All Episodes
Oct. 6, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
29:22
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Trump Colonizing Gaza.
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom.
Today is Monday, October 6th, 2025.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs will be here with us in just a moment on this neo-colonial deal to give Gaza to Jared Kushner.
But first, this.
My friends, if you care about your liberty and your right to control your own future, you need to hear about this.
From October 10th to 12th, Mikhail Thorpe, host of the Expat Money Show, is bringing together top experts from around the world for the Expat Money Online Summit, and it's completely free to attend.
You'll learn how to legally protect your wealth, secure second residences and citizenships, reduce your tax burden, and own property abroad, all to safeguard your freedom.
This year's focus is on Latin America, where opportunity is booming.
Argentina is shifting to free markets.
El Salvador is undergoing a dramatic transformation.
And Panama and Paraguay are offering simple residency programs.
A plan B is no longer optional.
It's essential.
Reserve your free ticket at expatmone summit.com.
And if you want VIP access with special perks, including lifetime replay access and exclusive VIP panels, use promo code JUDGE for 20% off your upgrade.
That's expatmoneysummit.com.
Promo code Judge.
Professor Sachs, welcome here, uh, my dear friend.
Of course, I was being a little hyperbolic in my uh introduction by uh arguing that this deal is to allow Jared Kushner to uh redevelop uh Gaza into the Trump Gaza.
I mean, at one point the president did explain that.
Let's take a step back.
Why should Hamas negotiate with Israel and the United States?
Israel attempted to kill these very Hamas negotiators in Doha, has killed uh Hezbollah negotiators in Lebanon, and the president of the United States lured Iran into a false belief that they were engaged in serious negotiations right before Israel and the United States bombed.
Who would trust Israel and the United States in a negotiation?
I don't know if anyone would actually trust uh Israel and the United States in a negotiation, but there is and has been for a long time, a strong interest in peace uh with Hamas and a strong interest in peace far more generally with the Arab world.
Actually, despite all of the propaganda we hear in the United States and especially in Israel, the Arabs put together a peace plan back in 2002, which they have reiterated for 23 years.
And their peace plan is straightforward.
It says that there will be normalized relations with Israel and security for Israel, together with a state of Palestine.
That's it.
Everything that has happened since then indeed, everything that has happened since 1996, when Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister
And indeed, everything that has happened since 1967, the Six-Day War, so-called, when Israel occupied all of the Palestinian territories, has been Israel trying to prevent a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel.
And because of that, there has been endless war.
now there is uh mass murder by Israel in Gaza.
But the fact of the matter is that uh what has been on the table for more than 20 years is a straightforward peace proposal.
A state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel and the state of Palestine and the state of Israel living according to international law on the borders of the 4th of June 1967.
This means that Palestine would be constituted of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the capital of the state of Palestine would be in East Jerusalem.
This is uh the right uh endpoint.
This is international law.
This is what the International Court of Justice uh ruled last year is international law.
This is what the UN General Assembly by overwhelming votes year in, year out, has agreed to, and this is what Israel and the United States have blocked until now.
Now, in the General Assembly session of the last couple of weeks, we had a number of countries, including uh France uh and the United Kingdom, and a number of other European countries and uh Australia and countries from other parts of the world recognizing the state of Palestine.
So the peace deal is very clear.
There are only two opponents to it.
One is uh the government of Israel, and the second is uh the subsidiary of the government of Israel called the government of the United States, which does whatever Israel says.
In this context where peace is absolutely desired by virtually every place in the world, and where there is a massacre and mass starvation going on in Gaza, the Trump government facing its isolation, has put forward a plan, a so-called 20-point plan.
But it prevaricates as usual.
It says many right things that the fighting should stop, uh, that there should be an immediate release of the hostages and immediately immediate release of Palestinians uh who are held by Israel, that there should be immediate humanitarian aid, all of that is fine.
But when it comes to every political question, well, it uh basically keeps the colonial structure.
That is the structure put in place by Britain and the United States as the colonial overseers, and now uh enforced by Israel as uh an apartheid state ruling over the Palestinian people.
