Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : No Peace Without a Free Palestine
Aired: 2026-04-12
Duration: 32:27


=== Derailing Agreements (12:16) ===

[00:00:03]  Undeclared wars are commonplace.
[00:00:06]  Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people.
[00:00:14]  Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government.
[00:00:19]  To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.
[00:00:27]  What if sometimes, to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government?
[00:00:32]  What if Jefferson was right?
[00:00:34]  What if that government is best which governs least?
[00:00:38]  What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong?
[00:00:42]  What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave?
[00:00:48]  What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?
[00:01:02]  Hi, everyone.
[00:01:03]  Jandra Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
[00:01:07]  Today is Monday, April 13th, 2026.
[00:01:10]  Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now.
[00:01:12]  Professor Sachs, I know it's late at night where you are.
[00:01:16]  Thank you very much for taking the time to join us.
[00:01:19]  Was the 21 hour marathon, so called negotiating session in Islamabad this past weekend, a negotiation or a farce?
[00:01:31]  It was clearly a farce.
[00:01:33]  Donald Trump explained, I don't want 90%.
[00:01:36]  I don't want 95%.
[00:01:38]  I want 100%.
[00:01:39]  100%.
[00:01:42]  It's not negotiation, especially when your 100% makes no sense.
[00:01:47]  And so this is not negotiation.
[00:01:50]  This is still the fantasy of Donald Trump having total control over the world.
[00:01:59]  And I suppose that Vice President Vance was sent there to explain to the Iranians, sorry, we have total control over the world.
[00:02:08]  Here are our demands.
[00:02:10]  Vance, if I'm quoting him correctly, I'm not absolutely sure because I've been traveling the last day, I believe said they didn't agree to our demands.
[00:02:18]  I think he used that phrase.
[00:02:20]  But in any event, that's what this was a list of U.S. demands.
[00:02:26]  After Iran had been bombed by the United States and Israel, in which thousands have been killed, in which vast damage has been done, there wasn't exactly An apology for these war crimes that the United States and Israel have committed.
[00:02:47]  There wasn't any exploration of issues.
[00:02:49]  There was a set of demands.
[00:02:52]  So, what is truly remarkable is how even a two week ceasefire is far beyond the capacity of this man.
[00:03:04]  We have the most incapacitated, incompetent president of American history.
[00:03:11]  He can't even keep a ceasefire for two days.
[00:03:14]  And that is his.
[00:03:16]  Incapacity.
[00:03:19]  The humiliation of JD Vance continues.
[00:03:22]  I mean, during the 21 hours, he took or initiated 11 phone calls from Trump.
[00:03:32]  He took or initiated a call from the head of state of Israel, who, of course, wants to trash the negotiations.
[00:03:42]  And his friend Viktor Orban, for whom he had campaigned in English in Hungary for three days, was defeated.
[00:03:50]  So it wasn't a good Weak for him, but I often wonder if Trump wanted Vance to fail so that Trump could swoop in, cut some deal, and claim credit for it.
[00:04:04]  But this was no serious negotiation if there was no give and take.
[00:04:12]  Also, there has been no serious negotiation for years.
[00:04:18]  There was a serious negotiation now 12 years ago.
[00:04:24]  It ended up in a serious agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, which the United States ratified in 2015 and which the UN Security Council unanimously adopted, which aligned with the Iranian commitment to no nuclear weapons by Opening up Iran to rigorous inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
[00:04:52]  It was trashed by Trump at Netanyahu's urging in 2018 because Netanyahu and Trump, as his partner, as his vassal, as his blackmail Lee, who knows, whatever it is, they don't want.
[00:05:15]  An agreement with Iran.
[00:05:17]  They want to overthrow the Iranian government.
[00:05:21]  This is different.
[00:05:22]  They want complete power in Iran.
[00:05:26]  That's what the events of recent weeks have all been about.
[00:05:31]  So, negotiation has been phony for all of the period of Trump.
[00:05:39]  And last year, there were negotiations that culminated in the U.S. Israeli bombing.
[00:05:46]  Of Iran.
[00:05:48]  And I had one glimpse of that when I said, it's not right for Israel to attack in the middle of this.
