Judging Freedom - Prof. John Mearsheimer : Israel’s Nightmare

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

Prof. John Mearsheimer : Israel’s NightmareSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Today is Thursday, November 6, 2025. Professor John Mears Sharmer will be with us in just a moment. on Israel's nightmare. But first this. History tells us every market eventually falls. Currencies collapse. And look at where we are now. 37 trillion in national debt. Stocks have record highs defying gravity.

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my gold and silver from Lear. And right now, you can get up to $20,000 in bonus medals with a qualified purchase. Call 800, 511, 4620, or go to Learjudgeonap.com today. Professor Miroshaimer, welcome here, my dear friend. What is Israel's nightmare? Well, I think Israel's nightmare has a number of dimensions. One is what's happening inside Israel. Number two is what's happening with Israel and its neighbors, especially Iran. And then three, what's happening with Israel in the United States. And Israel is in deep trouble on all three fronts, just to go inside Israel. First of all, there's the Palestinian problem.

And I don't have to go into that in any detail because we're all familiar with that situation. They have not solved the problem in Gaza. They have no modus vivendii in the works regarding the Palestinians. And furthermore, there's really trouble inside the Israeli Jewish community. And President Isaac Herzog was recently warning against the danger of violence among Jews and really hinting at the possibility of civil war because there's just so much anger within the Jewish community of Israel. Then there's the whole question of the external environment. Let me just stop you before you leave the internal.

There was this horrible event that took place where these Israeli either military or corrections officers filmed themselves raping a Palestinian prisoner. The IDF sought to investigate it. A lot of pressure was put on the investigators to prevent them from investigation. investigating the general counsel of the IDF herself, an IDF major general, authorized the release of the film that these creeps made of themselves. She was then arrested and being prosecuted for obstructing justice and was forced to resign, and President Netanyahu has to defend the rapists by saying the real problem here is a PR one. Do Israelis buy that, or are they repulsed by the,

idea a prison rape. I'm sure there are many Israelis who are repulsed. I'm sure there are many Israelis who are deeply disturbed by what's happening to the justice system there as reflected in what's happened to this general who released the tape. I mean, this is just a giant mess. But at the same time, there's a large chunk of that population. It appears that it's well over 50% of that population. And here we're talking about the Israeli Jewish population. that has devolved into savagery. I mean, they are no longer behaving according to the basic rules that most countries, certainly most countries in the West,

behave by. It's just horrible what's happened to Israel. And again, a lot of people inside Israel recognize that. And this is one of the big fault lines inside that society. But you want to ask yourself, what does it say when a tape like that is released? and the Prime Minister says that it's just a public relations problem. It's not like these people did anything wrong.

This is acceptable. We're allowed this. We're allowed to do this to Palestinian prisoners because we've dehumanized them. They're basically the scum of the earth. And therefore, we just have to worry about the public relations aspects of this whole episode. This is a terrible situation. And it basically says in very clear terms where Israeli society is at. How can a society long survive that lords the most vicious crimes that society has ever condemned?

And this is in the same category as torture and murder because of the ethnic identity of the victim. Well, it remains to be seen. I mean, my sense is that you can't last that long, especially when you draw support from the West, and that includes the United States. And this gets back to where I was going before. One of the other major problems that they face is their situation, Israel's situation, in the United States. the fact is that support for Israel is evaporating. And in fact, one might say that's not an accurate description of what's happening. It's not so much that support is evaporating. It's the criticism of Israel is growing by leaps and bounds, both inside the Republican Party and inside

the Democratic Party. I mean, the cat is out of the bag as to what Israel is all about at this point in time. We've witnessed Israel engaged in waging a genocide for the past two years. Everybody has seen it with their eyes on their screen. And this has caused enormous damage to Israel's reputation. And it's put the lobby, the Israel lobby in this country, in a really difficult situation, if not impossible situation, because the lobbying now has to defend genocide. It has to defend the behavior of Israel. It has to go on the attack against anybody who criticizes Israel. And given that the number of people who criticize Israel is increasing, the number of attacks on Americans is increasing. And this is not going to work to Israel's

advantage over the long term. Here's an example of truth coming out of the mouths of children over this. This confrontation occurred yesterday at Auburn University. A young man asks a question of Eric Trump, listen to the question, and listen to, well, we can decide if it's an answer. Chris, cut number eight. I'd like to ask about your father's relationship with Israel. He's taken over $230 million from pro-Israel groups. During the summer against Iran, even though he advised against it, Israel still attacked Iran. Israel has not been a great ally to the U.S. all the way since 1960 when they bombed the USS Liberty.

