Editor’s Note: In this episode of Judging Freedom, host Judge Andrew Napolitano welcomes Professor Jeffrey Sachs to unpack the historical and geopolitical factors driving conflict in the Middle East. Sachs offers a critical analysis of Israel’s current foreign policy and military actions, examining why the nation remains perpetually at war with its neighbors. The discussion also delves into the critical role of United States diplomatic and financial backing in shaping these ongoing regional dynamics. (May 29, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
Germany and the Roots of the Ukraine Conflict
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, good day to you, my friend, and thank you very much for double duty this week. Before we get to Israel and its form of government and its bellicosity, you recently published an open letter to the German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz. Why did you do this and what did you tell him?
JEFFREY SACHS: Well, I published it because Europe is in a very, very distorted and dangerous state of mind gearing up for war with Russia. It’s a kind of fervent Russia hatred that is completely irrational and that is completely counter to the historical truths. Germany is key to this. 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.
What I mean by this is that 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, actually, that Germany told already back in the 1990s. Germany wanted reunification in 1990 to reunify what had been a divided Germany after Hitler’s defeat. In 1945 that had a West Germany that was the zones of occupation of the United States, France, and Britain, and an East Germany, which was the zone of occupation of the Soviet Union, the four being the occupying countries that defeated Hitler.
In 1990, Germany asked for reunification. They negotiated with the Soviet Union. 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, because 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, soon after the commitment was made. German businesses said, “Oh, let’s have NATO enlargement, that’ll protect our investments in Central and Eastern Europe.” The United States said, “Well, we have a lot of Polish Americans and a lot of other Central European Americans, and so this is good politics.” 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.
Well, the US and Germany cheated. NATO began to move eastward. The closer it got to Russia’s borders, the more clear were Russia’s red lines. There were two big waves of NATO enlargement, first in 1999, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Poland. The Russians swallowed hard, 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, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and two further states, Slovakia and Slovenia, seven in all.
The Russians were furious. And they said, “Don’t you try anymore.” And in 2007, President Putin put down the Russian red line, “Stop, don’t even dream of coming to our border.” In Ukraine or Georgia, Georgia being a country in the South Caucasus region of Asia, by the way, not even of Europe.
Well, the United States being the US doesn’t hear a word, never respects anyone else. And so, “We don’t care what you say, Mr. Putin.” And in 2008, at the Bucharest NATO summit, the United States pushed through a NATO commitment that indeed 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. And so it pushed.
But the point of my open letter was Germany should know it cheated because Germany wasn’t a passive actor in this. And on many other occasions that I detail in my letter, Germany cheated. Germany negotiated the Minsk II 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. And there are many other episodes that I recall in my letter.
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. You’re talking about 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? Shame. Especially when it’s not this, “We’re so pure and they’re so evil,” when history shows that situation’s a little bit more complicated than that. So that’s why I published the open letter. Needless to say, Chancellor Merz has not exactly called me or sent me a letter.
Europe’s Warmongers and the Failure of Democracy
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: You answered my next question.
We’re going to jump to Israel in a minute, but I realize that popularity can change overnight, but his approval ratings make Donald Trump’s look good.
JEFFREY SACHS: The fact of the matter is all the warmongers in Europe are completely unpopular. They’re doing things their public does not want, right? They’re arming and they’re cutting social spending. They are provoking war and the people want peace. And so Macron and Merz and Starmer, they’re rock bottom in approval ratings.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right.
JEFFREY SACHS: But we don’t act democratically, just like in our country. We’re at war in Iran that the American people absolutely are against. Absolutely. But where is democracy in our country? Where’s our Congress even? It barely exists. Barely exists.
Is Israel a Liberal Democracy?
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Is Israel a liberal democracy?
JEFFREY SACHS: No. Israel has rudiments of democracy if you are a Jew in Israel. 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. And 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 standards of Israel, which is a completely racist standard, which is that the Arab people don’t count, or they’re animals, or they’re vermin to be exterminated. If you count the Arab people, the Palestinians, as human beings, then of course it’s not a democracy. Half the public, or even more, of what Israel calls Israel is non-Jews, and they have no rights. And Israel declares itself a Jewish state when half the public or more is not Jewish.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Could a Catholic become — obviously this is hypothetical — could a Catholic become the prime minister of Israel?
JEFFREY SACHS: I don’t know, but it’s called a Jewish state. And by the way, that means two things. One is it’s saying inside Jews are supreme. This is a supremacist state. And in fact, one of the key ministers, the Minister of National Security, Ben-Gvir, heads a party called Jewish Power, Otsma Yehudit. So 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.
Can the United States Restrain Israel?
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: To Iran, Professor Sachs, will the United States enter into an agreement with Iran that fails to restrain Israel? Will Iran enter into an agreement with the United States that fails to restrain Israel? Can Donald Trump restrain Israel?
JEFFREY SACHS: First of all, I’ll start with the last one because the answer is yes. 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.
Well, does the President of the United States have to abide by that? 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.