In other words, it ducks the question of the state of Palestine.
It recognizes uh somewhere uh that yeah, that's an aspiration of the Palestinian people.
Oh uh that we needed a uh president of the United States to tell us in a peace plan that that's an aspiration of the Palestinian people.
Instead, what the plan does, uh, together with these right things, ending starvation, uh ending the fighting, release of the hostages, release of uh Palestinian prisoners uh being held by Israel, all good, it establishes uh another colonial structure, uh that Donald Trump is going to chair, and that Tony Blair is going to sit on.
So it's literally the British American colonial system which has been in place since 1921, when Britain took over Palestine uh after World War One,
and with the United States being the great enforcer, and without any honesty or clarity about the fact that you want peace, you make a state of Palestine, like the whole world wants, other than Israel and its wholly owned subsidiary, the United States.
Isn't it true that Benjamin Netanyahu, who does not want peace, cannot afford peace, would lose his job, his government, and perhaps even his immunity and his freedom if there's peace?
I wouldn't put it exactly that way.
what I would say is that if there is peace with Israeli control over all of Palestine, in other words, if greater Israel is established or what they call Eretz Yisrael HaShlema, greater Israel ruling over all of the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, That's what he wants.
And he'd settle for peace on Israel's terms.
In other words, the Palestinians either die or they go away, or they live under a brutal apartheid regime.
That's what's on offer from Netanyahu and his colleagues, Ben Gavir and Smoturch.
That's literally what is on offer.
I'm not being hyperbolic.
I'm explaining literally what Netanyahu said in the UN General Assembly.
He said there will never be a Palestinian state.
Now, this is odd.
It's not Israel's to veto a Palestinian state.
International law is that Israel is illegally occupying the Palestinian lands.
Already around 155 countries recognize the state of Palestine.
The simple fact is that Netanyahu is simply betting that the United States government will use its veto in the UN and use its military might and its financial wherewithal and its threats to other countries to prevent what international law and the overwhelming majority of the world's people and
the overwhelming majority of the American people, people want, because we should remember Donald Trump is representing not the United States in this, he's representing the Israeli government.
If he would look at his own public, at the American people, Mr. President, if I may address you, uh the opinion of us, the American people, is that the United States and the other countries should recognize a state of Palestine, and that Israel should stop its murderous behavior in Gaza.
This is our will as Americans.
That's in our interest as Americans.
So all that remains for Netanyahu is this slender thread that the Zionist lobby can keep the U.S. president on side, despite the overwhelming sentiment of the American people,
the overwhelming sentiment of the world, international law, repeated votes of the UN General Assembly and the UN Security Council, except for the fact that the U.S. vetoes the resolutions in the UN Security Council.
And that's what Trump has basically written in his 20-point plan.
He's written out a state of Palestine.
Why?
Because when he met with the Arab leaders, they explained to him peace can come, normalization can come with the state of Palestine.
But then the next day, he met with Netanyahu and with Ron Dermer, the uh person who is Netanyahu's uh uh American-born political advisor, and they changed the plan to make sure that it was really a neocolonial plan.
Not only uh dropping the main issue, a state of Palestine as the basis for peace, but then writing in these absurd sections which it looks like a caricature of colonialism.
Uh, if I could just uh read uh uh just a piece of it, uh Point nine of the plan.
Gaza will be governed under the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee responsible for delivering the day-to-day running of public services and municipalities.
The committee will be made up of qualified Palestinians and international experts with oversight and supervision by a new international transitional body, the Board of Peace, which will be headed and chaired by President Donald J. Trump, with other members and heads of state to be announced, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair.
This body will set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza until such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform program as outlined in various proposals, including President Trump's peace plan in 2020, and can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza.
This body will call on best international standards to create modern efficient governance.
A Trump economic development plan, a Trump plan, this is now point 10 to rebuild and energize Gaza is that that's uh the Jared Kushner Riviera plan, no doubt, will be created by convening a panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East.
Many thoughtful investment proposals and exciting development ideas have been crafted by well-meaning international groups and will be considered.
A special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates.
His favorite word, except this means zero tariffs and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.