[00:05:58]  This before the United States joined, and the American interlocutor said, why not?
[00:06:03]  Why not?
[00:06:05]  Showing the complete phony, disdainful American approach.
[00:06:14]  But it wasn't about negotiations.
[00:06:17]  The Iranians came back.
[00:06:21]  Why?
[00:06:22]  Because they somehow believe that there must be some glimmer of truth and sanity in the U.S.
[00:06:31]  They said, we'll try again after we were bombed the first time.
[00:06:35]  This time, when they were making progress, rapid, dramatic progress in the negotiation, as explained by the Omani mediator, it was the next day when the Iranians met to discuss The next step of the negotiations that was to take place in Vienna in the following week that Mossad said, they're all together.
[00:07:01]  Let's kill them all.
[00:07:03]  And Trump said, that's a wonderful idea.
[00:07:07]  Let's kill them all.
[00:07:09]  How funny.
[00:07:10]  Isn't that clever?
[00:07:11]  We've got them all together.
[00:07:12]  Now we'll kill them all.
[00:07:14]  The ones we're negotiating with.
[00:07:16]  This is just, we're having such a great time here.
[00:07:19]  And that's how all of this started this time.
[00:07:23]  What we know.
[00:07:25]  From one account after the next, now is that this is literally a one man show because Vance doesn't believe in it.
[00:07:39]  He's been quoted as saying, I don't agree with you.
[00:07:42]  I don't agree with this, Mr. President, but I'll support you.
[00:07:45]  That is a widely repeated quotation.
[00:07:49]  The CIA and the intelligence agencies did not agree, the diplomats did not agree.
[00:07:56]  Joe Kent, who was head of counterintelligence, said that this was all phony.
[00:08:03]  The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the military did not agree.
[00:08:09]  But Trump did it.
[00:08:12]  It's one person in our country.
[00:08:16]  And on the other side, it seems to be two.
[00:08:19]  I don't really know who runs Israel, whether it's Netanyahu or the head of Mossad, but the two come together.
[00:08:26]  But here, it's one.
[00:08:29]  And Trump has brought the world to this disaster.
[00:08:37]  And he can't lay it off on anyone else.
[00:08:41]  It's him.
[00:08:43]  Everyone else around the room was snickering, laughing to themselves, thinking this is farcical.
[00:08:51]  This is listen to Netanyahu.
[00:08:54]  They knew, but Trump, he's stupid.
[00:08:57]  I'm sorry.
[00:08:58]  He's stupid.
[00:08:59]  He's just, he doesn't understand.
[00:09:01]  This is clear.
[00:09:03]  It's maybe a category that's not easy to process.
[00:09:07]  He doesn't understand.
[00:09:10]  So Netanyahu fed him.
[00:09:12]  a bunch of BS, and this is why we are at war right now.
[00:09:20]  And what is amazing to me, you know, our dear friend, and he's brilliant, John Mearsheimer wrote an important book last year called How States Think.
[00:09:31]  And the point of his book with his co author is that governments have processes.
[00:09:38]  So you might not agree with all that they decide, but the argument that John makes is that governments are rational.
[00:09:47]  But he cites examples.
[00:09:50]  Where governments are not rational.
[00:09:53]  One of them was George W. Bush Jr. taking us to war against Iraq in March 2003, because that was not a war on mistaken premises of weapons of mass destruction.
[00:10:06]  That was a war based on public relations claiming weapons of mass destruction that the insiders knew did not exist.
[00:10:16]  So it was a war on false pretenses, not on wrong pretenses.
[00:10:21]  So John says, well, that's a case of irrationality.
[00:10:25]  Well, we're in a case of hyper irrationality right now.
[00:10:30]  There are not processes at play in our government.
[00:10:34]  This is not a process.
[00:10:36]  You get into the room, it's Trump, it's Vance, okay?
[00:10:43]  It's Witkoff, sorry, his real estate buddy.
[00:10:50]  It's Kushner, his son in law.
[00:10:54]  It is a few other officials.
[00:10:57]  There's no process.
[00:10:59]  There's no documentation.
