Jeffrey Sachs on Netanyahu’s Struggle to Keep Control of the World’s Most Bloodthirsty Ethnostate
1h 37m 6s
The transcript critiques the Israeli political system’s deep-rooted anti-Arab racism and denial of democratic rights to Arab citizens, despite their 20% population share and high voter turnout. It highlights how Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu and Fox News figure Mark Levin, use inflammatory rhetoric to justify ethnic exclusion and claim election fraud, undermining democratic principles. The narrative emphasizes that Israel’s governance is not a true democracy, as nearly half its population in occupied territories cannot vote or live freely. Meanwhile, American public opinion, especially among younger generations, is increasingly critical of U.S. support for Israel’s policies, which involve ethnic cleansing, settler violence, and military aggression. The piece argues that the current political climate in Israel—marked by systemic racism and violence—is a moral and democratic failure, and that a shift toward inclusive governance could bring real change. This shift is gaining momentum in the U.S., where support for Israel is being challenged by growing awareness of its human rights violations. The call is for a reevaluation of U.S. foreign policy, urging leaders to prioritize American values of equality and justice over loyalty to an ethno-nationalist regime. The discussion also touches on broader societal issues, like pet healthcare and political transparency, but the central theme remains the erosion of democratic norms in Israel and the need for accountability from both Israeli leaders and American allies.
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Well, it's election season.
And by the way, not just here in the United States, where in six days we've got the fabled midterm elections.
But also internationally, there are important elections around the world this month.
And if you're tuned in to the news, if you're a good citizen, you're paying attention to the rest of the world, you already knew that.
You may have been following the elections.
In, I don't know, Bosnia, or Bulgaria, or the Czech Republic, or Canada, which had elections this month.
This month.
And the elections in Canada really matter, of course, because Canada is our neighbor.
We share the longest international border in the world with Canada.
5,500 miles.
It's our second largest trading partner after Mexico, our other neighbor.
We do twice as much trade with Canada as we do with China.
Did you know that?
Probably not.
Did you know?
They had elections this month?
Probably not.
Because while the Canadian-U.S. relationship is critical to the United States, by definition,
almost nobody in the United States pays attention to it, very much including our leaders and the media class that do their bidding.
So there's, like, no coverage of Canada whatsoever.
So if there was one foreign election you likely heard about this month, in fact, this week,
it was a parliamentary election in Israel, which is very far away.
Farther from here than, well, Bosnia.
Certainly farther than Canada.
And much smaller.
It's a country of fewer than 10 million people with whom we do very little trade, really.
We give them a lot of stuff, but there's not really a meaningful trade relationship there.
If all trade ended with Israel tomorrow, it would be a net benefit to American GDP.
So it's not like it's a critical relationship objectively.
If you were studying statecraft and the balance of power internationally,
Israel would. really probably be at the end of the semester because it doesn't really matter.
But it matters a great deal to the American media for whatever reason.
And so the coverage of the Israeli election in the U.S. this week was quite intense.
And in some of that coverage, you'll notice really an emotional intensity,
an investment that goes beyond mere journalism
and suggests that the people following the Israeli election are deeply vested in the results.
Maybe in an almost unhealthy way.
Watch Fox News. host Mark Levin talk about the Israeli elections.
And one of the most revealing clips we've seen in quite some time.
This is Mark Levin from yesterday.
To my fellow patriots in Israel, to the right wing, to Likud and the other coalition parties.
If you do not get out and vote right now, you're going to lose your country.
You're going to lose your country to leftists, to self-promoters, to Arabs who hate your country.
Want a Palestinian?
Want a Palestinian?
Want a Palestinian state?
Want to undermine your defense?
What a complete and utter disaster.
You stand between all of that, that tyranny, and the great nation of Israel.
So there are a couple things to notice.
One, here you have a Fox News host weighing in in great and passionate detail
on an election in a foreign country as a partisan.
To the people of Israel, to my fellow patriots in Israel, he says.
So leaving aside the red-hot question of,
like, dual loyalty, what is that?
Have you ever been so exercised about somebody else's election?
We hope not.
And if you ever find yourself getting that exercised about somebody else's election,
you probably should move there and vote in it and stay there.
Because that's the country you care about most.
That's clearly the country that Mark Levin cares about most.
But the second thing that you notice was a word that he used that kind of invalidates
a lot of the arguments he's been making for the past 30 years,
he and the rest of the Israeli lobby in the United States.
And the word he used was Arabs.
You have to vote, he told his fellow patriots in Israel,
because if you don't, the Arabs will take over and destroy your country.
Now, which Arabs is he talking about?
The Arabs that live in the surrounding countries around Israel
that threaten its existence?
The Arabs that cause the rest of us to have to affirm our undying support
for Israel's right to exist because it's a tiny nation surrounded by enemies,
we have been told, for 60 years?
No.
He's not talking about Hamas.
He's talking about Arabs, Arabs who live within Israel and who are Israeli citizens.
He's talking about the people who've been there longer than any of Mark Levin's friends by far.
In fact, since the beginning of recorded history,
he's talking about the indigenous population of the country of Israel.
And not just the indigenous population of Israel, not greater Israel.
We're not talking about the poor, benighted people in Gaza or the West Bank.
Or even East Jerusalem.
We're talking about, like, just normal Israeli citizens
who we have been told for lo these many decades are participants in Israel's democracy.
Because in case you haven't heard, Israel is not simply a democracy,
but the only democracy in the Middle East.
And that's why the United States has a moral obligation to stand with Israel.
And that's why our politicians sign its bombs,
which we provide and they use against the Arabs outside their borders,
who are threatening Israel's democracy.
Once again, the only democracy in the Middle East.
So let's just restate what democracy is, because it might be helpful as a reference point here.
Democracy is a system of government in which the citizens of the country own the country,
and the government exists only to do what they want,
to preserve their rights and to respond to their concerns.
They own the country by virtue of their citizenship,
not by virtue of their race,
not by virtue of their religion or who their parents were,
but by virtue of their status as citizens of that country.
And that, we are told, is what makes Israel so different
from the terrifying police states on its borders,
like Jordan and Lebanon.
Okay.
Now that's, of course, the only,
that's the kind of lie you could only tell to people
who've never been to any of those countries
and will believe anything, right?
Which is most people,
because anyone who's been to any of those countries knows it's an absurd lie.
It's absurd.
Which becomes immediately evident the second you go there and see it.
No, it's not a police state, actually, in Jordan.
It's really nice.
Nicer than most parts of the United States, actually.
But leaving that aside,
the question of citizenship in Israel,
which is a status that applies equally to all people in Israel
who live in Israel,
who are permanent residents of Israel,
citizenship,
a recognizably Western concept,
the fact that Israel has a system based on citizenship
is, again,
the pretext for Americans' support for Israel.
We support Israel because they're just like us.
They're an outpost of Western civilization in the Near East.
They're not some, like, creepy genocidal ethnostate
that kills people for having the wrong DNA.
No, that's like, that's what the Nazis did.
And we're all officially against that, and especially Israel,
because Israel was created in response to what the Nazis did.
So they're exhibit A in, like, how you run a country,
because they learned lessons from what the Nazis did,
which to restate, in case you missed it,
you missed that history lesson,
was isolate first,
attack second,
try to expel third,
and finally murder people within its borders,
beginning in Germany,
because they had the wrong DNA,
because they were the wrong race or ethnicity,
because, well, in that case, they were Jews.
