The Real Reason Israel Is Always At War – Jeffrey Sachs

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Why did you publish an open letter to to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and what did you tell him?

[00:00:07]>> I published it because Europe is in a very distorted and dangerous state of mind gearing up for war with Russia.

[00:00:17]It's a kind of fervent Russia hatred that is completely irrational and completely counter to the historical truths.

[00:00:28]Germany is key to this.

[00:00:31]It's the biggest country in Europe. It is the country that actually has a direct responsibility for Europe not sliding to war and Chancellor Merz is not doing his job at all.

[00:00:46]The roots of the conflict in Ukraine which is now spiraling out of control or at least threatening to do so in these hours comes from lies that Germany told already back in the 1990s.

[00:01:04]Germany wanted reunification in 1990 to reunify what had been a divided Germany after Hitler's defeat in 1945.

[00:01:17]In 1990 Germany asked for reunification.

[00:01:22]They negotiated with the Soviet Union.

[00:01:25]Explicitly Germany said in the context of that negotiation that NATO will not move eastward and as many times as that is denied that's as many times as Western governments are lying about it cause they promised unequivocally that in the context of German reunification NATO would not move eastward. Germany has a fundamental responsibility for the fact that Germany and the United States cheated on that commitment already starting in the early 1990s.

[00:02:09]Soon after the commitment was made, German businesses said let's have NATO enlargement. That'll protect our investments in Central and Eastern Europe.

[00:02:23]The United States said, we have a lot of Polish Americans and a lot of other Central European Americans, and so this is good politics.

[00:02:34]And the countries of Central Europe wanted NATO enlargement. But this was a matter of security for the Soviet Union and Russia and had been agreed that NATO would not move eastward. The US and Germany cheated.

[00:02:54]NATO began to move eastward. The closer it got to Russia's borders the more clear were Russia's red lines.

[00:03:03]There were two big waves of NATO enlargement.

[00:03:07]First in 1999, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Poland. The Russians swallowed hard.

[00:03:15]They objected, but this was still far from their borders. Then came the second wave in 2004 which was Romania and Bulgaria on the Black Sea, the three Baltic states, and two further states, seven in all. The Russians were furious and they said, "Don't you try anymore."

[00:03:40]And in 2007 President Putin put down the Russian red line.

[00:03:47]Stop. Don't even dream of coming to our border in Ukraine or Georgia. The United States being the US doesn't hear a word, never respects anyone else. And so, in 2008 at the Bucharest NATO summit, the United States pushed through a NATO commitment that NATO would move all the way to Russia's border with Ukraine and Georgia. That those two countries would join NATO. Chancellor Merkel of Germany, who went along with that commitment in the end, wrote in her memoirs that she knew that this was tantamount to heading to war with Russia. It would be like Russia setting up a military base on the Rio Grande in Mexico or in Canada, unthinkable from an American security point of view. But the United States doesn't understand the golden rule not to do to others what you would never allow them to do to you. The point of my open letter was Germany should know it cheated. Because Germany wasn't a passive actor in this. Germany negotiated the Minsk school agreement to end the war in Ukraine in 2015 and then it reneged on its own commitments that it made as negotiator and guarantor of that agreement. So, I say to Chancellor Merz before it's a complete disaster in Europe, please do your job. You're the leader of the most important country of the European Union. Your country broke many of its solemn promises made to Russia. You're now talking about war nonstop, building the military, preparing for war, but you're not even trying diplomacy. Chancellor Merz came into office. He didn't try to call President Putin. He didn't try to have his foreign minister meet with foreign minister Lavrov. They didn't even try. How can you go to war without even trying diplomacy?

[00:06:21]Shame. Especially when it's not that we're so pure and they're so evil when history shows that situation it's a little bit more complicated than that.

[00:06:35]So, that's why I published the open letter. Needless to say, Chancellor Merz has not exactly called me or sent me a letter.

[00:06:46]>> Is Israel a liberal democracy?

[00:06:48]>> No.

[00:06:49]Israel has rudiments of democracy if you are a Jew in Israel, but if you are an Arab in Israel, absolutely not. And if you're a Palestinian, you are more likely to be slaughtered than to have rights or a vote. So, no, it's not a democracy. It's a democracy in form in a certain kind of way, but the only way you could define it as a democracy is if you abide by the standard standards of Israel, which is a completely racist standard, which is that the Arab people they don't count or they are animals or vermin to be exterminated. If you count the Arab people, the Palestinians as human beings, then of course it's not a democracy.

