Jeffrey Sachs on Netanyahu’s Struggle to Keep Control of the World’s Most Bloodthirsty Ethnostate
In a Nutshell
Jeffrey Sachs argues that Israel functions as an ethnostate where Arab citizens face systemic segregation and denial of equal rights, with Netanyahu's coalition maintaining power through explicit anti-Arab racism that would be unacceptable in any democracy. The Israeli elections revealed that Arab parties won 20% of Knesset seats with 80% turnout, making them the potential balance of power to remove Netanyahu, but Jewish opposition parties refuse coalition partnerships due to anti-Arab prejudice. Sachs contends that American support for this system has enabled thirty years of disastrous wars costing trillions, and that the US must end its backing of a regime pursuing either perpetual occupation or a one-state solution where Arabs gain voting rights.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
It is election season internationally with elections in Bosnia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Canada occurring this month. Canada shares the longest international border with the United States at 5,500 miles and is the second largest trading partner after Mexico, with twice as much trade conducted with Canada as with China. Despite the critical nature of the relationship, there is minimal coverage of Canada in American media.
The one foreign election receiving intense coverage in the United States is the parliamentary election in Israel. Israel has fewer than 10 million people and the United States gives them substantial aid with minimal meaningful trade relationship. If all trade ended with Israel tomorrow, it would represent a net benefit to American GDP.
Fox News host Mark Levin addressed the Israeli elections as a partisan, stating: "To my fellow patriots in Israel, to the right-wing, to Lood 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 state, want to undermine your defense."
Levin used the term "Arabs" to refer to Israeli Arab citizens rather than external threats like Hamas. These are the indigenous population who have lived in the area since the beginning of recorded history, not Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, or East Jerusalem, but normal Israeli citizens.
Democracy is defined as a system where citizens own the country by virtue of their citizenship, not race, religion, or parentage, and the government exists to preserve their rights and respond to their concerns. This is presented as the basis for American support of Israel as an outpost of Western civilization.
The concept of Israel as a democracy contrasts with the claim that Israel operates as an ethnostate based on DNA rather than beliefs. There is no religious test to move to Israel, but there is effectively a genetic test requiring a mother connected to the project. This represents a system based on blood rather than beliefs.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been prime minister on and off for 30 years, responded to election results by claiming the elections were stolen by Arab parties. His statement read: "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."
Netanyahu demanded investigation by police and Shinbet (Internal Security Service) into "election theft by the Arab parties" and called for "full prosecution of the criminals" with law enforcement acting with an "iron fist."
Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister's son, stated: "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."
He referenced Israeli law section 7A of the basic law, the Knesset, which prohibits parties that support terrorism and negate Israel as a Jewish state from running for the Knesset. He claimed the High Court of Justice enabled their candidacy in violation of the law.
Arab-Israeli citizens face state-sponsored segregation with their children attending separate schools from Jewish majority schools. Essentially zero Muslim Arab children attend publicly funded Jewish majority schools. Arab citizens have been under state-sponsored segregation since the foundation of the state of Israel.
If Arab citizens vote against government policy due to dissatisfaction with segregation and policies in occupied territories, they are labeled as terrorists according to the Netanyahu family and should not be allowed to vote.
Since 1967, at least half the population of territories controlled by Israel are Arab and cannot vote. This situation is characterized as incompatible with democracy, with comparisons made to slavery without the element of intentional genocide present in the Israeli case.
Ben Shapiro stated that the extreme Arab party got an enormous number of seats in the election with leadership openly anti-Israel, wishing to destroy the state of Israel, and talking about solidarity with Hamas. He argued that if the Supreme Court of Israel bans the Kahanists, it should also ban the Arab party that calls for the destruction of the state of Israel.
The Arab party achieved approximately 80% voter turnout, higher than the median turnout in Israel, by participating within the Israeli democratic system.
The majority of verified acts of terror within Israel proper and occupied territories over the past 3 years have been committed by Israelis, including IDF soldiers, Shinbet operatives, and settlers. Settlers include young people known as hilltop youth, disproportionately American from Long Island, who moved to the West Bank at the encouragement of the Israeli government with funding from American donors.
The West Bank, formerly part of Jordan and taken by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, has never been claimed as Israel but is controlled by Israel as occupied territory.