It's by the way, it's absurd.
It is a caricature of colonialism.
Donald J. Trump is going to chair this committee.
Along with Tony Bear, the Blair, the butcher of Iraq.
Why would uh Hamas accept this?
I don't know what Hamas is going to do.
I can't imagine why any of the countries uh that met with President Trump last week would actually accept this for one moment.
It's absurd.
And I think that it should be understood one very important point.
The Palestinians, despite decades and decades of abuse and occupation and apartheid rule by Israel, have an extremely well-trained professional counter.
Many of them, I don't know if it's most, but many are working in the Gulf countries, in the Middle East, many in the United States, many in Europe.
They've not had a possibility of pursuing their professional lives in occupied Palestine, but they are skilled, they are highly educated, they are great professionals.
The Palestinians don't need the tutelage of Donald J. Trump and Tony Blair.
The Palestinians don't need years of trusteeship.
What is this?
Is this 1920?
Is this the mandate period of Britain?
Or after 120 years, aren't we a little bit beyond such vulgarity and such overt colonialism that Donald J. Trump will govern the board of Gaza?
Come on.
I mean, we don't need colonialism really means subjugation, almost a form of slavery.
Well, of course it does.
And the idea that the Palestinians need years of tutelage before they have self-rule.
Let's just say they've been waiting many, many decades.
And after all of these abuses, they don't need years of tutelage.
They need their sovereignty.
It's very straightforward.
It's not even hard.
But right now, because Israel rules by force and by murder, it turns on and off any financing that goes to the Palestinian authority.
It literally turns on and off the water or the electricity or any other public service.
It completely restricts the freedom of movement of people.
And in Gaza, it was run like a open uh air prison as it was uh widely described.
People could not come and go.
Uh people could not trade, they could not do their business.
We don't need this kind of colonialism.
What we need is a state of Palestine living alongside the state of Israel.
Now, what I did was take the 20-point plan, and I posted uh just uh a few uh changes uh to each of the 20 points to show you could have a 20-point plan that would be perfectly sensible, that Hamas could accept and would accept, and that the Arab countries uh could and would accept, and that the world community could and would accept.
And it says instead of having a governing board of Tony Blair and Donald Trump and others, there would be uh the Palestinian Authority as the government, and there could be an advisory board uh making suggestions.
Donald Trump could sit on the advisory board, that would be just fine.
But the sovereignty would be with the Palestinian people.
Uh, instead of saying that in some future uh there would be uh the possibility of negotiations leading someday somehow to uh perhaps a state of Palestine, as it basically says in Trump's plan, there would be a state of Palestine.
Thank you very much.
It's not hard.
More than 150 countries have already realized that.
The United States is the only veto of that in the whole United Nations, because there was a unanimous vote in the UN Security Council to admit Palestine as the 194th member state, except for the US veto.
There would not be a Donald Trump economic development plan.
Thank you, but no, thank you.
There could be a suggestion, there could be uh advice, there could be other things, but there would be a Palestinian development plan.
Thank you very much.
It's called having sovereignty.
We are not in 1920 or 1820 or 1720.
We are in the year 2025, where colonialism went out of fashion a while ago, and we don't need it back.
That's the basic point.
Your point is so thoughtful.
What incentive is there for Netanyahu to go along with this?
He wants to turn Israel into the size of Texas.
There is uh no uh incentive for Netanyahu to go along with this, but this does not depend on Israel.
You see, international law says that Israel's borders are the 4th of June 1967.
Israel is in illegal occupation of Gaza.
It's destroyed it completely, it's murdered tens of thousands of people, it's starving hundreds of thousands of people, but that's completely illegal.
The reason it gets away with it is the United States enables it every day.
The reason it actually is able to carry out this mass murder is that uh Google and Microsoft and Amazon Cloud Services and Palantir and other American companies are providing the artificial intelligence uh and uh the networking and the cloud services for the Israeli defense forces.
So this is uh a U.S. support.
This isn't a choice of Israel.
Israel has no veto over Palestine becoming a UN member state.
The U.S. has the veto, not Israel.