Israel is a nation where Christians are constantly under attack in both Gaza and the West Bank. We talk about America first and defending Christians, but how can we do this if we align ourselves with a nation that does not do that itself? There's no question. My father said frustration. In fact, I think he said frustration throughout the whole conflict with both sides. at the same time, make no mistake. You have a nation that will develop a nuclear weapon, and you have a nation that will use that nuclear weapon against the Western way of life. There's no question about it.

In response to the nukes from Iran, Israel has nuclear weapons, and is not a part of the IEA, unlike Iran. And it's just sad to see because I've never seen the American president get treated the way he does by the Israeli government. this is a president of peace and sometimes you have to be slightly unconventional with how you get there you use what you have that is certainly what he's been able to do peace around the world sounds pretty good to me and that's what this president is bringing they couldn't answer the young man's questions at all no you can't defend Israel let me just tell you a quick story when Steve Walt and I did the Israel lobby article and then we did book what we figured out pretty quickly was

that the lobby goes to enormous lengths to shut down discourse, simply because if you have an open debate, you cannot defend Israel. Israel is indefensible. Its behavior is indefensible. And that is certainly true now with the genocide. So once you go to a situation where individuals like that college student can ask tough questions, Trump's son is going to have no answer. There is no answer.

How do you defend genocide? How do you defend the fact that President Trump is not an America first president? He's an Israel first president. This is, you know, an open and shut case. You cannot defend Israel. You know, it gets worse, Professor. Here's another young man, an employee of the Heritage Foundation. whose CEO is being excoriated because he refused to condemn Tucker Carlson,

who of course has had a major rift with the Zionist lobby in America. And the young man is saying, I'm Christian or I'm Catholic. They want me to go to a Shabbat dinner and I'm not going to go. This is the level to which the lobby in America will try to change people's minds. Chris, number 14. I just want to say I'm grateful for all of our colleagues who are speaking up today. And especially for our colleagues on the National Task Force to combat anti-Semitism, I'm especially grateful for their work.

I also have a question about it, given some of the leaks that occurred yesterday. Right now, the National Task Force to combat anti-Semitism is demanding the Heritage host Shabbat dinners with Heritage interns and junior staffs. The faith of many Christians here at Heritage, myself included, would prevent us from attending these dinners and good conscience. As you know, for many Christians, Friday is a special day of prayer and abstinence to commemorate the death of Christ. I assume that no staff will be required to attend the Shabbat dinners, but my concern is that these dinners will be to serve as a sort of informal litmus test. And I'm worried that it will hurt many Christians who are not anti-Semitic, but don't feel comfortable attending a Shabbat dinner.

I would like to know how you guys would respond to that concern and how we can be sure that the dinners won't be used that way when the people. people requesting them or someone has already been linking them to the media. They're losing this PR war. Netanyahu's right about that, although he's talking about that one incident. But the lengths through which they are willing to go to get this kid is obviously Christian, and they're trying to get his employer to force him to attend a Shabbat dinner. I don't know what happens at a Shabbat dinner, but you can't force a person in America. to attend a religious gathering, they doesn't want to attend.

There's only one word to describe this. Outrageous. It's just outrageous. The idea that you're going to even have Shabbat dinners at the Heritage Foundation, all for the purposes of generating support for Israel and making sure that you minimize the number of people inside the institution who are critical of Israel is not what this country is all about. And furthermore, this is going to end up fueling anti-Semitism. I just don't understand why people in the lobby don't understand that this is counterproductive. Well, it is counterproductive. I mean, look at what happened here in New York City yesterday.