The occupied territories function as a gray zone where the Israeli military maintains control over all utilities and infrastructure. Israel closed the airport, preventing entry or exit without permission from Israeli authorities. The territory operates effectively as part of Israel, yet Arab residents cannot vote while Jewish residents can vote.
Many Jewish voters in the occupied territories are recent arrivals from the United States. Some are peaceful religious people, while others are dangerous extremists comparable to ISIS members. These settlers adhere to millennialist theology and demonstrate commitment to violence matching Islamic State radicals.
The situation has intensified over the past year or two, with video evidence showing settler violence against old people and children in the occupied territories. The Netanyahu government has occasionally felt compelled to semi-distance itself from these actions due to the volume of documented evidence.
A previously unshown video depicts masked settlers dressed in black masks beating an elderly man with sticks in a West Bank town. The victim is an American citizen, as are the majority of residents in this particular town. Most residents are Muslim Arabs who hold American citizenship.
The attackers operate as Israeli citizens with full impunity from punishment in the occupied territories. The original plan was to have the family member who filmed the incident appear on the show, but he withdrew after receiving threats that his family would be killed if he were publicly identified.
The video shows three men beating an elderly man on the ground. The footage was blurred to protect the victim's identity. After the initial attack, more masked settlers arrived and threw rocks at the house before pouring gasoline on the family car and setting it on fire. Seven attackers were ultimately involved in the incident.
The family lives in a suburban-style backyard, not a slum or illegal settlement. The victims are law-abiding, productive members of society who have been in the area since ancient times.
The American victim called the American embassy after the attack. Mike Huckabee's office was contacted, possibly reaching Mark Levin's stepson who runs the office. Despite being caught trying to hide attacks on Americans from the White House and soliciting money from people in Israel for his wedding, this individual retained his position.
When criticized in a New York Times piece, his stepfather screamed anti-Semitism to retain the job. The speaker notes that defending the life of an American beaten by religious extremists in a foreign country is not anti-Semitic.
Mike Huckabee hosted Jonathan Pollard, described as the most damaging spy in recent American lifetimes. Pollard stole secrets from the US military and gave them to the Israeli government, which passed them to the Soviet Union. Pollard met secretly with the US ambassador, who championed him, without consequences.
Israeli leaders openly call for stripping Arab citizens of voting rights. These Arab populations predate Theodore Herzl's Zionist program. The political class has pledged allegiance to a country that openly calls for sending people to camps because they are Arab.
For thirty years, only fringe activists discussed these issues at Washington rallies, making them easy to dismiss as radical America-hating elements. However, increasing knowledge about current events makes support unsustainable. The situation is described as openly genocidal and murderous, conducted with American money in America's name.
A country richer than the United States takes American money to murder people who did nothing wrong while the American political class pretends it is not happening and refuses to help Americans beaten by masked men.
Unlike five years ago when only fringe activists cared, a significant portion of the American population now understands the situation and will not tolerate it. No future American president will stand on a debate stage and claim the United States gets more from Israel than Israel gets from the United States, as Nikki Haley stated.
Jeffrey Sachs has traveled in and out of Israel for more than fifty years and has family there. He began with a sympathetic understanding of Israel following the Six-Day War, when Israel was probably the most popular country in the United States. Americans learned to dislike Israel through experience.
The Israeli Jewish vote divided roughly equally, with Netanyahu's group receiving slightly more seats. Netanyahu lost his governing majority. The Arab vote turned out massively, winning approximately 16-17% of seats in the Knesset and potentially becoming the determining factor in removing Netanyahu from power.
Netanyahu is described as one of the great disasters of modern history for Israel, the world, and the United States. His removal would be profoundly beneficial for all concerned.
Arabs constitute about 20% of Israel's population. Their turnout reached approximately 80%, up from an estimated 55% in the 2022 parliamentary election. They won significant seats and could determine the new government if extreme anti-Arab racism does not predominate.
If reasonable, decent, non-racist opposition members prevail, a new government without Netanyahu could form. This would benefit the United States because Netanyahu influenced Donald Trump to betray American interests and put Israel first during the administration's first two years.
Two scenarios exist for Netanyahu's removal. First, the opposition could form a coalition with Arab parties. Second, the opposition led by General Eisenkot could govern as a minority with Arab support for budget and crucial legislation without Arab parties joining the government formally.
In a normal society, Arab parties and the opposition would unite for a decisive majority, sending Netanyahu to jail. However, leaders of the Jewish anti-Netanyahu block vowed not to cooperate with Arab parties, demonstrating extraordinary racism and lack of practical politics.
Arabs constitute 20% of Israeli citizens within Israel proper. When including East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, the population is 50/50. Arab parties won approximately 20 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, making them the balance of power.
Normal politicians would form coalitions with Arab parties as junior members, but Israel is described as a deranged, vulgarly anti-Arab, racist, and violently anti-Arab society.
Netanyahu is under International Criminal Court arrest warrant. His leadership slaughtered approximately 100,000 people in Gaza. Evidence suggests he knew an attack was coming and either let it happen for political reasons or was delusional and incompetent in failing to alert the country.
Another possibility involves Zionist parties forming a coalition requiring Netanyahu's departure, possibly after receiving a presidential pardon. Multiple Jewish parties could form a majority while ignoring the 20% Arab population.
Among Israel's 10 million people (8 million Jews and 2 million Arabs), a significant majority wants Netanyahu and his gang removed from power.
Mark Levin urged Likud supporters to vote, claiming that if they did not vote, Arabs would take over and destroy the country. This represents a shift from previous messaging that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, where religion is secondary to citizenship.
Netanyahu claimed the Arab election success was fraudulent and that Arabs stole the election. This appeal to rank racism works to an extent but fails to create a governing majority.
The American people showed revulsion as Israel committed genocide in Gaza. A majority of Americans, particularly young people, support Palestinians being slaughtered and see Israel as a murderous and racist state. The state has behaved this way, and politicians should not refuse cooperation with Arab voters and parties that won 19-20 Knesset seats.
Netanyahu's removal would provide at least a break in the current storm. He came to power thirty years ago on a platform with American Zionist allies to launch wars for his greater Israel agenda of crushing Palestinians, which does not align with American interests.
This is not exactly America's interest or America's cause. The United States should never have signed up to such a horrendous thing. Trump said he wasn't going to do this, yet he doubled down on everything, even taking America to a disastrous war in Iran because Netanyahu told him to do so. This represents a chance to put a break to what has been 30 years of American perpetual wars costing trillions of dollars and aiding and abetting genocide. Netanyahu's departure would make a difference, though it would not make a decisive difference in the rhetoric and politics coming out of Israel.
A lot of the opposition in Israel is hardline and absolutely against a Palestinian state, but not all of them are like that. There's an even more likely direction Israel is almost compelling: moving not to two states but to one democratic state where Arabs and Jews vote together and form governments. This may be a better way because Israel says it will never have two states. In one state, Arabs would have rights too, be allowed to stay alive and vote. Many countries operate this way as national states, with Belgium as one example.
Netanyahu has brought disaster to the United States, and Donald Trump jumped full in on all of this. Trump could not resist endorsing Netanyahu after everything, proving that the President of the United States should stay out of it because America does not want to take on every delusion and every war of Netanyahu. America First means not having the President obsessed with Israel's election to keep Netanyahu in power through the Iran war and Gaza genocide.
The public wants this change. The MAGA public wants it, the Democrats want it, and both sides of the political spectrum especially the young people in America do not want to continue these disastrous wars for the delusion of Israel crushing the Palestinian people. This is not America's gig.
In two years at the presidential election, no candidate from either party will get elected saying they stand with Israel as the closest ally. Any candidate must explain they are not going to do what Trump did by saying one thing then jumping into another Middle East war. The candidate convincing on this will win the presidency.
In the last election, it was assumed every serious candidate for the presidency would uncritically support Israel. Money was involved in campaign contributions. They thought the American people weren't watching so they could do this for campaign finance, friends, and business deals. But people were watching, especially through TikTok, and the American people absolutely did not want to be party to mass slaughter because they are decent people.
This has been going on for 30 years. The Iraq war in 2003 was not based on mistaken premises about weapons of mass destruction but on phony premises. Netanyahu came to the United States in the fall of 2002 and spoke to Congress telling them this would be the greatest war ever, spreading sunshine and light all over the Middle East and leading to the overthrow of the Iranian regime. Every inanity, insanity, and lie he told resulted in a few trillion dollars down the drain.
In 2011, NATO under Obama bombed Libya to overthrow that government because Netanyahu said so. This created a civil war and unrest that spread across Africa and has been going on for 15 years with nothing coming out except chaos. Obama and Hillary decided to overthrow the Syrian government through Operation Timber Sycamore, another Netanyahu brainchild. That took 15 years, killed hundreds of thousands of people, cost America a fortune, and created disasters that continue today, flooding Europe with refugees and creating mass backlash.
The Iran war is the dumbest, most useless, senseless war imaginable. Twice Trump did the same thing last year and this year in the midst of negotiations that were actually leading to a settlement, which terrified Netanyahu. They went to war to prevent a negotiated settlement and to kill the people negotiating. On February 28th of this year, when Trump jumped into this, they killed dozens of Iranian leaders including the Supreme Leader. They were 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. The day before, the Omani mediator had come out to explain how much progress was being made and that negotiators would meet the following week in Vienna.
Netanyahu has said for 30 years not to negotiate at all, to crush them, overthrow them, go to war with them. Each war has been a cascade of more disasters than the last, making the government indebted with sky-high interest rates that will continue to soar, and a budget out of control. Trump jumped into this exactly the opposite of what he promised his own base and the American people.
Israel was always thought of as a European country with mostly European attitudes and Eastern charm, not a religious country at all except in Orthodox neighborhoods. Now there are clips constantly of Israeli leaders not wearing black hats sounding like Messianic religious extremists. Zionism in its original form was a secular movement, mainly Russian secular figures like Theodore Herzl who knew nothing about rabbinic Judaism. The rabbis of the late 19th and early 20th century and many rabbis until this day are against the whole idea of Zionism, saying Judaism is a religion of ethics with regard to God and not with regard to idolatry of the land.
There are rabbinic injunctions going back 1,500 to 1,800 years called the three oaths in the Talmud which say not to create Zionism again until the Messiah comes. Religious Judaism was basically anti-Zionist for decades in the early decades of the Zionist movement before and after the Balfour Declaration.
The first visit to Israel was in 1972, five years after the 1967 war where Israel captured Palestinian areas of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. There were debates about what to do, with a large part of the politics saying the lands should be given back and there would be a Palestinian state or some other arrangement as a temporary occupation.
Netanyahu's Likud party, with its founding charter in 1977, said all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea will remain under Israeli sovereignty. The whole point of Netanyahu's party was to rule out a state of Palestine and deny equal rights to the Palestinians under Israel's occupation. They created this racist state and things turned uglier over time because what emerged was not rabbinic Judaism but a kind of muscular fascistic Judaism.
This is the kind of Judaism of Ben-Gvir whose party is called Jewish Power. He celebrated a birthday with a noose on the cake because he wants to kill Arabs, torment them, torture them, and expel them. He represents what emerged in the 70s, 80s, and 90s as a violent, radical, profoundly racist, increasingly religious approach. This is not what religion is about at all. It is the opposite of Christ's teachings and the opposite of Jewish ethical teachings.
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. In historical terms, this is a political tract written in the 7th century BC in the style of Mesopotamian glory writing where the king said he killed all his opponents and was the great conqueror. This was probably King Josiah in the 7th century BC. This text has now been taken on in a kind of religious zealotry and fervor that the Bible tells us you can commit genocide.
This is something new. It was not Israel 30 or 40 or 50 years ago. Netanyahu's predecessor Menachem Begin and Netanyahu himself enlisted the Christian evangelicals not on the basis of Jesus's teachings, 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 who taught about peace, but to enlist the idea that the Jews must be there because that's what the Bible says and then we can have the final days. This created the political base for Netanyahu's extremism in the United States.
Religion got hijacked. The Jewish religion got hijacked and Christianity got hijacked in the cause of murder, which is extraordinary. It is exactly the opposite of Christianity and exactly the opposite of Judaism. It got hijacked in a fervor of extreme racist nationalism and grew in the 70s, 80s, 90s. It was not there in 1972 but showed its face in the 80s when the illegal settlements in the occupied territories started to grow in number. Rabbis and one extremist from the United States, Meir Kahane who was the progenitor of Ben-Gvir's extremism, came to the forefront.
Netanyahu is 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. Trump is supposedly telling Netanyahu he has to get rid of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich because these people are so extreme and vulgar in the name of religion.
The ultimate lie is saying that being against what Israel is doing is antisemitic. To be against the murderous behavior of the Israeli state is the most important defense of Judaism you can have. It is not against Judaism. It is the defense of Judaism as a religion of godliness and ethics. To stand by with mass murder is a destruction, a manipulation, a hijacking of a religion. Mass murder is against religion. Period. It is the opposite of it.
