs call a Nakba, another mass expulsion. Nakba means catastrophe in Arabic, and it refers to the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians by terrorist groups in 1947-48 that pushed them into refugee camps and out of their homes in the beginning of the state of Israel. Jordan immediately said, we are not going to be party to Anakpa. I think our politics in the United States are so bizarre, so completely dominated by the Israel lobby, so completely unaware of facts, uncaring of facts, uncaring of justice, uncaring of international law, that Netanyahu was given 58 standing ovations when he spoke in Congress after

having committed all of these crimes. So it doesn't surprise me when we hear these things, but it's not going to happen. It's just not going to happen. And the United States does not have the power. It doesn't have the influence. It doesn't have the law on its side to be able to do these things. So I hope that this is just a kind of early errors in what will be a four-year government and not really some kind of more definite fundamental mistake that would continue U.S. policy in this direction. Before I ask you about Prime Minister Netanyahu's upcoming trip to the United States, and before I ask you if the ceasefire is a ceasefire or a pause or a fraud i want to play for you a clip from daniel levy l-e-v-e-y uh former israeli negotiator who has a very strong

view on who got the better of the two ends of the bargain here chris cut number one one cannot underestimate the impact on the israeli public psyche of the release the initial three who were released and of course everyone therefore saw those images they've been told al-Qassam defeated. They've been told the public has turned against them. They've been told so many things. And then they saw those images. An occupying army. Armed and aided by the most powerful military in the world, the US. A nuclear armed state israel in a struggle between that and a

resistance movement we saw a very powerful display and israeli saw that we're being told by israeli analysts heads, political leaders, and their backers in the West, that the next phase has to be to move forward. We have to have the demilitarization of Gaza. The reality is the most significant force in Gaza, by a long stretch, is Hamas. Al-Qassam emerges from this with a very strong narrative. Israel's narrative doesn't look so good at all. Do you think Prime Minister Netanyahu understands that?

Look, the government in place is a government with one aim and one aim only, and that is to build what they call Greater Israel, which means to control all of the Palestinian lands in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, in Gaza, and for some of them into Lebanon, into Syria, because one of the biblical statements talks about the land all the way from the Nile to the Euphrates. So there are even more grandiose ideas based on biblical literalism. So that's their goal. They don't need to understand anything more. They want to

keep fighting until they kill all these people, until they expel them. And they're hoping and counting on U.S. politics to continue to fight this war for them. The question for this new administration, after the miserable failure that we just had for four years is whether the United States will regain its own foreign policy. The United States has done Netanyahu's bidding, literally funding whatever he wants, providing the armaments for whatever he wants. And now the question for Trump is, does he have a foreign policy or is he just handing it over to Netanyahu the same way? That's what we're going to find out soon. If Trump wants a successful government, one that isn't enmeshed in this terrible bloodshed in which the U.S. is complicit in war crimes and crimes

against humanity and genocide, and a war that divides our country and divides the world, that costs a lot of money, that poisons his whole administration. If he doesn't want that, he has to tell Netanyahu one thing, which is the United States is going to support a state of Palestine on the borders of the 4th of June, 1967, whether Israel likes it or not. Israel has no veto over that. International law says there should be a state of Palestine. The UN General Assembly says there should be a state of Palestine. The G20 countries say there should be a state of Palestine. The UN General Assembly says there should be a state of Palestine. The G20 countries say there should be a state of Palestine. The Arab Peace Initiative says there should be a two-state

solution with a state of Palestine. The whole world is on this side, except in the failed Biden-Blinken-Sullivan administration, the U.S. used its veto at the U.N. to block the arrival of the state of Palestine, and therefore the war has continued. Trump should decide. Does he want this to be the albatross of his government, or does he want to do other things with his presidency? And if he wants to do other things, it's not even hard. The U.S. just needs to change one vote in the U.N. Security Council, establish a state of Palestine. And by the way, peace would follow that because that's all that the neighboring countries are saying, every one of them. He is surrounded, at least his foreign policy and national security team consists of deep professed Zionists.

He has Mrs. Adelson to contend with. Do you think he'll be as subservient to Netanyahu as Biden was? Or do you think these two big egos, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, are going to clash and Trump's not going to put up with it much longer? I think that the latter is more likely if someone can explain to President Trump the real situation, that the idea that somehow there'll be an end run around Palestine or it's not important that the Saudis will normalize with Israel. Somebody has to explain. And I think the one that will do it, by the way, is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I think that they will explain very clearly to Donald Trump, look, peace is absolutely within reach. You want a Nobel Prize? You want a Nobel Peace Prize? You want

not to be dragged down like Biden by this? Not even hard. Straightforward. Absolutely within reach. So this is really the question. Yes, we've had decades in which the Israel lobby has controlled U.S. foreign policy. President Trump says he wants to make America great again. That means that America would have its own foreign policy. It's pretty straightforward. Just some breaking news, Professor Sachs, not something we were going to discuss, but maybe you want to weigh in on it. Uncharacteristic of Donald Trump, the White House Office of Management and Budget has rescinded, this happened about 30 seconds ago, rescinded the federal aid freeze, according to a memo from the Trump administration obtained by CNN. You know, there's lots of strange executive orders, lots of wild things,

lots of wild statements in the first few days, lots of bravado. Frankly, to my mind, none of it meant much of anything. Even the boasting, the threats, the threats to Colombia, the threats to all of these countries. So far, nothing's happened, except a kind of little bit wild, unconstrained signing of executive decrees. So again, I'm just withholding any more definitive judgment on any of it because it's kind of a very unstable start in my view. It doesn't show US power. It's not really accomplishing anything. Canada is still an independent country. Greenland is still part of Denmark. Panama still controls the Panama Canal. Nothing's happened except a lot of words. I don't think that much is going to happen, frankly. And I think that maybe President Trump's idea that the U.S. has this

overwhelming power that it can impose solutions the way that it wants, irrespective of world opinion or what other countries want. This is the big mistake of U.S. foreign policy, actually, for decades decades this arrogance this humor let's get back to netanyahu what does he hope to accomplish next week is he going to try and talk donald trump into waging war in iran of course he will this is uh the seventh of the seven countries that he's wanted the us to go to war uh. I don't think it's going to work, by the way, for another reason, which is that Iran and Russia signed a security agreement just a few days ago. We're not going to go to World War III for Netanyahu.