New York City has the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel. And this young Muslim man with no executive experience in government, just one term in the state legislature, I think he's 33 or 34 years old, won more than 50% of the vote and is now the mayor elect, he won 75% of the vote of everybody under the age of 30. That has to be, that is very telling. Yeah, I mean, the lobby is in deep trouble. They're desperate, and what you saw regarding the Shabbat dinner at Heritage is just an example of this. There was a big piece in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper this morning, about the huge amounts of money that the Israeli government is going to funnel into the United States. This is not the lobby now, right? This is like a double-barrel shotgun to get money from the lobby itself, and the lobby itself, of course, is going to go to great lengths.

influence opinion on Israel, but the Israeli government is weighing in in a major way for the first time. And the reason is that the lobby and Israel are desperate. And when you get desperate, you start doing outrageous things like this. Look, the truth is, as Steve Rosen, who long ago was a prominent figure in APEC once said, lobbies, and this includes APEC, of course, are most effective when they were behind closed doors. A lobby that has to work out in the open, and this applies to any lobby, is ultimately going to get itself in trouble. And you just want to do things quietly, as quietly as possible. But it's now impossible for the Israel lobby and for Israel itself to operate quietly. And as I like to say, they are now forced to engage in

smash-mouth politics. And smash-mouth politics is not going to work. The fact is the cat is out of the bag now. Everybody knows what Israel is up to. And engaging in smash-mouth politics is not going to silence people, and more and more people are going to talk about this. And more and more people are going to become critical of Israel, because people your age and my age who are more supportive of Israel than those people under 30 years old are going to die. And those people who are under 30 years old are going to replace us. And then you have more younger people. And you also just want to look at the demographics of this country, right? We let in lots of immigrants. And given the fact that most Americans are not making many babies, the number of immigrants

who are going to come into this country over time is going to be very great. President Trump and others on the right can deny this and say, we're going to prevent immigration into the United States. We're not going to prevent immigration. We're going to have large-scale immigration in the future. And I believe that most of those people who will come into the United States would be very critical of Israel. So the situation for Israel and for the lobby only gets worse with time. Shortly before he was murdered, Charlie Kirk spoke in a very articulate and prescient way about now mayor-elect Mamdani and the attitude of youth towards the establishment. Chris, number 13. The rise of Mamdani should be a, it's a coming attraction of what is

coming next. Who's Mamdani? Zoran Mamdani, the, the Muslim communist that is running for mayor in New York City. Not everyone, but most people are missing the point of really what this is. this is yet another distress signal by young people to say, hey, if you're not going to fix our life economically, we're going to get very radical politically. Now, let's take a step back. President Trump won the youth vote in many states across the country in many battleground states. One of the reasons he was able to win younger voters and younger men, especially in big numbers, is that they were trying to get their leader's attention.

They said, hey, this guy, Donald Trump, he is pledging to go fix our economic anxiety. he is loud. He is going to get your attention. Donald Trump was a distress signal by a lot of young people, especially young men, that were stuck in a credit-centric renter economy. And again, this is what is the rise of Mom Dani. It's just another iteration of this only from the left. I got to tell you, I know a lot of small government libertarians that voted for him, they don't agree with him on anything except Israel. and they want to shake up the establishment. Yeah, I agree with Charlie Kirk's analysis, by the way. And you notice that Charlie Kirk put hardly any emphasis on Israel. It was mainly economic issues. And I think he's on the money.

And by the way, a number of people have pointed out. I was just in New York yesterday that Mamdani himself did not emphasize the Israel-Palestine issue. Correct. It was his opponents that did, not him. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. And see, again, that just shows you the extent to which the lobby lives in fear of an open discourse. One could argue that they would have been smarter just to downplay Mamdani's criticism of Israel and of Netanyahu. But no, instead, they behaved like the attack dogs they are, and they went after him, and they made this a really big issue.

And I think it boomeranged on the lobby. It did not. work to their advantage. But again, I think Mamdami's attraction was in large part all about economics and the fact that there are a lot of people under the age of 30, especially white males, as he said, who are very, very angry. Is Israel still planning to attack or invade Iran? Yeah, this gets back to the third prong of my argument. We talked about inside Israel, then we talked about inside the United States. And then there's the whole subject, subject of the external environment. You know, the question you want to ask yourself is why is Israel thinking about attacking Iran after they told us that they achieved this spectacular victory

against Iran in June? According to my higher math, from June to July to August, September, October, November, that was five months ago, right? Five months ago, they scored this stunning victory against Iran. So they say. And here they are talking about going back after Iran. And by the way, they're bombing away in Lebanon today. Hasbalah has made it clear they're not going to disarm. They made it clear they are re-arming. So the Israelis are in a quagmire in Lebanon.

They're at a quagmire in Syria. They've got the Palestinian problem that they haven't solved. And then there's the whole issue of Iran. and I think that they do not have a war-winning strategy against Iran. When you listen to them talk and their acolytes here in the United States, it's like, what we have to do is turn the IDF loose and will solve this problem once for all. That's what they said before June 13th, and they didn't solve the problem then, and they're not going to solve the problem now.

And in fact, they better be very careful picking a fight with Iran because Iran has a huge inventory of ballistic missiles. It learned a lot from the June war. And I think the Iranians will make the Israelis pay a severe price if they attack Iran, which is not to say that the Iranians themselves won't pay a severe price. They will, but so were the Israelis. And they're not going to achieve their end of eliminating Iran's nuclear enrichment capability forever, number one. And number two, they're not going to end up.

turning Iran into another Syria. Is the United States effectively policing the Israeli compliance or noncompliance with the Whitkoff-Kushner-Trump, so-called Gaza ceasefire agreement? I think that we are doing our best to make the Trump plan, the 20-point plan, work. I don't think it can be made to work. I hope that I'm wrong. But nevertheless, I think that the Trump administration wants it to work. I do not think Trump wants to see the genocide start again because the pressure on him to shut it down will become great once again.

And the second thing is that Trump portrays himself as a great peacemaker and he wants a Nobel Prize. And he's failed in Ukraine. So the other big enchilada here is the Gaza genocide. So I think he very much wants to shut this one down. And I think that he and his advisors will go to some ways to try to make the 20-point plan work. The Israelis, of course, will do everything they can to undermine Trump. And the question is, will Trump stand up to them? Here's the peacemaker yesterday.

Tell me if he sounds like a peacemaker here. Cut number one, Chris. If the Nigerian government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the USA will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria. We're going to do things to Nigeria that Nigeria is not going to be happy about and may very well go into that now disgrace country, guns are blazing to completely wipe out the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible, horrible atrocities. I'm hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for

possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our cherished Christians. These are cherished people. These are great people. Leave them alone. Warning, the Nigerian government better move fast before it's too late. If they don't, there's going to be held to pay. And a president saying we're coming in with guns of blazing. Do the American public, even though where Nigeria is, does Nigeria pose the slightest threat to American national security? This is almost ridiculous. No, you're wrong.

It's not almost ridiculous. It is ridiculous. I mean, you know, this is like a comedy skit, isn't it? It is. The guns of blazing is like a comedy skid. And are we preparing to invade Venezuela also? I mean, what's happening inside of Nigeria is terrible. And it is happening not only to Christians, by the way, it's happening to Muslims.

These are radical Muslims who are attacking Christians and are attacking other Muslims as well. It's a very complicated process. And the question you have to ask yourself is, number one, is it in our national interest to shut this problem down? And number two, if it is, can we shut it down? And the answer clearly to the second one is no. This is why Trump should not be saying these things. The idea that we can go into Nigeria, you realize that Nigeria is an enormous piece of real estate, number one. Number two, it has the largest population of any country and all of Africa. Just think about that. And third, we all know that

when you get these sort of civil conflicts, like the one that's taking place in Nigeria, you don't shut them down. You don't shut these kind of conflicts down with military force alone. You have to have some sort of political solution. And we don't have the military forces to even come close to shutting this down to get started. And we have no political solution. Nobody was even thinking about Nigeria a week ago. And all of a sudden, he's boasting that we're going to go in there and shut this one down and really treat the Nigerians harshly if they don't help us. I wonder if he spoke to his secretary of state or a secretary of defense slash war before he made that outlandish comment, which was out of Halloween party, by the

way but that's where he was in his in his residence in Palm Beach Florida just crazy I think he probably didn't talk to them because they're too busy scheming for an invasion or an attack on Venezuela another one of the great threats to the United States just hard to believe yeah well here's um there's another clip I want want to play for you, which is an example of the lobby dispatching one of its acolytes to attack Americans who are critical of the Netanyahu regime. This particular attack is aimed at your and my mutual friend and colleague, Tucker Carlson, but I hope you can stomach all of this. Chris, cut number five. Tucker Carlson has turned himself into a conspiracist and a crank and a

pathological liar. Tucker excuses Vladimir Putin's murderous and barbarous reign. He has even become one of his most ardent defenders. Tucker Carlson has attacked President Trump as a cover-up artist for sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein on behalf of Israel and Mossad, because of course Tucker's a coward. Tucker Carlson has stated that President Trump has undermined America First and MAGA by attacking Iran, giving into neo-con ghouls like Mark Levin. Tucker Carlson acts as an ideological launderer for other people's evils. He's a master of gaslighting. Tucker Carlson will have on a Hitler-friendly pseudo-historian to minimize the Holocaust and blame Winston Churchill for World War II, and he will call him America's best and most honest historian. I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War.

