Jeffrey Sachs on Netanyahu’s Struggle to Keep Control of the World’s Most Bloodthirsty Ethnostate

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 US 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 statecraftraft 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 US 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 Levvin talk about the Israeli elections and one of the most revealing clips we've seen in quite some time. This is Mark Levven from yesterday. 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. 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 redhot question of dual loyalty, like 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 us 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 Levvin'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 the is of Israel, not greater Israel. We're not talking about the poor Benedicted 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 or 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 lie 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 American 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 their exhibit A in like how you run a country because they learned lessons from what the Nazis did which two restate in case 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 there if there's one lesson of the Second World War, it's that that's just wrong. 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 Leavvin encouraging more non-Arabs to cast them. Right in the middle of that, Mark Levvin 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 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 belief 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. And Israel is not the only ethnostate in history. That's for certain. In fact through history most states have been ethnostates. In fact until recently almost all states have been ethnostates. Though you could 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 ethnostate is acceptable to the leaders of Western countries because they spend the rest of their day when they're not defending this ethnostate in the Middle East attacking the idea of an ethnostate and denying their citizens the right to create ethnostates. Like that's the whole project. So it's a little bit weird. And here you have Mark Levvin just sort of casually admitting that nah, 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've been here longer than we have, they can't have control of the country. Oo. So then you think, well, okay, that's Mark Levvin. Like, what does he know? He's got a weekend show on Fox. Like, he's not really an arbiter of anything important. and he's just like a blowhard, an increasingly unhappyl 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 pgrams. 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 Durmer? By the way, the editor of Durmer 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 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 fluid things. 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 uh 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 of 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. H what kind of software could be prohibited to mobilize voters? In what democratic system is it ever prohibited to mobilize voters, 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 Shinbet, 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 pag 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 their voting itself is 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 BB'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, Y Netanyahu, who you may have read about. 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. Year Netanyahu, the prime minister's son, spent the bulk of that time in Miami again at nightclubs, etc., etc. 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 Justices 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 Lood 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 wellunded 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 could 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 3 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 or a wise leader, but he is crafty and tougher than most people in politics. And he may wind up 6 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 in our system." And so its defenders will no longer be able to falsely 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 shadow slavery in the United States because child 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 demonstrabably 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 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 Levvin 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 and the United States Senate, and another is the US ambassador to Israel. And there are a whole bunch of them. And of course, you know, our richest class is filled with them. Bill Aman 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 Lood. And as Lud becomes explicitly not simply anti-terror or anti-Hamas, but anti-Arab, including the Arabs who are citizens of their own country, hate them 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 cander 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 the the 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 destroy the state of Israel. Uh openly talks about solidarity with Hamas. Um it's it's kind of an astonishing thing they're allowed to sit in the Knesset in in the first place. The the Supreme Court of Israel, there's been a lot of talk about judicial reform. It seems to me that if the Supreme Court of Israel worth its salt, if you're going to ban the Kahanist, which is totally fine and appropriate, if you're going to ban the Kahanists, 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 seems 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% 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 3 years have been committed by Arabs? Well, some, sure. The majority. Oh no. 30%. 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 been for the last 3 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 Shinbet 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 Cuckabe refers to with dead serious as Judea and Samaria. Really? How many Samaritans are left there? Mike Huckabe, 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 closed 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 besided 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 just 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 that the 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 US ambassador to Israel, as he calls it, Mike Huckabe from Arkansas. And even Mike Huckabe has had is well guys, that's a 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. Now, we're about to show you a video that has not been shown anywhere before. This is something that happened last week in a Westbank town whose name we're not going to tell you, and it happened to a family we're not going to identify. Now, 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 citiz 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