[00:07:46]Half the public or even more of what Israel calls Israel is non-Jews, and they have no rights.

[00:07:54]Israel declares itself a Jewish state when half the public or more is not Jewish.

[00:08:02]>> Could a Catholic become >> I don't know.

[00:08:05]But it's called a Jewish state. And by the way, that means two things. One is it's saying inside that Jews are supreme. This is a supremacist state.

[00:08:18]And in fact, one of the key ministers, the Minister of National Security, Ben-Gvir, heads a party called Jewish Power.

[00:08:29]That's just open Jewish supremacy. But the other thing, which is really annoying, is they claim to speak for Jews elsewhere. And since I'm an American Jew, I find that disgusting. "Leave me out of your crimes" is what I say to Israel.

[00:08:50]>> Will the United States enter into an agreement with Iran that fails to restrain Israel?

[00:08:57]Will Iran enter into an agreement with the United States that fails to restrain Israel? Can Donald Trump restrain Israel?

[00:09:06]>> First of all, I'll start with the last one because the answer is yes.

[00:09:12]If we have an American president that acts like an American president, then they can restrain Israel because all of Israel's militarism, I would say fascism, which is a term that the Minister of Finance himself uses for himself, Smotrich, all of that depends on twisting the United States out of shape, putting the US in Israel's palm. Does the president of the United States have to abide by abide by that?

[00:09:49]Of course not. So, if the United States says no, we're not your pawn and your plaything, then Israel cannot do the things it's doing.

[00:10:02]For Israel to be this country at war across a region where it's outnumbered multiple multiple times, that depends on American armaments and American financing and American diplomatic cover because the US vetoes all of the Security Council resolutions that would bring Israel back under some control of international law. Israel cannot do this. And the president of the United States, if we had a president that cares to be president of the United States, of course, Israel would have to stop because it literally cannot carry on its military campaigns, its vendettas, its invasions, its wars, its fighting, its occupation of Lebanon and Syria, it's fighting in Yemen, its wars with Iran, and its gains in Africa without the United States fully partnering in this.

[00:11:12]>> Why is Israel seemingly perpetually at war with countries that are around it?

[00:11:18]>> Israel is perpetually at war because it is making the most maximalist demands that it can.

[00:11:27]And in that, it is supported by American Christian Zionists like the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee.

[00:11:37]What Israel is saying is, we own all of Israel and we own all of Palestine. We own all of Gaza. We own all of the West Bank. We own all of East Jerusalem, the Islamic holy sites, and not to mention we own Southern Lebanon. We own parts of Syria.

[00:11:59]And we have the right not to be part of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

[00:12:06]We have no constraint or controls on our nuclear weapons, but will kill anyone that tries to do anything remotely like that, even countries that deny they want to do that, we will kill them anyway if we decide so.

[00:12:26]And we reserve the right to assassinate anyone in our region that we think supports the Palestinian cause.

[00:12:36]This is called Greater Israel.

[00:12:39]It's a kind of fascism. It is we decide, we own everything. We rule over 8 million Palestinian Arabs, and maybe they'll be exterminated, maybe they'll be ethnically cleansed, maybe they'll just be subservient in an apartheid state, maybe it's all of the above, but we rule and we do what we want. Like he Netanyahu saying, we're not even going to stop at the Litani River. We're going further in Lebanon, that's ours. Or we own Gaza. We have 60% now, we're going for 70%. He said yesterday, I'm giving the order to go to 70%.

[00:13:28]They're out of control. And then they do have their friends in the United States. Ambassador Huckabee, who should have been removed from his job the moment he said it, said, "Yes, according to Genesis, Israel has all the land it wants from the great river of Egypt to the Euphrates River of Iraq."

[00:13:54]>> Is that the public policy of Israel?

[00:13:57]>> It may be the public policy of the United States, for all I know.

[00:14:02]It's hard to know. Israel doesn't define any borders.

[00:14:07]It never has.

[00:14:09]It's always looking for more. And the party that Netanyahu leads, the Likud Party, which I hate to say it, I don't want to be misinterpreted.