So I don't think it will work. Now, will Trump say to Netanyahu, sorry, your absolute extremist, violent, war crime ridden escapades are coming to an end because the U.S. is interested in having good relations with Saudi Arabia, good relations with Egypt, good relations with other countries. Peace and economy is what we want, not ongoing war. And if he tells Netanyahu that, then he'll be doing the job of being president of the United States. Biden could not be president, I think, most likely because he didn't have the, he wasn't fully there for a number of years. And so he wasn't capable of leading in that way. Trump can tell Netanyahu, sorry, I'm running the United States, not you. That's what I hope he tells him. The executive order that was rescinded was for domestic spending.

But the executive order on foreign spending, of course, exempts Ukraine, Egypt, and Israel. No surprise there. Look, this is... I'm just wondering, is this more of the same, Jeff? Excuse me, Professor Sachs, the military equipment is still going to Ukraine and Bibi's people are still killing Palestinians. They're shooting them when they're trying to go back to their home in large numbers. Right. So what has changed except the personality in the White House? Nothing yet. But on the other hand, we have a wrong standard to think that in one day

everything changes. Nothing has changed. We're still basically treading water. But things could change. And it's the job of the president. It's the job of Rubio. It's the job of J.D. Vance. It's the job of Waltz to understand these realities, not to play games. Biden just never got it on any of these crises. He wasn't there and his team was absolutely incompetent and miserable, Blinken and Sullivan. So we'll see whether these people get it. If they treat the world like it's domestic politics, so it's what Mrs. Adelson says, well, God help us all. Because yesterday, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists said we're 89 seconds to nuclear Armageddon. What does that mean? It means that we're the closest to World War total destruction in the history of the post-war era. This doomsday clock is a representation of the state of fraught confrontation in the world. And what the bulletin said yesterday is that we've never been closer to World War III.

Biden brought us there, as far as I'm concerned, because of a failed administration. If you run foreign policy because some donor says you have to do it, and if it's complete amateur hour, shitshow, to use the technical expression, pardon me, but that's what it is. If you're just doing things off the cuff and making decrees and making threats and so forth, the world is an extraordinarily dangerous, unstable place right now, extraordinarily dangerous. So they need to understand. There's nothing that guarantees any success of American foreign policy or any security for the American people if we're completely improvising hour by hour, day by day. We need to understand what these wars are about, how to solve them, and that requires a substantive understanding of the

crisis. So I'm hoping that can happen. Does the CIA improvise when it comes up with an opinion on the origins of COVID and says, but it doesn't have much confidence in its own opinion? You know, COVID was caused by a virus that from the very beginning had telltale signs that it was made in a laboratory. And I've studied this very intensively over the last four years because I chaired a global commission about these issues. The CIA finally said what is true, which is that this virus came out of a lab. What they didn't tell you, and what's quite important, is that it almost surely was made in a U.S. laboratory. Oh, boy.

Not in a Chinese laboratory. It may have been tested in a Chinese laboratory, but it was made in a U.S. laboratory, probably in the University of North Carolina, by the way, just to mention. We have a lot to learn, but there's a lot of trail about this. It's awful. And it was hidden by the Biden administration. This decision by the CIA director to make this statement is a kind of partial step because it was said that it's, it was probably out of a lab made by U.S. scientists and perhaps sent to China for testing. One very good theory is that the Wuhan facility has a colony of a specific kind of bat population that the U.S. scientists wanted to use for testing this new virus, because they wanted to see whether these bats in China would be susceptible to this newly concocted virus. But there's a big trail of evidence. In the end, it's not going to be the CIA. It's going to be the FBI if they ever get on this to crack this case, because this is an inside U.S. job. And it wouldn't be so hard to find out.

Probably they know. University of North Carolina, by the way, has been sued for 2020 and 2019, especially, emails. They're holding off releasing 2019 emails. The University of North Carolina, are you kidding? They should be the first to say in the public interest, we release everything so that we can understand what happened. They're holding these emails males secretly and fighting nonstop to keep them from public scrutiny. And that's unbelievable. We do need to find out what happened. There's good reason to believe that Tony Fauci funded extraordinarily reckless, dangerous research that went awry. Professor Sachs, thank you very much. Thank

you for your time. Thank you for allowing me to go across the board from the doomsday clock to Netanyahu to Ukraine to COVID. It's very much appreciated, my dear friend. I hope you'll join us again next week. Of course I will. See you next week. Thank you. And coming up later today at two o'clock, Colonel Douglas McGregor at three o'clock, Phil Giraldi. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. We'll be right back. Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. WGU is an online accredited university that specializes in personalized learning. With courses available 24-7 and monthly start dates, you can earn your degree on your schedule. You may even be able to graduate sooner than you think by demonstrating mastery of the material you know. Make 2025 the year you focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu.