Oct. 9, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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| Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. | |
| Today is Thursday, October 9th, 2025. | |
| Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now. | |
| Professor Sachs, thank you very much. | |
| Double duty this week. | |
| And I know it's late in the day where you are very much appreciated. | |
| Let's get right to this. | |
| What is your take on the Donald Trump, Steve Whitkoff, Jared Kushner, Tony Blair, Gaza Plan? | |
| Well, uh, apparently uh there will be a ceasefire that could be a sustained ceasefire. | |
| Um, and that is very good news. | |
| Maybe the fighting is going to stop. | |
| Uh Israel has uh murdered uh sixty-seven thousand people uh since uh it um attacked Gaza on October 8th following uh the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. | |
| Sixty-seven thousand people is a lot. | |
| Uh it has starved uh hundreds of thousands of people uh as well and many children dying uh just uh on a uh daily basis right now because of starvation. | |
| So maybe this will end with a ceasefire, uh a uh an exchange of hostages uh held uh in Gaza by Hamas and other militia forces and hostages held by Israel in much larger numbers, | |
| uh hostages uh seized by Israel in Gaza and uh other Palestinians as well, uh maybe up to two thousand will be released in this deal. | |
| This is said to be the end of the fighting. | |
| Maybe uh Israel has exhausted itself, it certainly has uh exhausted the patience of the world with this uh mass genocidal bloodletting that it has uh been on for the last two years. | |
| Now all the rest of the so-called peace plan is not agreed. | |
| It will never be agreed. | |
| Uh we're only after the fighting stops going to enter into the real politics of this. | |
| Uh and the politics are very straightforward. | |
| Uh, Israel with U.S. backing has rejected a state of Palestine for decades. | |
| The world community overwhelmingly for decades has called for a state of Palestine. | |
| Uh, the UN General Assembly by massive votes with more than ninety percent of the world community in countries voting yes, have called for a state of Palestine on multiple occasions in recent years, including just a couple of weeks ago. | |
| This plan, so-called, isn't really a plan beyond what has happened today, or apparently will happen in these hours. | |
| Uh there's a lot of gobbledygook, but there's no resolution of the core political issues. | |
| Uh, there's a lot of uh spin and fluff and bluff, uh, and uh Donald Trump uh to be uh king of the Palestinians uh and uh lots of weird things that aren't going to happen. | |
| The question is, will there be a state of Palestine? | |
| Uh will the United States uh try as it has for decades to uh divide uh suppress scare bribe twist arms of the Arab world to uh Israel's will, | |
| uh, or will the Arab world finally, after basically a century of abuse by the British and the Americans starting uh at the end of World War One, uh until today, will the Arab world finally stand up and say enough is enough. | |
| Uh we're not going to be uh bullied, uh bribed, uh twisted uh again uh with uh yet another defeat of basic political rights of the Palestinian people. | |
| So all of that is to come. | |
| Today, it appears uh maybe there's uh enough exhaustion, enough disgust, enough uh global pressure uh that Israel's uh genocide uh is ending today, at least we have to hope so. | |
| Prime Minister uh Netanyahu's goal, of course, has been the eradication of the Palestinian people from Gaza. | |
| Hamas's goal has been to survive and stay relevant. | |
| Uh many of your colleagues on this show uh today who share your and my and our viewers' views of the uh genocide have said this is a setback for Netanyahu. | |
| Hamas survives, something he vowed would never happen. | |
| Do you view that this way? | |
| Can you see it through that lens, Professor Sachs? | |
| I never really thought uh this uh had uh much to do with Hamas. | |
| That was a convenient uh bumper sticker for a genocidal uh maniac uh driving uh his uh military through Gaza on mass on a mass murder campaign. | |
| Uh Hamas is uh one of the militant groups that has been fighting Israel's occupation of Palestine. | |
| It's one of them uh in the context of a state of Palestine really being created alongside Israel on the borders of the 4th of June 1967, that is, with a real state of Palestine being created according to international law and the will of the international community, Hamas would not be an obstacle to peace. | |
| It's not an independent actor. | |
| It gets funded and it gets armed by those who are calling for a state of Palestine. | |
| If a state of Palestine is actually achieved, uh Hamas does not play uh any central role in this drama. | |
| Uh so I think all of this uh incessant focus on Hamas has been uh kind of a talisman or a way for Israel to talk itself into uh a flagrant open genocide of the Palestinian people. | |
| Why is Jared Kushner involved? | |
| Is he going to become the developer of Trump Riviera? | |
| That's what he does for a living, is huge upscale billion-dollar, well-financed real estate developments. | |
| Everything's possible in our weird world. | |
| We have more flagrant corruption, self-dealing, insider dealing, uh, that uh basically goes without notice in this world. | |
| Just about everyone swarming around uh the Trump world uh operates with uh insider dealing, corruption, nepotism, uh maybe different flavors for different people. | |
| But that's par for the course of the Trump White House. | |
| Uh everybody understands it. | |
| It's surely disgusting if we lived in a normal time and had a normal country, which we don't have anymore, alas, uh, none of this would happen. | |
| So, yes, uh lots of people are no doubt scheming one way or another. | |
| How can they get rich uh on the back of a mass murder. | |
| Uh lots of American companies have gotten quite rich, by the way, uh selling uh cloud services and AI and uh genocidal targeting to the Israeli defense forces. | |
| So this has been this has been a good year uh for Silicon Valley, which is all over uh this mass murder in Gaza. | |
| No doubt Jared Diamond wants to, and Jared Kushner wants to uh um build uh build build things too, and uh no doubt there are a lot of other grifters and crooks around who will want to take advantage. | |
| Well, what what I what I think though is important is it's just actually possible that something better happens and that it's not uh dictated any longer by a pathetic United States, not just the Trump White House, but a United States, which for decades uh has uh abetted Israel's uh extremism. | |
| Maybe this will end, not because the United States is any better, certainly not because Israel has any self-reflection, but truly the whole rest of the world is just disgusted by Israel, just disgusted by what has happened. | |
| You have marches uh all over Europe uh of uh hundreds of thousands of people in Amsterdam, uh in uh Italy, uh, as uh I arrived here to uh see uh uh a national strike in essence in favor of the Palestinians. | |
| This is happening all over the world, and this is what might change things, not uh Jared Kushner or Donald Trump. | |
| So why I think excuse me. | |
| Why would any Middle Eastern group, Palestinian or otherwise, trust Netanyahu and the uh Israelis to comply with this? | |
| Why would the why would Hamas, I know you think Hamas is not the most significant player here, but why would whoever is negotiating in behalf of the Gazans give up their leverage because of a promise from Netanyahu. | |
| He isn't not only the world's great monster, he's the world's great liar. | |
| Well the one that uh one can question about trust is uh the is the United States uh because nobody trusts Netanyahu. | |
| Uh Hamas or anybody else is not acting uh on the basis of trust of Netanyahu. | |
| You can be absolutely sure of that. | |
| Uh the agreement that has been reached has been reached with the United States, Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, uh, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, uh, and other countries. | |
| Now, the United States uh cheats all the time, and it could cheat again, but Hamas is basically uh I I think not only uh exhausted uh because of mass slaughter, and the Palestinians actually want something to eat before uh the mass starvation carries them away. | |
| So they want the fighting to stop. | |
| But they're hoping uh for the fact that this isn't a matter of trust with Netanyahu, it's not a deal with Netanyahu, uh, and it's not really a deal only with the United States. | |
| They're trusting that with the countries that I mentioned, Egypt and Turkey and uh Qatar and uh Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and others uh as signing on to this, that at least the fighting will stop. | |
| That's what they're counting on. | |
| They're not disarming right now, so they're not giving it full trust in any way. | |
| There's no political agreement in any of this. | |
| This is a call to stop the bloodletting. | |
| One hint that may play some role here uh is the fact that early on the Israelis uh decided that they would commit mass slaughter, and they would commit mass slaughter to terrorize the people of Gaza and perhaps uh make them flee uh so that they could continue their permanent rule. | |
| And the uh former head of the Israeli military intelligence uh actually said, and he was caught on tape, and it became quite notorious, or maybe not notorious because nothing's notorious in Israel, but it became discussed in Israel in recent months. | |
| He said at the beginning that for every Israeli that died, 50 Palestinians should be killed. | |
| And according to standard counts, uh between 1,200 and 1,300 Israelis died one way or another from the October 7th attack. | |
| And if you multiply the 50 to 1 ratio, uh you reach uh a uh uh a targeted death toll by these mass murderers of something around 64,000 deaths. | |
| Well, they reached that number in the last few weeks. | |
| So maybe they calculate that their mass bloodletting has uh uh been accomplished, uh, and uh now there's no more purpose to continue bloodletting. | |
| It could actually be this, because this 50 to 2 was uh widely discussed, and there's a certain primitiveness in the Israeli mentality, I have to say. | |
| Uh there's a certain degree to which uh Israel acts uh like a 10th century BC uh theocratic state. | |
| And we know from the Old Testament that uh that uh state committed to repeated genocides. | |
| And I think uh a lot of uh Israeli leaders uh think in that primitive way. | |
| And so this may be an explanation also. | |
| The bloodletting went on, the 50 to 1 ratio was reached, uh, and so why not stop? | |
| And we don't really know why, because uh the thousands and tens of thousands of deaths had no purpose either. | |
| Right. | |
| This ceasefire could have been reached two years ago. | |
| Uh Netanyahu actually said that Hamas uh as a fighting force was uh basically uh ended uh soon after the Israeli invasion of Gaza. | |
| So most of what has happened since then has been a sheer bloodletting. | |
| Uh and it's vile, it's repulsive, it's genocidal, it's against international law, but maybe it was following a 50 to 1 formula, and they filled their quote of uh death. | |
| Uh we are running a poll. | |
| Do you believe this plan, the ceasefire slash peace plan holds? | |
| Yes, no undecided. | |
| You got a few more minutes to vote on before Professor Sachs and I part ways for the day. | |
| I'll uh give you the results of the poll. | |
| How has Israel suffered in the past two years? | |
| How is it different today, October 9th, 2025, than it was on October 6th, 2023? | |
| I think the uh the tragic part for us and for Israel is uh a lot of Israeli society has really become deranged. | |
| Uh the mindset and the mentality uh has been uh kind of bloodlust. | |
| Uh so Netanyahu in some ways acted against public opinion because he did not pursue the release of the remaining Israeli hostages uh with uh any care. | |
| He was much more interested in genocide than he was in getting the hostages released. | |
| But there is, I'm sorry to say it, no evidence uh that in Israeli society there has been any widespread concern about the genocide itself. | |
| Uh all of the rhetoric and the attention and the focus and the marches have been about, say, the 20 remaining uh Israeli hostages. | |
| Uh Israel holds uh at least 2,000 uh Palestinian hostages, by the way. | |
| No one in Israel would care at all about this, but there's been almost no uh discussion in Israeli society about the mass killing of Palestinians. | |
| To me, this is the number one fact of the last couple of years. | |
| There's been not a moment in that I have seen of Israel coming to grips with its uh murderous approach and the fact that it has become a despised nation in the world for understandable reasons. | |
| This is not understood at all. | |
| Of course, the costs of war, the dislocations, the hundreds of thousands of people uh from Israel who have left the country who see no future there. | |
| Those are very heavy costs. | |
| But for me, the societal costs of uh a country that uh cheered on a genocide and to this moment can't reflect honestly on it, is tragic beyond measure for what it means for that society. | |
| I don't want to compare it with the actual suffering of the Palestinians, which is vastly greater, but for Israel, it's uh a kind of uh destruction of Israel as a normal society. | |
| It will take years or decades to overcome this, and there's not even uh a start of that at this moment. | |
| Do you think that Netanyahu willingly accepted this deal? | |
| Do you think his cabinet will accept it? | |
| Do you think Smotric and Gavir and the fanatic right wingers will accept it? | |
| Well, I think again, it's important to distinguish two very different things. | |
| One is uh a stopping of the fighting right now, the release of the hostages, uh emergency aid before there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people starving to death. | |
| I think that there's a reasonable chance that this can go into effect. | |
| Then there is the rest about the future. | |
| I think there's no chance that the rest can go into effect because the rest of this 20-point plan is uh a bunch of nonsense, actually. | |
| It's not a plan at all. | |
| It's not been agreed by anybody. | |
| There's only one way to have peace. | |
| If you want it right now, if you want peace, it is what the overwhelming majority of the international uh world, uh, the international community has said, and the international court of justice and decades of international law, and that is a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel. | |
| By the way, many people say, why should there ever be that there should be one state uh because Israel, you know, has uh proven itself incapable of being a civil society and so forth. | |
| All I would say is if people believe in that, perfectly understandable that people would have that view. | |
| I don't object to it in some principal way. | |
| I just don't think that it is at all what can bring peace. | |
| There are 8 million Israeli Jews right now, there are 8 million Palestinian Arabs. | |
| They each need their place to live and trust and living together. | |
| God help us, it should come, but it's gonna take years or decades. | |
| But right now, we need peace and we need Israel to end its slaughter and its repression of the Palestinian people. | |
| And the one thing that is immediately at hand is the fact, as I've said, that more than 90% of the world is in countries that say, two states, do it now, we know the borders, that's international law. | |
| That could happen tomorrow if Trump would change American policy. | |
| Uh the big if, if the United States could have its own foreign policy. | |
| That's what we're really waiting for. | |
| And so if you ask me, will today ceasefire hold for a while? | |
| It could. | |
| But it's not a peace plan. | |
| Let's have no confusion about that. | |
| And the next steps depend on real politics and depend on the world will and international law prevailing over the United States being in the hands of the Zionist lobby. | |
| This is what it's going to take to bring peace. | |
| Right. | |
| Before I let you go, the results of the poll. | |
| Do you believe this plan holds? | |
| Yes, six percent. | |
| Undecided, 12%. | |
| No, 82%, Professor Sachs. | |
| Surprised? | |
| Again, we have to check the semantics. | |
| Could the fighting stop for a while? | |
| I think it can. | |
| Is this a plan for peace? | |
| Of course not. | |
| It's not even a plan. | |
| So in that sense, uh, your voters, your viewers are very well informed indeed and are on the have the right understanding. | |
| But at least a temporary peace gives us the chance to get American foreign policy back in American hands. | |
| Thank you, Professor Sachs. | |
| I know it's late in the day where you are, and I know this is your second time around with us. | |
| But uh always a pleasure. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Everybody deeply appreciates it. | |
| All the best. | |
| We'll see you next week. | |
| Great. | |
| Thanks a lot. | |
| Thank you, my friend. | |
| Coming up tomorrow Friday, the end of the day, the end of the week, the intelligence community roundtable, Larry Johnson, Ray McGovern, 4:30 in the afternoon. |
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