Tucker Carlson will have on over and over, a pro-Chinese propagandist who used global warming to promote global socialism, all in order to criticize Israel and hug China. Israel has run American foreign policy in the Middle East for 30 years. That's how it works. this is actually the truth if we drop our angst on big bad Russia, big bad China, which is also not going to invade the United States. They're not a threat to the United States, honestly, and Iran is not a threat. Tucker Carlson, of course, brings on pro Hamas voices, episode after episode after episode. The instances are almost limitless. America needs a robust conservative organization based on principle and ideas, not personal loyalty to bad actors like

Huckin Carlson. Ben was very effective at all, but this is what the lobby is dispatching. Yeah, yeah. He and Mark Levin, some of those tapes of Levin. Oh, boy. We can play them for you if you want. They're nauseating. No,

but again, it shows you the level of desperation here. And by the way, some people have sent me some tweets involving Ben Shapiro. And when you look at the comments, virtually all the comments are against him. So he's not effective. I don't think that he and Mark Levin and I know them both from my years at Fox are very effective PR people, even for the Zionist cause and the split in Maga, particularly among the young people. These guys are losing that battle. Israel is hemorrhaging support in the United States, in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and in Dallas. I think there's no question about that.

And it's hemorrhaging support mainly on the right now, broadly defined, and it already had hemorrhage support on the left. The Democratic Party had been lost quite a long time ago. Now they're losing the Republican Party. You want to think about how Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are going to behave over the next three-plus years. Remember, Trump has three plus more years in the White House. J.D. Vance not only has three plus more years as vice president, but he wants to be president. And they are operating in an environment that has changed in fundamental ways with regard to Israel.

This was the problem that we're now talking about on the show was not a problem for Donald Trump, really, three, four, five months ago. It has come up suddenly. And what you're saying, and I think is correct, is the problem is only going to get worse with time. It's not going to be Donald Trump Jr. or whoever his son, was it his son Eric, who was asked that question. It was his son Eric, yes. It'll be Donald Trump himself. We've already seen J.D. Vance asked tough questions in public regarding Israel. This is not going to stop. And Trump has to be aware of his base. You remember that Trump is got the midterms staring him in the face, and this issue is going to be there front and center. So the question is, how does he

deal with it? How does Vance deal with it? And it's going to be very interesting to see, but I think they're going to have to pull their punches on Israel. I do not think they're going to be able to argue that they support Israel no matter what, as has been the case in the past. Here's the kind of announcements they make that just made this announcement about two or three minutes ago, the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, launches initiative to track and monitor Mamdani administration policies and appointments protect Jewish New Yorkers. Does this advance the popularity of the Netanyahu regime amongst Americans, even Jewish Americans? No, not at all. And it's going to boomerang on the, or backfire on the lobby. This is, this is remarkably foolish. And further

the great danger here is that it's going to fuel anti-Semitism. It's very clear that there is real anti-Semitism in the United States as there is in any society. And you don't want to stir that up. And this kind of behavior on the part of the ADL is designed to do that. It just makes no sense to me. But you see, the problem is, Judge, they have no choice. but to play smash-mouth politics, if you really think about it. Because they can't win an argument. They don't have the facts. Exactly right. Facts and logic is not on their side. I told you, that's what Steve and I figured out. That's why they went to such enormous lace to shut us down. We were at first

quite naive, and we said, well, why don't we have a debate, right? Let's just talk about this. You hear our side. We'll hear your side. We'll go back and forth. And let's do it before a big audience, that sent shivers up their spine. The last thing they want to do is have Steve Walt and John Meersheimer debate them out in an open forum, because it is for us like shooting fish in a barrel. Wow. Professor Meersheimer, thank you very much, my dear friend. I know you've been traveling. I appreciate your time this afternoon. We'll look forward to seeing you next week. I look forward to seeing you as well, and have a good week. Thank you. You as well. And coming up at 4 o'clock at the end of our long day to wrap all of this up, who else? Max Blumenthal, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.

Thank you. Thank you.