For Israel to be this country at war across a region where it’s outnumbered multiples of time, 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. And so no, 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 and its vendettas and its invasions and its wars and its fighting and its occupation of Lebanon and Syria and its fighting in Yemen and its war with Iran and its gains in Africa without the United States fully partnering in this.
Why Is Israel Perpetually at War?
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Why is Israel seemingly perpetually at war with countries that are around it?
JEFFREY SACHS: Israel’s perpetually at war because it is making the most maximalist demands that it can. And in that, it is supported by American Christian Zionists, like the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee.
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, and we have the right not to be part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. We have no constraint or controls on our nuclear weapons, but we’ll kill anyone that tries to do anything remotely like that, even countries that deny they want to do that. We’ll kill them anyway if we decide so. And we reserve the right to assassinate anyone in our region that we think supports the Palestinian cause.”
So this is called Greater Israel. 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 Netanyahu saying, “Ah, 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%.” 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.
Greater Israel and the Likud Charter
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Is that the public policy of Israel?
JEFFREY SACHS: It may be the public policy of the United States, for all I know. It’s hard to know. Israel doesn’t define any borders. It never has, by the way. It’s always looking for more.
And the party that Netanyahu leads, just to be clear, the Likud Party — which actually, I hate to say it, I don’t want to be misinterpreted, I was going to say it even looks moderate compared to the parties of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, whose partners in government are two of the absolutely 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, the 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. Now, this is very interesting. 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, it will go into their houses, it will burn their houses down, it will shoot them, it will terrorize them. It will hang them for crimes under Israeli law that apply only to the Palestinian people.
So this is what Israel is saying. And when the chant, “From the river to the sea,” is cracked down on in the United States as an anti-Israel chant, that’s the charter of the Likud. “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. It kills them indiscriminately. It expropriates them. It expels them. It terrorizes them. And this is our ally in this. 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.
Netanyahu’s 70% Claim and the Book of Joshua
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: We have the clip of Prime Minister Netanyahu talking about 70% that you just mentioned. Before I run it, when Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz both told Tucker Carlson, “From the river to the sea,” we just laughed at the absurdity of it. And the two of them said this is because God the Father gave them this land. But they actually believe that and are willing to kill to bring it about. That’s what you’re telling us.
JEFFREY SACHS: This is their operational charter right now. A book from the 6th century BC, actually, probably the 7th century BC, the Book of Joshua, which is so extraordinary and fascinating to talk about. Because the Book of 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.
So 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, to kill them. This is in the Book of Joshua.
Now, the interesting thing, the ironic thing, is these genocides didn’t happen in history. From all that one can gather from the archaeologists and the biblical specialists that have looked at this, the record is that that didn’t happen. This is some boastful book from the 7th century BC that’s written in the style of Assyrian conquest boasts. So it’s part of the local, actually local politics of the region from the time of King Josiah around 620 BC. It’s bizarre. But in any event, this is taken as the literal text for mass murder today.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right.
JEFFREY SACHS: And then, of course, we have other completely bizarre things, I’m sorry to say. And a lot of—
Netanyahu Video Clip: Controlling Gaza
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Let’s— yeah, let’s watch Netanyahu and try and listen to what the audience shouts back at him.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Right now, we’re in a process where our power, we can leverage our power in multiple directions. We’ll still need to crush Hezbollah. At the moment, we’re crushing Hamas.
JEFFREY SACHS: Yes.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: We now control 60% of the Gaza Strip. You know, we were at 50. Now we’ve moved to 60. The second objective is to move from 100. No, go in order.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: First of all, the 7th. Let’s start with that.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: We’re crushing them from all. We’ll deal with the rest accordingly.
VIDEO CLIP ENDS:
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: This is an AI translation, but a reliable one. And you heard the interjection of 100. Isn’t there a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza? For which President Trump has taken credit as the negotiator and fomenter?
A Murder State: The Ongoing Genocide
JEFFREY SACHS: We’re in, of course, 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. And I’m sorry to say that it’s a terrible truth. The genocide that the Nazis committed, they hid from view. 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 making crimes in the dark. They’re making crimes that they boast about and smirk at and think that they have the U.S. completely in their hands.
And maybe they do. Maybe they do. We don’t know. We don’t know whether President Trump is— he said he could run for head of Israel. Maybe, maybe that’s what he is. Maybe he just serves Israel. 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’s committing. And as an American Jew, I can tell you lots of American Jews are despising what Israel’s 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. And this is the truth. And where are we in this country? Well, the American people are on the right side of this. Where is our president, the one who said America first? Well, show us, Mr. President, because America does not want to be party to this mass murder and this ongoing war.
Closing Remarks
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, thank you very much. Appreciate so much the history as well as the analysis of the contemporary events. And of course, you know I love your passion on all these things. Thank you, Jeff. We’ll look forward to seeing you next week, early next week. Have a nice weekend.
JEFFREY SACHS: Thank you.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Thank you. I’m coming up later today at 4 o’clock this afternoon, the Intelligence Community Roundtable with Larry Johnson, Ray McGovern, and Scott Ritter. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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