So that is always and everywhere wrong.
I mean, if there's one lesson of the Second World War,
it's that, that's just wrong.
It doesn't matter who commits it.
It's an absolute standard.
It is always wrong at every time in history.
There really is one lesson of the entire 20th century
of our modern society.
It's all based on that idea.
And again, the defense of Israel has been based on the claim
that Israel is upholding that universal standard
uniquely in the Middle East.
None of the other countries are, but Israel is.
It's a democracy.
So it's a little weird to hear one of Israel's
most faithful cheerleaders in the United States just kind of casually,
admit that's not true.
That the problem with the most recent Israeli elections,
and again, this was yesterday as votes were still being cast,
there was Mark Levin encouraging more non-Arabs to cast them.
Right in the middle of that,
Mark Levin just kind of casually admits,
oh, wait, Arabs might have an effect
on the outcome of the election.
Not Hamas, Israeli Arab citizens.
In other words, our democracy might function as democracies are in
intended to function and that would be a disaster
because it might undercut the project,
which is not a democratic project.
The project is building an ethnostate based on your DNA,
not on your beliefs, on your DNA.
Because of course it was based on your beliefs.
There would be a religious test to move to Israel,
but there's not.
There's in effect a genetic test.
You have to have a mother who's connected to the project.
So it's by your blood.
So that's an ethnostate.
Now, you could argue, you know,
nations have a right to construct ethnostates if they want,
It's not the only ethno-state in history.
That's for certain.
In fact, through history, most states have been ethno-states.
In fact, until recently, almost all states have been ethno-states.
So you could argue that that's a term that's been maligned in the wake of the Second World War.
But you can't argue that the existence of an ethno-state is acceptable to the leaders of Western countries because they spend the rest of their day, when they're not defending this ethno-state in the Middle East, attacking the idea of an ethno-state and denying their citizens the right to create ethno-states.
Like, that's the whole project.
So it's a little bit weird.
And here you have Mark Levin just sort of casually admitting that, no, it's not really democracy.
Because when it functions as intended, we have to stop it.
We can't let the Arabs take control.
The people who live here, who have been here longer than we have, they can't have control of the country.
Ooh.
So then you think, well, okay, that's Mark Levin.
Like, what does he know?
He's got a weekend show on Fox.
Like, he's not really an arbiter of anything important.
He's just like a blowhard, an increasingly unhappy-looking blowhard shooting videos of himself as he walks down the, shuffles down the sidewalk.
So maybe, like, within Israel, at the level of, like, the people who run it, people are more diplomatic and, you know, aren't saying things like that out loud.
Because when you say things like that out loud, you kind of give away your future plans, which is to commit pogroms, of course.
Whenever you have a leader of a country identifying a group as evil based on its blood,
you can be certain that if unchecked, that leader will continue down the inevitable path toward killing them, right?
I mean, isn't this, like, the lesson of Der Sturmer?
By the way, the editor of Der Sturmer was executed after the Second World War.
That was, of course, the Nazi-affiliated paper that identified Jews as evil, not just because of what they did, but because of who they were.
No one ever pretended that that guy hurt anybody, but his words alone were considered so vile and so critical to the process
of genocide that he was executed by the Allies, which is to say, you know, by the people who adjudicated those trials,
which included judges from the United States and the Soviet Union.
So we know that language like that is bad.
Like, we know that, and we've been teaching our kids that for, well, 80 years.
So it would be a surprise if within Israel, the political class, whose salaries we effectively pay for here in the United States,
were saying similar or really even more florid.
So let's check in on the still-current prime minister of the state of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu,
who's been on and off the prime minister for 30 years.
And as the votes began to be tallied and the exit polls analyzed today,
it became clear that he had not won a clear victory and that he hadn't, according to most analysis,
because the Arab parties, which represent about 20% of Israel's population, the population of Israeli citizens,
who have a right to vote and participate in the political process, because it's, again, a democracy,
the only democracy in the Middle East, it became clear that they were not voting for Benjamin Netanyahu,
because, I mean, just guessing, maybe they were, I don't know, unimpressed by the genocide to their south in Gaza.
I mean, who knows? Just kind of throwing that out there.
But in any case, they didn't vote for Netanyahu, according to exit polls.
So here's Netanyahu's response, and we're quoting now, and this is publicly available on X.
Quote, the elections in the state of Israel were stolen by Arab parties that support terrorism
and the elimination of the Jewish state through serious criminal offenses of bribery, threats, violence, forgeries,
and the use of prohibited software to mobilize voters.
Let's just stop there.
Prohibited software to mobilize voters?
Hmm.
What kind of software could be prohibited to mobilize voters?
In what democratic system is it ever prohibited to mobilize voters?
To encourage your. To encourage your fellow citizens to express their preference at the polls?
We're not even sure what that means, but the idea itself doesn't sound a lot like democracy at all.
In any case, he went on.
The election has been stolen by the Arabs.
Quote, we demand from the police and the Shin Bet, which is the internal security service, the secret police,
a thorough investigation into the election theft by the Arab parties and the full prosecution of the criminals.
This is a serious blow to Israeli democracy.
And the voting rights of Israeli citizens, the law enforcement agencies must act with an iron fist and in an immediate manner.
In other words, let's have a pogrom because that's what he's calling for.
This is a threat to the voting rights of Israeli citizens.
Well, the people in question, the Arabs, are Israeli citizens, which is why they voted in the first place.
And Netanyahu's complaint is that they didn't vote for him.
And therefore, they are supporters of terrorism.
And therefore, they're voting itself.
It's a crime.
Now, to their credit, there are people, because this is a contested election within Israel,
a few who have pointed out that this is genocidal language.
This is insane.
In fact, the whole idea behind that post is totally incompatible with Western civilization or its understanding of justice.
The idea that an election is invalid just because people whose ancestors I don't like voted in it is not something that we would accept in the United States.
Or that most American citizens have any interest in paying for, though they are against their will.
But that was Benjamin Netanyahu's first response.
The Arabs did it.
And again, not Hamas, not Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad or any of the scary-sounding radical groups.
Radical groups.
None of whom is anywhere near as radical as some of Bibi's own cabinet ministers.
But in any case, those radical Islamic groups, he's not blaming them.
He's blaming his own people.
The people he's supposed to be representing.
And it wasn't just him.
As the day went on, his view of this was bolstered by his son, Yair Netanyahu.
You may have read about it.
In fact, if you go to nightclubs in Miami during the Gaza conflict, you may have run into him because he was there in Miami for much of that conflict.
When basically every secular man in the nation of Israel was drafted to fight that.
And some died.
Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister's son, spent the bulk of his life in Gaza.
He spent the bulk of that time in Miami, again, at nightclubs, et cetera, et cetera.
In any case, he's back in Israel weighing in on today's election.
And here's what he said.
And we're quoting.
The truth must be told, which is always a tell.
The truth is not going to be told.
The election results prove that the majority of Muslim Arabs in Israel identify as Palestinians, justify terrorism against us, want to drive all Jews out of here, aspire to destroy the Jewish state.
And establish an Arab-Islamic-Palestinian state on its ruins.
This is an existential problem, no less than the Iranian nuclear threat.
Israeli law, Section 7A of the Basic Law, the Knesset, is very clear and prohibits parties that support terrorism and negate Israel as a Jewish state from running for the Knesset.
The reason they're in the Knesset is that the High Court of Justice has emptied the law of substance and enabled their candidacy in violation of the law.