[00:11:01]  There's no accountability.
[00:11:03]  Those who don't agree are just kept out of the room entirely.
[00:11:08]  There's no interagency examination of options.
[00:11:13]  There is no consultation with Congress.
[00:11:16]  And our Congress is so completely pathetic.
[00:11:22]  And in this case, I really mean the Republicans.
[00:11:25]  I'm not partisan, but watching the behavior where the Republicans say, we want to have nothing.
[00:11:32]  To do with this, we don't have, we don't want to take oversight.
[00:11:36]  Uh, we don't want a war powers resolution.
[00:11:39]  We don't want to know.
[00:11:40]  We leave it to King Donald.
[00:11:43]  This is how completely collapsed our processes are.
[00:11:48]  So if you have a president who is mentally unstable, not smart, delusional at this stage, and you have a Netanyahu who is a pretty hardened war criminal who, as he's told us, has dreamt for 40 years of this war.
[00:12:08]  This is where we're at right now.
[00:12:12]  Netanyahu will do everything he can to see to it that negotiations don't work.

=== Land Peace Vision (04:12) ===

[00:12:19]  The moment the ceasefire comes, they carpet bomb Beirut.
[00:12:24]  The moment.
[00:12:26]  Not to say, let's give this a moment, let's see what happens.
[00:12:31]  The idea from the first moment is to derail any kind of agreement.
[00:12:38]  Israel does not want.
[00:12:41]  Peace.
[00:12:42]  It wants to overthrow the Iranian government.
[00:12:46]  This is straightforward, obvious, and admitted.
[00:12:52]  Why we are party to this?
[00:12:54]  That's because we have a completely broken down government.
[00:12:59]  How critical to all of this is the freedom of the Palestinian people, the existence of a free state of Palestine?
[00:13:11]  The whole story of the modern Middle East, which is a story of war that stretches from Libya to Sudan, Somalia, Gaza, the West Bank,
[00:13:26]  Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran, that whole story traces back directly to the question of Palestine.
[00:13:42]  This is very basic and very important to understand.
[00:13:47]  Netanyahu leads a political movement that from 1977, when it was founded onward, and what it said in its founding charter, this is the Likud party, Israel's sovereignty, sovereignty will extend from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.
[00:14:08]  What that means for everybody is no Palestine anywhere to be seen.
[00:14:14]  Israel will rule over the entire Any discussion of a state of Palestine alongside a state of Israel will be opposed.
[00:14:26]  When Netanyahu came into power in 1996, he and his American Zionist neocons, people in high positions in the U.S. government or who would be in high positions in the U.S. government, concocted what they called the clean break idea.
[00:14:48]  Clean break meant a break from the idea of, quote, land for peace.
[00:14:53]  That idea is international law.
[00:14:55]  Israel leaves the areas that it occupied in the 1967 war in return for peace.
[00:15:02]  So it's called land for peace.
[00:15:05]  That land becomes a state of Palestine next to the state of Israel.
[00:15:10]  But for Netanyahu, that's impossible.
[00:15:13]  So there's a clean break with land for peace.
[00:15:18]  And Netanyahu, To his evil credit, he recognized that that position is so inimical to the rights and interests of the Palestinian people and to the beliefs of the world that there would be militant opposition to it.
[00:15:38]  And by the way, armed struggle in defense of political self determination has been proclaimed to be legitimate in the United Nations for decades.
[00:15:51]  The point is, Netanyahu knew that there would be opposition, even armed opposition.
[00:15:57]  And then Netanyahu said, We don't have to fight those militias or paramilitaries or Palestinian movements.
[00:16:06]  We need to overthrow the governments in the Middle East that are supporting them.
[00:16:12]  So, ladies and gentlemen, when you see wars across the Middle East, these are Netanyahu's wars to overthrow governments that have supported The Palestinian cause, the cause of a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel.

=== Covert Regime Change (14:29) ===

[00:16:32]  And that meant overthrowing the Libyan government in 2011.
[00:16:37]  It meant that Israel was deeply involved, if you can believe this, that they have this time on their hands to support an insurgency in southern Sudan, to create a civil war in Sudan, to bring down the Sudan.
[00:16:55]  government.
[00:16:56]  We don't think of Israel as part of the South Sudan insurgency, but that was part of their strategy.
[00:17:05]  This is what is taking place in Gaza.
[00:17:08]  This is what is taking place in the West Bank right now.
[00:17:12]  This is what took place in Syria.
[00:17:15]  What took place in Syria was a war launched by Barack Obama on the same principle on behalf of Israel to overthrow Bashar al Assad, who was the leader of Syria.
[00:17:30]  Why?
[00:17:31]  Because Assad was supportive of the Palestinian cause, so he had to be gotten rid of.
[00:17:38]  So in 2012, Obama signed a presidential finding called Operation Timber Sycamore, which assigned the CIA the responsibility to overthrow Bashar al Assad.
[00:17:53]  It was 13 years of bloody war, hundreds of thousands dead.
[00:18:00]  It's called a covert regime change operation in polite company, not so polite.
[00:18:08]  2003, same story.
[00:18:11]  Everyone can go online and find in October 2002, Netanyahu testifying in Congress of how brilliant and wonderful and easy and inspiring it will be for the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
[00:18:28]  And it was going to lead to an uprising in Iran that was going to show the way to freedom.
[00:18:35]  The man has been filled with this murderous BS for decades, and the U.S. has been a party to it for decades.
[00:18:46]  And that's the story we're in till now.
[00:18:49]  They don't negotiate because they don't want to negotiate.
[00:18:54]  And there is one more point that's important to understand.
[00:18:59]  Israel wants hegemony, military dominance over the Middle East.
[00:19:07]  The United States has long wanted, insisted on, and believed in U.S. dominance over the world.
[00:19:16]  In Trump's simpleton mind, this is a very personalized thing.
[00:19:21]  Trump was going to choose the next leader of Iran.
[00:19:24]  Trump was going to take their oil and make so much money.
[00:19:30]  Part of the Iran story for the United States is that the Iranians had the gall to escape from American hegemony.
[00:19:39]  You see, in 1953, the CIA and Britain's MI6 conspired to overthrow the democratic government of Iran.
[00:19:51]  And the U.S. installed a police state.
[00:19:54]  And that police state lasted 26 years.
[00:19:59]  And the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
[00:20:02]  Was Iran escaping the U.S. imposed police state?
[00:20:08]  What did the U.S. do?
[00:20:10]  It didn't say, well, we're so sorry for those 26 years.
[00:20:13]  We should not have intervened in your country and overthrown your democracy back in 1953.
[00:20:20]  What the United States did was encourage and fund and armed Saddam Hussein, the one we fought a few years later, to invade Iran and to kill.
[00:20:35]  Hundreds of thousands of Iranians.
[00:20:38]  That started already in the 1980s.
[00:20:40]  You see, the United States needs its revenge.
[00:20:45]  Revenge for what?
[00:20:46]  Revenge for escaping the American empire because Iran was in our hands and they got out of our hands.
[00:20:55]  And since the early 1980s, the U.S. has, one way or another, been attacking Iran.
[00:21:02]  It's been using, especially, confiscation of Iran's own money.
[00:21:07]  Donald Trump. in his utter bullshit, and I'm sorry to use the language because we hear such garbage from this man every day, such lies, says Obama sent pallets of money to Iran.
[00:21:23]  You know what?
[00:21:24]  That was a tiny fraction of Iran's own money that the United States had confiscated.
[00:21:32]  We've confiscated tens of billions of dollars of Iran's money.
[00:21:37]  Iran's money.
[00:21:38]  Trump, do you get it?
[00:21:40]  It was Iran's money.
[00:21:43]  I don't, it's too complicated for him, I know.
[00:21:45]  Yeah.
[00:21:46]  But this is what happened.
[00:21:48]  We've been at war with this country since 1979.
[00:21:53]  And then Netanyahu comes along in 1996 and he says, We'll be your loyal buddies and partners in this.
[00:22:03]  We need to overthrow the Iranian government.
[00:22:06]  And that has been Netanyahu's 40 year dream because it was 10 years before Clean Break, 10 years before he became prime minister.