Meir Kahane was an American from New York, murdered in the end in New York. Everything that is happening in Israel has been embedded, 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, change its relationship, and distance itself from Israel. The American people are demanding that support for this criminality stop. Politicians will respond to that and will continue to win elections on that basis. In 2028, the candidate that says the American people are decent people and will not abet this kind of regime that is violent, in perpetual war, mass murdering Palestinian people will prevail.
America will absolutely stop its support. It needs to happen before they insert an extraordinary clause in the defense legislation which would basically turn the Pentagon over to Israel. There is still pending an attempt to merge Israeli security and US security, which would be the most shocking irresponsibility of American politicians, the most shameful behavior imaginable to give a special relationship to Israel inside the security apparatus at the core. A lot of these congressmen and senators are still trying to do this in the waning moments of this AIPAC-funded Congress.
Israel will have some reckoning to do. Israel will not be able to live in peace and possibly not be able to survive if it is attempting to crush half the population of this shared territory. Demographics show that Arabs and Jews are going to be roughly 50/50 for the next 20 or 30 years in this shared territory.
The thing that has been on offer for decades is making two states, one Arab and one Jewish, living side by side. The irony and cruelty of Netanyahu is that the Arabs have had an Arab Peace Initiative since 2002 putting this clearly on offer. The Zionist phony rhetoric in our country and in our politics and in Israel is that there is no one to talk to, that they are implacable foes. It is exactly the opposite. For 24 years, the Arabs have said make two states, then we are going to get along fine, normalize relations, have a normal peaceful Middle East.
Netanyahu's whole point and his party's position was they will never let that happen and not to dare try to negotiate it. They kill the people who try to negotiate with them.
The other option is that it all slips away from these crazed people and what ends up as a basic reality is that Israelis have settled physically all over the West Bank and all over places that were to be the Palestinian state. They say there is no way those populations are ever going to leave. Then there is an obvious answer and not a bad answer: one state called Israel-Palestine.
There are plenty of places in the world like that. It is called binationalism. It means two nations in one country. Belgium is an example with five parliaments: a national parliament, a parliament for the Flemish-speaking population, a parliament for the French-speaking population, a parliament for Brussels, and a parliament for a small German-speaking population. There could be three parliaments: a Jewish Israeli parliament, an Arab parliament, and an umbrella federal state.
There is a pretty significant movement of Jews who for a long time opposed the racism that has been underway for decades. Most Jews said two states. The Arabs have said it. That is international law. That is the easy way. But there is a quite significant movement within the Jewish world which says Israel did not want two states, one state is fine, so there is no need to divide it anymore. Maybe it cannot be divided but institutions can be created so that Jewish people can govern themselves in many ways in education and religious affairs and community affairs. Palestinian Arabs do the same thing on their side. On joint issues like water supply, transport, and other things, there would be a national government which combines the two.
There are many interesting devices. There are issues that are so important they are called reserved issues where both sides have to agree. It is not just a majority vote, but there must be an agreement on the Jewish side and an agreement on the Arab side in order to reach the national outcome in areas that are reserved in that manner.
Israel in its current form, in its quest for greater Israel, is pursuing an expansion that extends potentially all the way to the Euphrates River. This vision was articulated by US Ambassador Mike Huckabee, who read lines from the Bible in an unbelievably naive, unlearned, and extraordinarily wrong way, claiming that Israel can have all this land, maybe all the way to the Euphrates.
This approach is not the way to find peace in this world. Such a vision could only conceivably survive with American backing, and American politicians have backed that for the last 30 years because they received campaign financing. It was just the normal thing to do, and they didn't think the American people were watching.
American politicians have repeatedly apologized for wars - sorry for the Iraq war, sorry for this war, sorry for this war - but now the American people are actually watching and they want the wars to end.
Donald Trump did Americans a favor because he campaigned in 2024 to end these wars. He broke his promise very vulgarly, but he opened the eyes of the American people. Americans now know that he lied and know that the costs of this are huge, and they don't want it anymore.
For all the sting of the betrayal and the horror and the outrage felt at watching what's happening, it is also Trump who, by betraying his own voters and his own country, revealed the deep deep architecture of American government. Once you see it, you can change it. He promised Americans were not going to do this anymore, and it was a good promise, and a lot of Americans bought into it. Now Americans don't want this anymore, and it's unlikely they will get it anymore.
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