In other words,
If you disagree with the ruling coalition, which, as of tonight, is still the Benjamin Netanyahu-Lakud coalition, you can't participate in elections.
This is the Israeli version of democracy.
You're allowed to run against us as long as we substantively agree with you, as long as we're basically on the same page and arguing about the margins.
But if you seek actual representation in our system, if you feel you are being marginalized, if your children, for example, go to. separate and much less well-funded schools, if you're living under state-sponsored segregation, which, of course, Arab-Israeli citizens are and have been since the foundation of the state of Israel, their kids go to separate schools, Jim Crow alert, you may not have heard this from the ADL, which is, of course, ever vigilant that there might be a resurgence in segregation in the United States, but they don't mention that state-sponsored segregation is the rule in Israel.
But it is. You can look it up, if you like.
How many Muslim Arab kids go to publicly funded Jewish-majority schools in Israel? Basically zero.
They go to their own schools.
So, let's say you don't like that system.
Let's say you believe it's separate and unequal, and let's say you have relatives in the occupied territories who may have lived there for, I don't know, a couple thousand years, and your relatives have been slaughtered in the genocide that your government has been committing for the past three years.
And you're dissatisfied with that.
And so you're voting as you thought was your right in a democracy, the only democracy in the Middle East, against government policy.
You are now a terrorist, and according to the Netanyahu family, you shouldn't be allowed to vote.
So what you're watching, actually, is not simply a losing candidate yelping about losing, though you're definitely watching that, and we can debate whether he really will lose in the end.
Don't bet against Benjamin Netanyahu.
He's certainly not a genius.
He's certainly not a genius or a wise leader, but he is crafty and tougher than most people in politics, and he may wind up, six months from now, remaining the prime minister of Israel.
We'll see.
So you're certainly watching that.
You're watching a guy fighting off his back using all available rhetorical weapons, but you're also watching the beginning of a consensus change in Israel.
You are beginning watching a process by which the Israeli political system just says the unspoken out loud, no, Arabs cannot participate.
our system. And so its defenders would no longer be able to false
claim that Israel is a democracy. Of course, it has not been a democracy since 1967,
because at least half the population of the territories controlled by the government of
Israel are Arab, and they can't vote. So you can't have a democracy if almost half of your
population can't vote. That's not a democracy. That's actually like slavery, which is what it
is. In fact, it's worse than chattel slavery in the United States, because chattel slavery in the
United States never had intentional genocide, horrible as it was. And Israel does. But in any
case, they'll no longer be able to say, the only democracy in the Middle East, because it
demonstrably won't be. But given the way public opinion in Israel seems to be changing, evolving,
perhaps devolving in real time, it's possible they just don't care what the West thinks.
thinks of them. Even what voters in the United States think of them. Perhaps even what politicians
in the United States think of them. Now, everything that we've read is real. And it's been out for,
well, in the case of the Levin video, more than 24 hours. And you haven't seen any reaction at all
from the pro-Israel chorus in American politics, which would include the leaders of both parties.
And of course, a couple of them are particularly active, and you know their names. One represents
Texas in the United States Senate. And, of course, a couple of them are particularly active,
and another is the U.S. ambassador to Israel. And there are a whole bunch of them. And, of course,
you know, our richest class is filled with them. Bill Ackerman and his friends. All
serious, long-term supporters, not simply of the state of Israel or the idea of Israel,
but of the Netanyahu government, of Likud. And as Likud becomes explicitly, not simply anti-terror,
anti-Hamas, but anti-Arab, including the Arabs who are citizens of their own country,
because they are Arabs, these people, not one of them, has said a word about it. Not one.
Well, let's actually revise that. One has. And we're just grateful for the candor on display in
this clip. And again, every week we pledge no more Ben Shapiro clips. You don't want to elevate the
guy above his station. You don't want the kind of dark temptation to mock his eyebrows. You know,
all the kind of ancillary potential problems with playing a Ben Shapiro clip. But this is just too
perfect.
And so we're going to break our own rule and do it. So here is Ben Shapiro today with a whole cast
of people who agree with him, all sort of nodding. Oh, yeah, Ben Shapiro. Good point.
Watch their faces as he just says, you know what, we're just going to have to strip
voting rights from Arabs in Israel. Watch this. The extreme Arab party got an enormous number
of seats in this election. And the leadership of that party is openly anti-Israel, wishes to
be the leader of the Arab party. And so he's going to have to sit in the Knesset in the first place.
The Supreme Court of Israel has been a lot of talk about judicial reform. It seems to me that if the
Supreme Court of Israel were worth its salt, if you're going to ban the Qohannes, which is totally
fine and appropriate, if you're going to ban the Qohannes, then banning the Arab party that calls
for this, not all Arab parties, but the party that calls for the destruction of the state of Israel,
that would seem some pretty baseline stuff. The fact they haven't is pretty astonishing.
So he just says it. He just says it. When he says the most radical Arab party, he's talking about
the Arab party.
That democratically in the Israeli system, abiding by the rules of the Israeli system,
no one has actually provided specifics to refute that. They went along with the system the
Israelis set up for them to participate, and they got their voter turnout to about 80 percent,
which is apparently higher than the median turnout in Israel. In other words, they did
what you're supposed to do in a democracy. And because of that, here you have Ben
Shapiro, who poses as like an American, a defender of the American system and a defender of Israel,
because Israel has a version of the American system, participatory democracy,
an enlightened liberal view of the world, both heirs of Western civilization.
Here you have that guy pulling off the mask and just saying, well, no, no, Arabs can't vote.
No, they're terrorists. Really? Have they committed acts of terror? Name them.
Within Israel and the occupied territories right now, what percentage of the verified,
let's just say on tape, acts of terror in the past three years have been committed
by Arabs? Well, some, sure. The majority? Oh, no. 30 percent? Don't think so. Lower. Much,
much lower. And this is not a defense of Hamas, which has certainly committed acts of terror,
for sure.
It's merely an accurate and honest observation about where we are right now in 2026 and have
for the last three years. The acts of terror within Israel, Israel proper, and particularly
within the territories it controls, it administers, it writes the rules. The acts of terror within
that area, Palestine, are overwhelmingly committed by Israelis, by IDF soldiers, by Shin Bet operatives
and by settlers. Settlers would be mostly young people, the so-called hilltop youth,
disproportionately American, a lot of them from Long Island, who have moved at the encouragement
of the Israeli government and the huge pools of money set aside, given largely by American donors
and administered within Israel, who have moved to the West Bank, the area that,
for incomprehensible reasons, Mike Huckabee refers to with dead serious as Judea and Samaria,
Really, how many Samaritans are left there? Mike Huckabee, can you tell us what a Samaritan is? No, whatever. But to that region, an area that was formerly part of Jordan, that was taken by Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967, and has never been claimed as Israel. It's just an area that they control. We call it the occupied territories because it's occupied by the Israeli military.
And so it's a kind of gray zone where Israel runs it. They control the utilities. They control everything about it. They close the airport. You can't get in or out without permission from the Israeli authorities.
So it is in effect in Israel, but no one who lives there can vote. If they're Arab, the Jews who can live there can vote. And amazingly, a lot of those Jews who can vote are just recently arrived from, well, the United States.
And some of them are probably peaceful religious people.
Some of them are dangerous lunatics, as dangerous as anybody in ISIS, as committed to violence, as besotted by some sort of millennialist theology, as anybody in the Islamic State.
Truly radical religious extremists.
And so if you know anything about this, if you followed it at all, you know that not only is everything I just said true, it's accelerating.
It is getting more intense and more crazy. In fact, so intense and so crazy that there have been moments in the last year.
Or two, that even the Netanyahu government has felt compelled, because there's a lot of video evidence this is really happening, that the sort of settler Taliban is running around killing people, old people, kids in the occupied territories.
There's so much evidence of it.
At times, Netanyahu government has had to sort of semi-distance itself from what's going on.
And that would include the most valuable asset in the Israeli government, which would be someone whose salary you pay directly.
Not indirectly, like the rest of them.
That would be the U.S. ambassador to Israel, as he calls it, Mike Huckabee from Arkansas.
And even Mike Huckabee has had to say, "Well guys, that's a little over the top."
But of course, that's all cover. They don't mean it.
And it's more over the top than you may realize.
And we're about to show you a video that has not been shown anywhere before.
This is something that happened last week in a West Bank town whose name we're not going to tell you.
And it happened to a family we're not going to identify.
The original plan was to have one family member who shot this video on the show tonight to explain what was happening.
But we got a call from him today saying that he was pulling out because he believes if he were publicly identified,
his family who remain in this town would be killed.
So as we play this, we want you to keep in mind a couple of things.
One, the elderly man who you're about to watch being beaten by masked settlers with sticks, dressed very much,
like ISIS, in black masks.
That man, who was badly injured by this attack, and you'll see why in just a minute,
is an American citizen, as are the majority of people who live in this town in the West Bank.
They are mostly Muslim, Arabs, not all.
But they're American citizens, and this man is an American citizen.
He's an American.
And the people beating him may or may not have been Americans, perhaps they're dual citizens,
we don't know.
But as they beat him, they were acting in their capacity as Israeli citizens,
with the full impunity from punishment that that implies in the occupied territories.
Now again, this has never been shown, and we had hoped to have it fleshed out a little bit
by a person who shot it.
But in the end, he was too afraid that his family would be killed if he were identified.
So with that, here's the video.
There is no sound, but you can watch carefully what is happening.
There they are.
Three men beating an elderly man on the ground.
We blurred that out, because the family is so concerned he'll be identified.
And he runs away.
And as he does, more mass settlers arrive.
And they throw rocks at the house, and then they decide to pour gasoline
on the family car and ignite it. At this point, there seem to be six of them, of these Israeli
Taliban. Oh, and there they go. There's seven of them, and they light his car on fire and run away.
Now, you can tell from the backyard there that this is not a slum. Not that it matters, of course.
These are human beings. But just in point of fact, they're not torching a car and beating a
homeowner in some shanty town that was erected illegally on Israeli land. No, they're torching
the car and beating the patriarch of a family who has been there since the beginning of time
and has been successful and who are law-abiding, productive members of society. Again, it doesn't
matter morally whether they're poor or rich, but just to be totally clear here, they're beating up
an American homeowner in what looks like a suburban backyard.
In the United States, except it happens to be in the occupied territories in the West Bank.
And they beat this man almost to death. And what happened next? Keep in mind, he's an American.
Well, what do you think the first thing he did was? Well, he called the American embassy.
He called Mike Huckabee's office. And maybe he spoke to Mark Levin's stepson, who runs that office.
Still, even after he was caught trying to hide,
attacks on Americans from the White House, even as he was caught soliciting money from people in
Israel for his wedding, he still has the job for some reason. Because when criticized in a lengthy
and exhaustive New York Times piece, his stepfather just screamed anti-Semitism until he kept his job.
Anti-Semitism. Okay. All right now. What's actually not anti-Semitic to defend the life of an American
when he's beaten by religious extremists in a foreign country? But so distorted has this
administration become, so distorted has every administration been for the last 60 years,
that there is no, it's no longer obvious to them that their first obligation is to Americans
and to the United States. And that's why Mike Huckabee was allowed to host secretly until he
was caught. The most damaging spy in our lifetimes, Jonathan Pollard.
Pollard, who stole secrets from the U.S. military, gave them to the Israeli government,
which passed them to the Soviet Union. That's all true. And that guy meets secretly with the
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program. And our political class has pledged allegiance to this country, which, you know,
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because they're Arab. That's all happening right now, and it's not an exaggeration.
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and murderous, and it's all being done with your money in your name.
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wrong. And our entire political class is pretending it's not happening.
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again. But it's just amazing that it's gone on for so long. It's amazing.
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Have you ever heard of the Pelosi stock tracker? Well, here's the stock trading app behind it.
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So we thought it'd just be a perfect time, considering the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu
may finally be coming to an end after 30 incredibly ugly and bloody years. Or not.
It'd be worth checking in with one of the true experts on the subject, someone who has been
traveling in and out of Israel for more than 50 years, who has family there, who began with a very
sympathetic understanding of Israel, like most Americans, by the way, in the wake of the six-day
war. And so we thought it'd just be a perfect time, considering the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu
war, Israel was probably the most popular country in the United States. Americans didn't always
dislike Israel. They learned to dislike Israel the hard way. In any case, Jeffrey Sachs is,
it is fair to say, an even-handed and deeply knowledgeable observer of what is happening
in Israel. And so just a moment ago, we talked to him about what this election means. Here's
the conversation. Jeffrey Sachs, thank you so much for doing this. Of course. Anytime, Tucker.
Thank you. So we're right in the middle of trying to figure out what the Israeli
election results mean. They're not certified, of course, yet.
Where do you where do you think Israel stands as of right now?
Well, what happened is that the the Israeli Jewish vote divided roughly equally.
Maybe Netanyahu's group got a few more seats, a little bit higher percentage.
But Netanyahu lost his governing majority.
And the big news, really, although it's it's being pushed away in some way, is that the Arab vote turned out massively and won about 16 or 17 percent of the seats in the in the parliament in the Knesset.
And they could be the determining factor, actually, if if common sense prevails to get Netanyahu out and to.
At least get a different group in Netanyahu, who is one of the great disasters of modern history for Israel and for the whole world and for the United States.
And getting him out would be a profoundly beneficial thing for for all concerned.
So I think that the remarkable fact actually is that the Arabs, who constitute about 20 percent.
Of Israel's population had a turnout that is something like 80 percent astounding up from an estimated 55 percent in the 2022 parliamentary election.
They got a lot of seats.
They could determine the new government if extreme anti-Arab racism doesn't predominate in Israel, which it certainly could.
If some people are reasonable, decent, not vulgarly racist in the Netanyahu opposition, then there will be a new government with Netanyahu gone and the possibility of something better and something much better.
Tucker, of course, for the United States, because Netanyahu, you know, seems to.
Work his spell on Donald Trump, who has betrayed our country and betrayed his base and betrayed his promises about putting America first, because he put Israel first during these first two years of this administration.
And it's been dreadful.
And maybe with Netanyahu gone, maybe America could actually regain a little bit of our own sovereignty.
This this would be my hope.
So a couple of things, just to be clear on what you're saying, you're saying that Netanyahu could lose power if his opponents were willing to form a coalition with the Arab parties.
But it's possible that they may be under so much internal pressure that they don't form a coalition with the Arab parties and Netanyahu stays.
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah. So there are two ways that things could happen.
The way you mentioned is one of the two, not the most likely.
But the other way in a parliamentary system is that the opposition group led by a general Eisencott could govern as a minority share of the parliament, but what's called with the support of the Arabs.
In other words, when the budget comes up, the Arab bloc votes with the government to adopt the budget and to adopt creation.
That's a crucial legislation, but it's not part of the government.
So it's not a coalition.
Now, OK, if this were a normal society, which Israel is not, Israel is a deranged society, I'm very sad to say.
But if this were a normal society, the Arab parties and this opposition group would unite and there'd be a clear majority, a quite decisive majority.
And Netanyahu would rule.
Netanyahu would go off to jail or to wherever he would go.
And it would be simple.
But the leaders of the Jewish side of the anti-Netanyahu bloc vowed not to cooperate with the Arabs.
This is the perversity of Israel.
This is an extraordinary racism.
This is an extraordinary lack of decency and practical politics.
The Arabs constitute 20 percent of the Israeli population.
And I'm talking about of Israel proper.
If we look at all of the land, that means of Israel proper and of East Jerusalem and of the West Bank and of Gaza, then it's 50-50.
And that's how it really should be.
In fact, it should be 50-50.
But even within the more limited boundaries of those who are called Israeli citizens, because the others don't have any rights, but if those who are called Israeli citizens, that's 20 percent of the population.
And they're supposed to have their rights.
And they just voted.
They just turned out in mass numbers.
And if these opposition figures would say, yeah, OK.
Now we form another coalition.
There'd be the normal bargaining about what the coalition would be.
The Arab parties would be junior members of that coalition, to be sure, just in the sheer vote count, in the sheer count of seats.
But it would be normal that they would be part of the government.
Of course, it's not that way because Israel is a deranged society.
It is vulgarly anti-Arab.
And it is racist anti-Arab.
And it is violently anti-Arab, of course.
So while Netanyahu and his side, including these monsters, Ben-Gavir and Smotrich, are outright murderous, the other side I don't think is outright murderous.
I hope not, and I don't think they are.
But before the election, to prove their truth.
True Zionism.
They declared they would never take support or join in a coalition with the Arab parties.
But here come the Arab parties, and they have won 20 seats or so in the Knesset out of the 120 seats.
They are the balance of power.
Normal politicians would say one of these two options, which is, OK, we could join the government and get some ministries, probably junior ministries, not the other way around.
The essential ministries, I'm sure, not defense, not finance and so forth.
But you could have some ministries, and it would be a normal country.
But Israel, not being a normal country, could also have these politicians say there are good reasons to get Netanyahu out.
He is a betrayer of Israel's security.
This is clear.
He is actually.
Under warrant for his arrest by the International Criminal Court.
His leadership has slaughtered probably around 100,000 people in Gaza.
Every sign suggests that he knew that the attack was coming and either decided to let it happen for some reason for his politics.
Or.
Is so thoroughly delusional and and and incompetent that he didn't put the country on alert.
But whatever it is, the man failed.
So you might think that the opposition, which has vowed not to go into government with him, might say, OK, we'll govern with the support of the Arab parties.
In other words, they won't join the government.
But.
We will negotiate so that they can have more decent lives and not be subject to brutality and attack.
And they will vote for our budget or may make sure that we can effectively govern, in which case Netanyahu would be out immediately.
Whether they do that, it's really a test.
It's a test of the most basic policy.
What takes precedence in Israel, anti Arab racism or the chance for Israel to stabilize itself after the monstrosities that have occurred in recent years and the disasters that have occurred in Israel in recent years.
That's that's the drama that we're facing.
One other way that Netanyahu can go.
Is a rather different way, which is that the so-called Zionist parties, which is the Netanyahu.
side and the opposition side form a coalition with the proviso that Netanyahu
leave and that could happen for example if Netanyahu got his pardon because the
man's a crook on top of everything else so he could be pardoned by the president
he could retire from office and then a number of parties could form a Jewish
majority and just ignore the fact that 20% of the population is Arab and get on
with the Zionist side so that's another possibility in other words there are
many ways that Netanyahu could go he lost his majority the opposition to
Netanyahu is a clear majority although part of it is the Arab parties so there
are a number of ways that that clear expression that of the 10 million people
in Israel 8 million Jews and 2 million Arabs the significant majority want this
man and his murderous gang to leave and they should be able to figure this out
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from Mark Levin the Fox News host and Netanyahu promoter and he was urging
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Israel to vote in a video and in it he said if you don't vote the Arabs are going to take over
and they'll destroy the country and I thought you know for years and I know that that kind of talk
is common in Israel it has not been common in the United States among supporters of Israel
who instead tell you that Israel is worth supporting because it's quote the only democracy
in the Middle East notwithstanding the fact that millions of Arabs are in the territories can't
vote but Israel proper is a democracy not even can't vote can't even live well of course they're
being murdered yes of course but but but so they say no well that's complicated and we're occupying
and whatever but in Israel itself Israel proper as you said we have this big Arab minority and
their citizens and their citizenship is what matters it's a western system where you know
your religion is secondary to your citizenship and it's therefore a democracy I've yeah they
went to the polls they voted but here you have they're not saying that anymore it's like no
they can't have power because they're Arabs well that's not
no it's it's even it's even worse than that Tucker because today with this big turnout and
this success of the Arab parties Netanyahu's saying that this is a fraud that the Arabs
have stolen the election so it's actually just mind-boggling this man of course is a thug and
a liar and will say anything at any time but the line today is not just a
oh my god you know what are we gonna do and the other side might take support from the Arabs but
no this is a fraud they've stolen this country so this is apparently what this Fox newscaster
whatever newscaster is a little bit too glorious for him but whatever he said yes that has become
the new line because the appeal is
to rank racism period that's the appeal and it works to an extent but it does not work to create
a governing majority and that that's the reality right now well it works in the short term but in
over time it becomes something you want to distance yourself from because it's ugly and
shameful and you could say that of a lot of things going on right now including the genocide in Gaza
so it you do sort of wonder yes and I and I would say that uh you know if you're if you're if you're
one thing we should be very proud of in the United States is that as Israel committed this
genocide the American people were uh in revulsion uh about this and now a majority of Americans
actually a significant majority of young people and I'm very proud of the young people being an
older guy uh they're significantly on the side of the Palestinians who are being slaughtered in this
and they see Israel for what it is doing right now which is being a murderous and racist State uh I'm
not saying every person in Israel is obviously not but what I'm saying is that the state has
behaved that way and the politicians that are running for office right now should behave
themselves not in this racist manner and they shouldn't say we will never cooperate with the
Jews and the Arab parties that have won apparently 19 or 20 seats in the Knesset this is the root
actually to their power and to the reform of what has gone terribly wrong in Israel so they could
actually uh show the door to Net Yahoo if they swallow the racism and get on with normal politics
not racist politics so do you think that's possible I mean I think we both agree
it's good if Netanyahu is bounced because he's done indisputably terrible things and that should
never be rewarded but if he is and and he's done terrible things to our country Tucker oh well
that's what I'm mad about right I watched it yeah no absolutely I agree but if he leaves
does it get better does the country get better does America's relationship with Israel change
what do you imagine happens if he loses well I think
being gone uh will uh be at least a break in the clouds or a break in in this horrible storm this
man has been a disaster for 30 years we're in the 30th anniversary since he first came to power as
prime minister he came to power on a platform with his American Zionist allies that Israel and the
Palestinians so that Net Yahoo could have his greater Israel agenda meaning crush the Palestinians
this is not exactly America's interest this is not exactly America's cause we should never have signed
up to such a horrendous thing but of course our presidents did and and Trump said he wasn't going
to and he's doubled down on everything even taking us to a disastrous war in Iran because BB told him