[00:22:15]  He already harbored.
[00:22:16]  These murderous ideas.
[00:22:18]  And we're in the middle of this now.
[00:22:20]  And the world economy is going down.
[00:22:23]  We've got our supreme genius in our country blockading a blockade.
[00:22:29]  This is great, very clever.
[00:22:32]  The Straits were open two days ago.
[00:22:34]  Netanyahu bombed Beirut to make sure that they wouldn't really be opened.
[00:22:39]  Then phony non negotiations.
[00:22:43]  Now, not only are the Straits closed, we're blockading the blockade.
[00:22:47]  This is absolutely wonderful, Mr. Trump.
[00:22:50]  You've Just solve the problem.
[00:22:54]  What have Netanyahu and Trump gained by their six weeks of war?
[00:23:01]  Well, they've killed a lot of people.
[00:23:03]  That must be satisfying to them.
[00:23:05]  Uh, they have, uh, destroyed a lot of Iran.
[00:23:08]  That must be very satisfying to them.
[00:23:11]  They have achieved no strategic aims, of course, at all.
[00:23:16]  They have brought the world economy to already a major crisis that I think is likely to get vastly worse.
[00:23:26]  And they have achieved nothing politically at all.
[00:23:30]  So this is a, this war is a complete Whimsical, delusional disaster, except that Trump and Netanyahu like the idea of killing Iranians and bombing the place.
[00:23:47]  Israel does have a concept called mowing the grass.
[00:23:52]  Mowing the grass is the concept that every few years, Israel should enter Gaza and kick the shit out of them for a while.
[00:24:04]  Excuse the language, but what I mean by that is murder lots of people.
[00:24:09]  And kill innocent people and destroy the infrastructure.
[00:24:15]  That's called mowing the grass.
[00:24:18]  So Netanyahu can at least say we've mowed the grass in Iran.
[00:24:23]  But of course, it has solved no military problem, no political problem, no economic problem, no geopolitical problem, no security problem.
[00:24:33]  It's only made everything worse.
[00:24:38]  Good Lord.
[00:24:39]  How do you see this ending, Jeff?
[00:24:41]  I think it's going to continue to escalate, actually, because even when you have this complete weirdness of the President of the United States saying, open the straight, you crazy bastards, and I'm going to destroy your civilization.
[00:25:05]  And then there's a ceasefire that night.
[00:25:10]  Well, the next day, We had the bombing of Beirut the day after we had the failed negotiations, the day after we had the U.S. blockade of the Iranian blockade.
[00:25:21]  In other words, he's not mentally stable enough.
[00:25:26]  Is the strait open now or closed?
[00:25:30]  I am not absolutely sure.
[00:25:35]  In the last couple of hours, the price of oil fell a little bit.
[00:25:39]  Maybe some ships passed.
[00:25:40]  I don't know.
[00:25:42]  For all intents and purposes, it is not at all open in any reliable sense.
[00:25:50]  That I can say 100%.
[00:25:52]  There is no basis for believing for a moment that we are out of the worst economic and energy crisis that we have had in decades, if not ever.
[00:26:06]  Well, that remains to be seen.
[00:26:08]  But we're in a very deep crisis without any resolution at all right now.
[00:26:14]  Why do you think Trump attacked the Pope and at the same time posted an AI generated image of himself as some sort of a divinity?
[00:26:30]  Well, Trump has absolutely messianic delusions.
[00:26:37]  That's a kind of clinical statement.
[00:26:40]  This has been observed by many forensic psychologists and psychiatrists, especially in recent weeks, but for many, many years.
[00:26:49]  Trump has said he's an instrument of God.
[00:26:54]  He thinks God delivered him to save the world and so forth.
[00:27:00]  These are Trump's delusions that are very dangerous and they're very, very real.
[00:27:12]  And so Trump has a coterie around him of ministers who tell him the same thing, like Franklin Graham did on Easter morning in the White House that God has set you for this purpose.
[00:27:32]  This is really terrible behavior to tell.
[00:27:36]  A delusional person, these things to feed the delusions.
