Jeffrey Sachs

It started with Netanyahu and his American advisors in 1996 in something called Clean Break, which was a political document that the Americans and Netanyahu made when Netanyahu became prime minister. After 9-11, it went into full gear with the Iraq wars being the first of those wars. Clean break, what does that refer to? Clean break is we're going to make a clean break of the Middle East.

A break with the past. We're going to break with the past. We're not going to have land for peace, which is the idea that Israel would have a Palestinian state next door. No, we're going to have greater Israel and we're just going to bash anybody that doesn't like it. And we're going to do that by bringing down any government that supports the Palestinians.

It's a rather shocking amount of hubris. It has been, in my view, a complete disaster for the United States and for the Middle East. It has been Netanyahu's M.O. since 1996, actually, and he's been prime minister more than half the time since then. And the United States goes to war on his behalf. And what happened in Syria is the culmination of that effort. So seven wars in five years.

Netanyahu came to the U.S. in 2002 after 9-11. Actually, he came in September 20, 2001, if I remember correctly, and gave a speech that said, There's terrorism, but you don't fight the terrorists, you fight the governments that back the terrorists. That's the idea. So you go to war. You don't just have a kind of an anti-terrorism effort, you go to war.

And the first of those wars was Iraq, but Syria was supposed to be exactly the next war. And the timeline was this remarkable idea of seven wars in five years. According to all of the understanding that we now have from lots of insiders, from documents, from the archives, what happened was the US got bogged down in Iraq. There was the insurgency.

We didn't move onward to the next war, which was to be Syria, which was to happen already 20 years ago. But in 2011, what really brought Assad down last week started under Obama. Yes, and this is also interesting. It doesn't really matter who's president. This is long-term deep state policy. Obama ordered the CIA to overthrow Assad. So that started in 2011.

But why would Obama want to overthrow Assad? Because Israel has run American foreign policy in the Middle East for 30 years. That's how it works. We have an Israel lobby. We have this clean break strategy. We have a plan for seven wars in five years. And what's interesting is they actually kind of carry out this madness. They don't explain any of it to the American people. They don't tell anybody.

But you can watch step by step. We've had six of those seven wars. The only one that hasn't happened is Iran. And if you watch every day now, the MSM, the mainstream media is pushing for U.S. war with Iran. Netanyahu is pushing for war with Iran. They're really trying to get this started to make seven out of seven. But Obama, you know, for no reason.

particular reason, by the way, but he launched two of these wars on the list of seven. He launched the war to bring down the Libyan government, Muammar Gaddafi, in the fall of the war started in March 2011. And he and Hillary Clinton, his secretary of state, said Assad must go. in the spring of 2011. I remember scratching my head at the time saying, oh, that's interesting.

How are they going to do that? Syria was a normal functioning country at the time, despite whatever you read, whatever propaganda is said, Syria was a normal functioning country. I recently dredged out a report by

the International Monetary Fund on Syria in 2009 that praised the Syrian government for its reforms and its rapid economic growth and looked forward to continued years of economic development. In other words, it was not this. wasteland or this battlefield. It was an actual normal country. Was it a threat to the United States?

It was no threat to the United States whatsoever, but it was deemed to be by Netanyahu a threat to Israel because of a simple reason, which is that Netanyahu wants to control Israel. All of Palestine wants to rule over the Palestinian people, does not want a Palestinian state, and that has led to militant opposition. That's led to Hamas, that's led to Hezbollah, that's led to other groups.

Netanyahu's theory is, well, we're never going to allow a Palestinian state, so we have to bring down any government that supports those militant groups against us, because our core aim is greater Israel. That's not much of a worthy cause, by the way. Having a Palestinian state next door and having peace could have saved probably a million lives by now over the last 30 years.

But that's not Netanyahu's crazy ambition, which is... What is greater Israel? Greater Israel means, depending on how crazy the people are, either that... Israel controls not only its geographic territory, but that it essentially controls or annexes the West Bank, the Golan Heights, which they've just enlarged, Gaza. Golan Heights being part of Syria, historically. It was part of Syria. It's...

claimed by Israel, and now with an expanded territory, and East Jerusalem. So everything that was captured in 1967, Netanyahu explicitly said, we're never giving that back. Now, there are two motivations for that. One, Netanyahu says, not safe to give it back because he doesn't want to negotiate any kind of peace or any state of Palestine. Then there are

religious zealots, I would use even stronger terms, who use The book of Joshua, which is 2,700 years ago, that said, well, God gave us everything from the river in Egypt, meaning the Nile, to the Euphrates. And there are zealots in Israel, and they're in the government, who believe, yes, this is God's ordinance. We're going to take whatever we want.

Well, if you take the greater view of this, it would include Lebanon. It would include Syria. It would include part of Iraq. It would include part of Egypt. And some of these people actually quote the Bible and say, we're going to do this. And it's a little sad. Yeah. Absolutely terribly frightening.

But I'd say the more narrow vision is what they call from the river to the sea, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. That's taken as a pro-Palestinian chant, but it's exactly the opposite. It is the greater Israel literal vision of Israel. the government of Israel. It's the literal idea. There happened to be 7 million Palestinians there. That's a minor problem.

Maybe they can be ethnically cleansed. Maybe they can be thrown out. Maybe they can just be ruled in a military dominant way. Of course, probably well over 100,000 have been killed in the most recent war by Israel. Official count, 45,000 of bodies claimed from the rubble, but we know that there are a lot more that have died since this war in Gaza began. But all of this is to say...

This greater Israel idea says we can't make peace with the Palestinians. So anyone that supports the Palestinians is by definition a mortal threat to us. And when you have a mortal threat, you must destroy it. And so this is the opposite of diplomacy. It's war. And as Netanyahu crowed last week, it's war to remake the Middle East.