to do so so this is a chance actually to at least put a break to what has been 30 years of American
perpetual Wars costing us trillions of dollars and being the the aiding and abetting genocide
so yes I want him to go it would make a difference but would it make a decisive difference in the
rhetoric and the politics
coming out of Israel obviously not a decisive difference a lot of this opposition is hardline
and absolutely against a Palestinian state but not all of them are like that and anyway maybe
we're going in a completely different direction to a I think even more likely in Israel's almost
compelling it not to two states but to one Democratic
state where Arabs and Jews vote together and you form governments and it's just a different way and
maybe that's even a better way because Israel says we'll never have two states okay so you have one state where Arab
have rights too and they're allowed to stay alive and they're allowed to vote and we have one state
a lot of countries are like that by national states belgium's like that just to take one
example so maybe we're heading in that direction but we need to head in a completely different
direction and you know one of the tragedies of course is what netanyahu has done to the united
states but one of the shocking tragedies is how donald trump jumped full in on all of this
and has brought disaster to our country and his base knows it too and yeah and
trump could not resist in the last few days endorsing netanyahu after everything just proving
come on president of the united states why don't you just stay out of it because
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and insurance plan tucker so i mean let's say nanya who remains prime minister or even if he doesn't
can you imagine two years from now we'll be at the presidential election
any candidate getting up on stage and saying we stand with israel i stand with israel it's our
closest ally any candidate who would say that getting elected uh from either party there's no
chance no way no way from either party this is absolutely a candidate has to explain i'm not going
to do what trump did i'm not going to tell you that and then fake it and pull the rug out from
under you and jump into another middle east war i'm not going to do it the one that is convincing
on that is going to win the presidency i agree with you completely i mean but if what a change
sometimes it's worth pausing and acknowledging how quickly and totally consensuses have changed
so i mean in the last election it was it was unspoken sometimes spoken but just assumed that
every serious candidate for the presidency of the united states would basically uncritically support
israel and that's been that way for a long time a lot of money of course was involved in campaign
contributions and they they uh felt the american people aren't watching so we can basically do this
we need our campaign finance we need our friends we need our business deals there's a lot of
corruption in all of this and so they thought no one was watching but and this is why they were so
desperate about tick tock and all the rest because people were watching
and the american people absolutely did not want to be party to mass slaughter
yeah because we're decent people yeah and that is the basic point they saw what this
is all about now the truth is this has been going on for 30 years and for those of us who
kind of obsess about all of these things and that we follow it hour to hour day to day this
is what the iraq war was all about yes in 2003 it was a war not on mistaken premises about weapons
of mass destruction but on phony premises because and netanyahu came to the united states in the
fall of 2002 and spoke to congress and told him this is going to be the greatest war ever
oh and it's going to spread sunshine and light all over the middle east and it's going to lead
to the overthrow of the iranian regime and every absolute inanity insanity and lie he told
him okay that's 2003 that was a few trillion dollars down the drain and then came 2011.
and there we were for mr netanyahu again nato under obama bombing libya
because we had to overthrow that government and we succeeded in creating a civil war
and unrest that spread across africa and that has been going on for 15 years now
and it's been going on for a long time and it's been going on for a long time and nothing came out of it except chaos and obama and hillary well they decided uh and netanyahu's all there yeah we got to overthrow the syrian government and uh presidential finding operation timber sycamore uh that the cia is now tasked with arming training financing the insurgency to overthrow bashar al-assad another bb-possum
brainchild uh and that one took 15 years killed hundreds of thousands of people cost america a
fortune created disasters that continue to this day flooded europe refugees yeah of course and and
created this mass backlash and europe is you know i'm in europe right now so sad and pathetic that
they have been so terrified of the united states that they can't speak an honest truth so the refugees came
in they couldn't say hey maybe you should stop that war in syria because you're creating a lot
of problems exactly this created a mess all over the world and then of course we now have
the iran war and the american people are furious about it and they're right to be furious about it
this has to be the dumbest most useless senseless war
imaginable. And twice, Trump did the same thing, last year and this year, in the midst of
negotiations that were actually leading to a settlement, which was terrifying our dear friend
Bibi. They went to war to prevent a negotiated settlement and went to war to kill the people
negotiating. And I don't know if Americans fully appreciate this, but on February 28th of this year,
when Trump jumped into this swamp, or let's say he dragged us into this mess,
they killed dozens of Iranian leaders, including the Supreme
leader. Why were they all together? Because they were at the residence of the supreme
leader discussing the next round of diplomacy with the United States that was to start the
following week and the day before the Omani mediator had come out to explain how much
progress was being made and now the negotiators would meet the following week in Vienna. Well,
Netanyahu for 30 years has said don't negotiate at all, crush them, overthrow them, go to war
with them and each war has been a cascade of more disasters than the last. It has made our
government indebted up to here. We're now, as everybody knows, with sky-high interest rates
that will continue to soar, budget out of control and Trump jumped into this,
exactly the opposite of what he promised his own base and what he promised the American people.
So should Netanyahu go? Absolutely please, today, tomorrow, you guys in Israel, figure it out. You
won the election, put aside your racism and actually figure out a way to form a government.
So if you're following the news, there are some ominous signs out there not to scare anyone
watching, but if you're following the news, there are some ominous signs out there not to scare anyone watching, but
for example, the end of October, there was a giant cyber attack that knocked out big parts of the internet. And within days, the British government was telling its citizens to stockpile water and canned food. That's not good. I mean, all the Pentagon has told American military bases to operate independently for 90 days without outside electricity, water or fuel. In other words, they don't trust utilities in this country. So they're worried really, among other things, about the risk of a cyber attack, driving people away.
government's acknowledged that is potentially going to happen. They're preparing for it. Are you preparing for it? That's the real question. The reality is the systems you depend on every day are more fragile than they look. So if the internet goes down, so do most other things in our society, including your bank and your gas station, your grocery store. And that's one of the reasons we started Last Country Supply. We believe that everyone is ultimately responsible for himself and his family, period.
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So I always thought of Israel having visited it a lot and enjoy myself every time. I always thought of it as kind of a European country with mostly Europeans.
Has the attitude in Israel toward religious extremism changed?
It's, as you know, a very complicated story and a complicated history. But Zionism in its original form was a secular movement. It was mainly Russian secular figures, not religious people.
Or Theodor Herzl. He knew nothing about it. He knew nothing about rabbinic Judaism.
And by the way, the rabbis, the rabbis of the late 19th century and early 20th century, and many rabbis until this day, are against the whole idea of Zionism.
They said, you know, Judaism is a religion of ethics with regard to God and not with regard to idolatry of the land.
And there are, of course, we've discussed it also, rabbinic injunctions going back 1,500, 1,800 years.
It's actually called the Three Oaths in the Talmud, which say do not create Zionism again until the Messiah comes for the Jewish people.
And so this was not a religious movement. And in fact, religious Judaism is a religious movement.
Religious Judaism, or what could be called rabbinic Judaism, was basically anti-Zionist for decades in the early decades of the Zionist movement before and after the Balfour Declaration.
When I started going to Israel, my first visit was in 1972, so 54 years ago.
There were religious neighborhoods, of course, and religious communities, but Israel was kind of mostly a secular ideology, and there were divisions about what to do.