[00:27:40]  But Trump has these people around him telling him this.
[00:27:45]  So, by itself, posting this picture is actually, in a way, par for the course of his mental instability.
[00:27:55]  Going after the Pope is so sad, so revolting.
[00:28:04]  I'm in Rome today, Judge.
[00:28:07]  People on the streets.
[00:28:10]  Are mortified.
[00:28:12]  They are sad.
[00:28:14]  They are deeply shocked by this.
[00:28:20]  And I mean this across this country, and it's of course far beyond this country, but this is where I happen to be today.
[00:28:29]  This is really unbelievable.
[00:28:34]  And, but this is part of Trump's grandiosity and What the psychologists call malignant narcissism.
[00:28:45]  Many people have said, oh, no, you don't understand.
[00:28:49]  But I think in the last couple of days, Trump has shocked people who were willfully turning away from the psychological evidence.
[00:29:01]  We have a real problem.
[00:29:03]  It is still unaddressed because our congressional leaders refuse to address it.
[00:29:10]  And it's a very, very serious institutional crisis that we're in.
[00:29:16]  I looked up and I didn't do a thorough historical search, but I wondered whether Hitler had openly attacked Pope Pius XII, for example, because Pius XII was strongly despised by the Nazi leadership.
[00:29:39]  According to what I found, Stand to be corrected because I only did a quick search of this.
[00:29:47]  Apparently not.
[00:29:48]  Apparently, Hitler had the control, self control, not to do this.
[00:29:54]  Trump going after Pope Leo like this, completely unprecedented.
[00:30:02]  Utterly shocking, utterly disgusting.
[00:30:06]  Here's, not to ruin your evening, but here's what he said a few minutes ago outside the Oval Office when he was asked to justify this AI generated picture of himself as a divinity.
[00:30:19]  Chris, cut number six.
[00:30:21]  Mr. President, did you post that picture of yourself depicted as Jesus Christ?
[00:30:25]  Well, it wasn't depicted.
[00:30:27]  It was me.
[00:30:28]  I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with Red Cross as a Red Cross worker there, which we support.
[00:30:35]  And, uh, Only the fake news could come up with that one.
[00:30:39]  So I just heard about it.
[00:30:43]  And I said, How did they come up with that?
[00:30:45]  It's supposed to be me as a doctor making people better.
[00:30:48]  And I do make people better.
[00:30:50]  I make people a lot better.
[00:30:53]  It says, Taken it down, nobody believes that he was claiming to be a doctor, it was an image of him as Jesus.

=== Fake News Confusion (01:25) ===

[00:31:02]  Of course.
[00:31:02]  And it's so pathetic.
[00:31:05]  You could only say if he's telling the truth.
[00:31:08]  It's equally pathetic.
[00:31:10]  If he can't tell the difference, how can he judge the difference of war and peace?
[00:31:15]  Of course, he's lying.
[00:31:16]  Of course, he's, in this case, trying to cover for what was a PR disaster from his point of view, an impulsivity that he displays.
[00:31:30]  But if he really can't tell the difference, if he really thinks, oh, that was a picture of me as a doctor, he needs to be removed because.
[00:31:39]  Any 10 year old would know the difference.
[00:31:43]  Professor Sachs, thank you very much.
[00:31:45]  Thanks for your passion.
[00:31:46]  Thanks for your intellect.
[00:31:48]  Thanks for the recitation of the history because everybody needs to know this.
[00:31:56]  All the best to you, my friend.
[00:31:57]  Safe travels.
[00:31:58]  See you soon.
[00:31:58]  Thanks a lot.
[00:31:59]  Thank you.
[00:31:59]  Bye bye.
[00:32:00]  Coming up tomorrow, Tuesday at 8 in the morning, as usual, Ambassador Chaz Freeman at 9 15 in the morning, Professor John Mearsheimer.
[00:32:10]  At 10 o'clock, Aaron Mate.
[00:32:12]  At 1 o'clock, Ian Proud, the former British diplomat with some very strong words for his former colleagues.
[00:32:20]  At 2 o'clock, Matt Ho.
[00:32:23]  At 3 o'clock, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.