[00:14:20]It even looks moderate compared to the parties of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, whose partners in government are two of the most despicable people and have recently been indicted by the International Criminal Court because of the crimes that they're committing. But Netanyahu's party, Likud, said back in its founding charter, back in the 1970s, that Israel will keep sovereignty over all of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. This means that Israel will keep sovereignty over a population that is as large as, and by many demographic estimates, larger than the Jewish population of Israel itself. In other words, it will run an apartheid state, or it will mow the grass, meaning it will kill as a warning sign by the thousands, and then recently by the tens of thousands of people in that region. It will expropriate people.

[00:15:40]It will go into their houses, burn their houses down, shoot them, terrorize them, hang them for crimes under Israeli law that apply only to the Palestinian people. So, this is what Israel is saying.

[00:15:58]And when the chant from the river to the sea is cracked down on in the United States as an anti-Israel chant, you know, that's the charter of Likud.

[00:16:12]From the river to the sea, Israel will be sovereign. So, the problem is this is a country of maximalism that lives and breathes a hatred and a dehumanization of half the people that it rules over.

[00:16:30]It kills them indiscriminately.

[00:16:33]It expropriates them. It expels them. It terrorizes them. And this is our ally, and there are people absolutely complicit in senior US leadership in this. And Trump has basically gone along with all of this until today. And he has an ambassador who openly espouses all of this. When Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz both told Tucker Carlson, from the river to the sea, we just laughed at the absurdity of it.

[00:17:09]And the two of them said this is because God the Father gave them this land, and they actually believe that and are willing to kill to bring it about. This is their operational charter right now. A book from the 6th century BC, probably the 7th century BC, the book of Josh- Joshua is a book of genocides, supposedly at God's command, that the Israelites returning from Egypt are to kill all the people in Canaan because that's the promised land. God in this book commands the forces under Joshua to go in and kill all the people, nation after nation, every man, woman, and child. The interesting, ironic thing is these genocides didn't happen in history from all that one can gather from archaeologists and biblical specialists. This is some boastful book from the 7th century BC, written in the style of Assyrian conquest boasts. But, in any event, this is taken as the literal text for mass murder today.

[00:18:32]Right now, we're in a process where we can leverage our power in multiple directions. We'll still need to crush Hezbollah.

[00:18:44]At the moment, we're crushing Hamas. We now control 60% of the Gaza Strip.

[00:18:51]We were at 50, now we've moved to 60.

[00:18:54]The audience shouts back 100.

[00:18:57]This is an AI translation, but a reliable one. Isn't there a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza for which President Trump has taken credit as the negotiator and and filter. We're in an environment of empty words, meaningless words. Israel is murdering Gazans and Palestinians every day in large numbers. It's murdering Lebanese every day in large numbers. It's a murder state. It's a state of hatred and dehumanization of the 8 million Palestinian Arabs in its midst and in complete deprecation of the hundreds of millions of people in the neighborhood and it's out of control. It's a genocide. The intent is not even hidden. I'm sorry to say it's a terrible truth. The genocide that the Nazis committed, they hid from view.

[00:20:04]They kept it secret. What's happening in Israel is not kept secret. It's broadcast proudly. The killing, the expropriation, the expulsions, this is not hidden at all. They're not committing crimes in the dark. They're committing crimes that they boast about and smirk at and think that they have the US completely in their hands and maybe they do.

[00:20:36]We don't know whether President Trump he said he could run for head of Israel.

[00:20:43]Maybe that's what he is. Maybe he just serves us Israel.

[00:20:48]We don't really understand it. But I can tell you absolutely certainly the American people are against this. The American people side with the Palestinians and they are despising the crimes that Israel is committing.

[00:21:08]And as an American Jew, I can tell you lots of American Jews are despising what Israel is doing and resent being told that this is somehow about Judaism. This is not about Judaism. This is a violation of the most basic ethics of two millennia of rabbinic Judaism. It's disgusting what's happening.

[00:21:35]And this is the truth.

[00:21:37]Where are we in this country? The American people are on the right side of this.

[00:21:44]Where is our president? The one who said America first.

[00:21:48]Show us, Mr. President, because America does not want to be party to this mass murder and this ongoing war.