I was there five years after the Six-Day War, so-called, the 1967 war, where Israel had captured the territories.
I was there five years after the Six-Day War, so-called, the 2007 war, where Israel had captured the territories of Palestinian areas of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Gaza, and there were debates about what to do, but a large part of the politics said, well, yeah, we have to give these lands back, and maybe they'll be a Palestinian state, or maybe they'll be some other kind of arrangement, but this is a temporary occupation.
I was there five years after the Six-Day War, so-called, the 2007 war, where Israel had captured the territories of Palestinian areas of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Gaza, and there were debates about what to do, but a large part of the politics said, well, yeah, we have to give these lands back, and maybe they'll be some other kind of arrangement, but this is a temporary occupation.
This is the kind of Judaism of this Ben-Gavir and his party is called Jewish Power.
It's astounding and, you know, he celebrated, I think it was a birthday, with a noose on
the cake because he wants to kill Arabs and he wants to torment them and torture them
and expel them basically. He's a monster and he represents what emerged in the 70s and
the 80s and 90s, a violent, radical, profoundly racist, increasingly religious approach. Now
Now this sounds strange to us.
This is not what religion is about at all for me and for you.
It's the opposite of Christ's teachings, that's for sure.
And it's the opposite of Jewish ethical teachings.
But it harks back to a very complicated book in the Bible called the book of Joshua, which
is a tale of repeated genocides by the Israelites conquering the so-called
Promised Land. It's actually in historical terms a political tract
written in the 7th century BC that was a kind of a political tract in the style
of the Mesopotamian glory writing of those centuries where the king said I
killed all my opponents I am the great conqueror and this is exactly in that
style as many scholars have shown probably King Josiah in the seventh
century BC and it boasts of genocides and this text has now been taken on in a
kind of religious zealotry and fervor that you see the Bible tells us you can
commit genocide. And that's so perverse. It's beyond belief and so completely the opposite of
what 2,000 years of rabbinic Judaism is all about. But it's a new kind of, they call it national
Judaism. It's national in the most vulgar sense, which is that the Jews are supreme and the Arabs
need to be thrown out or killed or ruled over as non-citizens. And these are all the options that
are being played out right now. So, Tucker, this is something new. This was not Israel 30 or 40 or
50 years ago. It is something new. And of course, one of the tricks of Netanyahu's predecessor,
Menachem Begin, and then really the calling card of Netanyahu himself, was to
enlist the Christian evangelicals, not on the basis of
certainly not Jesus' teachings, let me put it that way, not on the basis of the Gospels,
not on the Sermon on the Mount, not on the great Prince of Peace and the greatest peacemaker
in history, you could say, who taught about peace, but to enlist a kind of basic, the Jews,
must be there because that's what the Bible says and then we can have the final days or whatever.
And this created a lot of, also, the political base for Netanyahu's extremism in the United States.
So, all of this is to say, religion got hijacked. The Jewish religion got hijacked and Christianity got hijacked actually in the cause of murder, which is extraordinary.
It's exactly the opposite of Christianity and I would say it's exactly the opposite of Judaism. But it got hijacked in a fervor of extreme tyranny.
It grew in the 70s, 80s, 90s. I watched it grow because it was not there in 1972 when it was only showing its face in the 80s when the illegal settlements in the occupied territories started to grow in number.
And then a number of rabbis and one extremist from the United States,
Mayor Kahane, who was the progenitor of Ben-Gavir's extremism, came to the forefront.
And Netanyahu, because he's a, by the way, everyone I know, senior Israelis, say the same thing, that he's simply the most unprincipled,
absolute immoral, self-interested person imaginable, completely manipulative, desperate for power, will do anything.
He opened the door to even more extremism than himself.
And, you know, one of the subtexts of the last few days is supposedly that even President Trump is telling Netanyahu, well, you got to get rid of Ben-Gavir and Smotrich.
And supposedly, you know, that's a part of the part of the negotiations going on right now, because these people are so extreme, so vulgar.
And in the name of religion, that it is beyond what we could ever have imagined.
And it is, just let me add, the ultimate lie of saying that being against what Israel is doing is anti-Semitic.
It's the ultimate, complete lie and untruth.
Because to be against the murderous behavior of the Israeli state.
Is the most important defense of Judaism you can have.
It's not against Judaism, it is the defense of Judaism as a religion of godliness and ethics, not against it.
And to stand by with mass murder, that is a destruction, a manipulation, a hijacking of a religion.
Amen.
And every religious person in our country should understand that.
I mean, every preacher, every minister, every priest should understand mass murder is against religion, period.
Yes.
The opposite of it.
I love that.
So one last question, Jeff.
You mentioned Meir Kahane, and it's who's an American, I think, from New York, murdered in the end in New York.
But it's just another reminder that.
everything that is happening in Israel has been abetted, paid for, populated by supporters of Israel in the United States.
A lot of settlers are from the United States.
Kahane was from the United States.
The money comes from the United States.
America as a nation, as a political system, is clearly going to withdraw, is going to change its relationship, distance itself from Israel.
What next for Israel?
I mean, that has profound consequences for Israel.
So.
Like, what does Israel do as that happens?
The American people are demanding that we stop supporting this criminality.
This is clear, and our politicians will respond to that.
They're winning elections on that basis, and they will continue to win elections on that basis.
And in 2028, just like you said.
The candidate that says the American people are decent people and we are not going to abet this kind of regime that is violent, that is in perpetual war, that is mass murdering Palestinian people will be the one that prevails.
So America will absolutely stop its support.
By the way, it needs to happen before they insert this absolutely extraordinary clause in the defense legislation, which would basically turn the Pentagon over to Israel.
You know, the it's still pending this attempt to merge Israeli security and U.S. security, which would be absolutely the most shocking.
Irresponsibility of American politicians, the most shameful behavior imaginable of American politicians to say that at this moment we give a special relationship to Israel inside our security apparatus at the core.
And that's what a lot of these congressmen and senators are actually still trying to do in the waning moments of this APAC funding.
Congress.
This is the end of that story, but they're still trying to put some absolute horrible things in place before they depart at the start of the next Congress.
So what will happen to Israel?
Israel will have.
Some reckoning to do.
Israel will not be able to live in peace and possibly not.
Not be able to survive if it is attempting to crush half the population of this shared territory.
And it is half the population.
And I ran some demographics in the last few days to try to understand different scenarios.
But basically, the Arabs and the Jews are going to be roughly 50 50 for the next 20 or 30 years.
In this shared territory.
So.
The thing that has been on offer for decades is that you make two states, one that is Arab, one that is Jewish, and they live side by side.
The irony of and the cruelty of Netanyahu is that the Arabs have had an Arab peace initiative since 2002.
And that is clearly on offer.
And of course, the Zionist phony rhetoric in our country and in our politics and of course in Israel is, there is no one to talk to, implacable foes.
And it's exactly the opposite.
24 years, the Arabs have said, make two states.
Then we're going to get along fine.
We're going to normalize relations.
We're going to.
We're going to have a normal, peaceful Middle East.
OK, Netanyahu's whole point, the whole party was, we'll never let that happen.
And don't you dare try to negotiate it.
We kill the people we negotiate, that try to negotiate with us.
The other option is that it all slips away from these crazed people.
And what ends up is a basic reality, that Israelis have settled physically all over the West Bank
and all over places that were to be the Palestinian state.