So this is not something to negotiate with Netanyahu.
This is something to uh make plain that the United States uh is not supporting this genocide or Israel ruling illegally over the Palestinian people anymore.
And there is a plan, by the way, a highly desirable plan for Israel, which is that all of the neighbors would normalize their relations with Israel.
Also, what is in Trump's 20-point plan is fine, that Hamas would be completely demilitarized, that it would not play a role in the government.
This would be actually implementable if the counterpart were not continued Israeli rule, but the counterpart was a state of Palestine.
That's the point.
In other words, if there was a political solution, there could be a political outcome.
But Trump, as usual, evaded every political point and instituted and wants to implement a pure continuation of colonial rule.
So this is the point.
The Arab countries have said since 2002, we normalize.
We make peace.
The Israeli people do not ever hear this.
Because if you think our propaganda is thick, Try Israel's propaganda.
Israelis are told every day, all they want to do is kill you.
I sit with the ambassadors and the foreign ministers.
I listen to the governments.
I talk to the people of the neighboring countries.
I visit the neighboring countries.
It's totally false.
What they want is the wars to stop in their region so that they can have economic development, so they can worry about the water crisis, so that that they can build infrastructure.
That's what they want.
They don't want all these wars all the time.
But Israel has been fomenting wars all the time in order to avoid the obvious state of Palestine, and Donald Trump plays along with this.
Here's what the Prime Minister Netanyahu said yesterday, October 5th, about the real path to peace, Chris cut number three.
If you want a real path to peace, then the Palestinians have to come finally to recognize and accept the existence of a Jewish state in their midst.
And that hasn't happened.
That's why we don't have peace here, because they refuse to, they don't want a state next to Israel.
They want a state instead of Israel.
And once the any territory they get, they used to attack us again and again.
If we don't change that, then uh you know, then this conflict will continue.
If we do, we are able with the plan that we have for the day after Hamas in Gaza.
If we are able to change that, that goes a long way to securing a long-term peace.
Respond to him.
He is an outright liar, period.
Because what the Palestinian and the Arab peace plan and the organization of Islamic cooperation and the UN General Assembly have said and said for years is two states, a state of Palestine and a state of Israel living side by side on the borders of the 4th of June 1967.
And what Netanyahu said last week at the General Assembly, clearly, everybody should read it.
He said, never a state of Palestine, period.
He is a murderer and a liar and a thug.
It's enough.
It's time for two states living side by side as the will of the whole world wants.
And it's time for Donald Trump to be honest and just make it possible for there to be peace and to end These lies of Netanyahu, which are sheer and total lies.
So where do you think this will uh this will go?
How do you think this will end up, Professor Sachs?
Of course, uh, I don't know.
Uh the fact that uh the uh Muslim majority countries met with Donald Trump at the end of last week and said, Thank you, Mr. President, for putting a plan on the table shows how much they want peace.
The fact that uh Trump cheated as usual and then announced a plan, which was not the one that he showed these leaders uh a couple of days later after meeting with Netanyahu and Dermer shows that the United States government remains uh in the uh hands of uh Israel.
Whether Trump uh ever makes America have its own foreign policy, or whether he remains simply subservient uh to uh the Zionist extremism, I don't know.
Uh I don't think there can be peace uh on this absurd basis of Donald J. Trump uh running Gaza.
A shame uh to even suggest such a thing uh in this day and age.
So the question is whether the United States government starts to represent the American people.
And if they do, then the American people want to be together with the rest of the world and with the Palestinian people for two states living side by side.
Professor Sachs, thank you very much.
I know it's been a long day, and it's late where you were, and I appreciate your comedy accommodating my schedule.
This is an intractable problem, and I don't know how it's gonna be resolved because Netanyahu controls Trump.
The Israeli government and their Zionist donors here control the American government.
That is correct.
And uh the day that the United States starts behaving like the United States is the day that we have peace in the Middle East.
Thank you, Professor Sachs.
All the best to you.
We look forward to seeing you again soon, my dear friend.
Thank you.
We'll talk soon.
Thanks for watching.
Thank you.
Export Selection