And they say, well, there's no way those populations are ever going to leave.
And then there's an obvious answer, and not a bad answer, which is, OK, we have one state.
You can call it Israel.
Palestine.
And there are plenty of places in the world like that.
It's called binationalism.
It means two nations in one country.
And I mentioned Belgium as an example.
Belgium actually has five parliaments.
It's a very interesting political system.
It's got a national parliament.
It's got a parliament for the Flemish-speaking population.
It's got a parliament for the French-speaking population.
It's got a parliament for Brussels.
And it's got a parliament for a small German-speaking population.
It's got five parliaments.
Well, you could have basically three.
You could have a Jewish-Israeli parliament.
You could have an Arab parliament.
And you could have an umbrella, which would be the federal state.
There are plenty of places in the world that operate like that and operate peacefully like that.
And so this may be what happens in the end also, that there is not—
two states, and there's not one racist state killing half the citizens or half the people,
because they're not citizens, I should underscore.
But rather, there becomes one nation, one state—actually, one nation, let's say—one state, sorry.
You could say two nations or two ethnicities, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.
And they self-govern for me.
Many, many issues.
And they govern together for the things that have to be governed together.
And maybe that's what's going to happen in the future.
There's a pretty significant movement of Jews who, for a long time,
those who opposed the racism that has been underway for decades,
most Jews, like myself, said two states.
Just have two states.
The Arabs have said it.
That's the international law.
That's the easy way.
But I can tell you there's a quite significant movement within the Jewish world which says,
OK, Israel didn't want two states.
One state.
That's fine.
So, you know, we don't have to divide it anymore.
Maybe it can't be divided.
But you create institutions so that Jewish people can govern themselves in many ways in education,
in religious affairs, in community affairs.
The Palestinian Arabs do the same thing on their side.
And on joint issues like the water supply and on transport and on other things,
then you have a national government which combines the two.
And there are many interesting devices.
You know, there are issues, for example, that are so important that they're called reserved issues that both sides,
have to agree it's not just a majority vote, but you have to have an agreement on the Jewish side.
You have to have an agreement on the Arab side in order to reach the national outcome in areas that are reserved in that manner.
All of this is to say, Tucker, Israel in its current form, in its quest for greater Israel,
in what, sorry to say, our U.S. ambassador,
Mr. Huckabee said, reading some line of the Bible in the most unbelievably naive way, I have to say,
unlearned and naive and extraordinarily wrong way, said, OK, they can have all this land.
They can have all of it, maybe all the way to the Euphrates, he said, you know, which is not exactly the way that we're,
uh, going to find peace in this world.
That is over.
That is at an end because that could only conceivably survive with American backing.
And yes, American politicians backed that for the last 30 years.
They got a lot of campaign financing.
Like you said, it was just the normal thing to do.
They didn't think the American people were watching.
Oh, so sorry for the Iraq war.
Oh, sorry.
Oh, so sorry for this war.
But now the American people are actually watching and they want the wars to end.
And Donald Trump did us a favor because he campaigned in 2024 to end these wars.
OK, he broke his promise very vulgarly, but he opened the eyes of the American people.
We know that he lied.
And we know that the costs of this are huge and we don't want it anymore.
I am so grateful that you said that because I was making this case at dinner last night with someone that for all the sting of the betrayal and the horror and the outrage you feel at watching what's happening, it is also Trump that by betraying his own voters and his own country revealed the deep, deep architecture of our government.
And like once you see it, you can change it.
He promised we were not going to do this anymore.
And it was a good promise.
And a lot of Americans bought into it.
I didn't know.
And now we don't want this anymore.
No.
And I don't think we're going to get it anymore.
Jeffrey Sachs, thank you.
That there's no one who could have summarized that as as crisply and wisely as you did.
So thank you for taking the time to do it.
Always great to be with you, Tucker.
Thank you.
See you soon.
See ya.
That's it for us tonight.
Thanks.
Thanks a lot for watching.
We'll be back next Wednesday night at 6 p.m.
Eastern.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Odoo offers a unified business management platform that integrates sales, accounting, inventory, and marketing without messy spreadsheets or fragmented software.
International elections this month, including in Canada and Israel, receive disproportionate media attention, with Israel’s election drawing intense coverage despite limited trade ties.
Fox News host Mark Levin promotes anti-Arab rhetoric, falsely claiming Arab Israelis threaten Israel’s democracy, ignoring that Israel is a democracy where all citizens have voting rights.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his son Yair claim election results are fraudulent, accusing Arab parties of terrorism and calling for investigations, while dismissing Arab citizens’ right to vote.
Arab Israeli voters achieved high turnout and won significant parliamentary seats, challenging Netanyahu’s dominance and exposing systemic racism and disenfranchisement.
The Israeli political system, especially under Netanyahu, enforces ethnic-based governance, with state-sponsored segregation and denial of equal rights to Arab citizens.
American political leaders and media largely silence criticism of Israel’s policies, despite growing public opposition and evidence of ethnic discrimination and violence.
A shift in public opinion—especially among young Americans—shows growing rejection of U.S. support for Israel’s ethno-nationalist agenda and its role in ongoing violence and displacement.
Summary:
The transcript critiques the Israeli political system’s deep-rooted anti-Arab racism and denial of democratic rights to Arab citizens, despite their 20% population share and high voter turnout. It highlights how Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu and Fox News figure Mark Levin, use inflammatory rhetoric to justify ethnic exclusion and claim election fraud, undermining democratic principles. The narrative emphasizes that Israel’s governance is not a true democracy, as nearly half its population in occupied territories cannot vote or live freely.
S. support for Israel’s policies, which involve ethnic cleansing, settler violence, and military aggression. The piece argues that the current political climate in Israel—marked by systemic racism and violence—is a moral and democratic failure, and that a shift toward inclusive governance could bring real change.
, where support for Israel is being challenged by growing awareness of its human rights violations. S. foreign policy, urging leaders to prioritize American values of equality and justice over loyalty to an ethno-nationalist regime.
The discussion also touches on broader societal issues, like pet healthcare and political transparency, but the central theme remains the erosion of democratic norms in Israel and the need for accountability from both Israeli leaders and American allies.
FAQs
Odoo is an all-in-one business management software that integrates sales, accounting, inventory, and marketing into a single platform. It eliminates the need for multiple disconnected apps and spreadsheets, offering a unified system to manage operations more efficiently.
The speaker highlights how U.S. media, particularly Fox News, focused intensely on the Israeli elections despite limited real-world impact. This coverage often reflects deep emotional bias and racialized rhetoric, such as blaming Arabs for threatening Israel, rather than factual or balanced reporting.
The speaker argues that Israel’s political system excludes Arab citizens from full democratic participation, despite their 20% share of the population. Arab voters are often labeled as supporters of terrorism, and their political rights are threatened, undermining Israel’s claim to be a democracy.
Netanyahu claims the election was stolen by Arab parties, accusing them of terrorism and voter fraud. He demands a full investigation and calls for the prosecution of those allegedly involved, which the speaker sees as a threat to democratic principles and the voting rights of Arab citizens.
The speaker criticizes U.S. political leaders and media figures like Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro for promoting racially charged narratives about Israel, often ignoring the reality of systemic discrimination and disenfranchisement of Arab citizens in Israel.
The speaker references a video of settlers in the West Bank beating an elderly American citizen and setting his car on fire, highlighting the violence and impunity faced by Arab residents under Israeli occupation and settler activity.
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