Netanyahu ‘is nothing if not obsessive, and he's still trying to get us to fight Iran this day, this week,' Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs says in lecture
US President-elect Donald Trump shared a video online Wednesday showing an academic criticizing what he called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's “obsessive” efforts to involve the US in war with Iran.
The video shows Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs examining the motives behind the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Sachs alleges that the push for war stemmed from the long-standing strategy by Netanyahu – who first served as Israeli premier in 1996-1999 – to dismantle regimes supporting groups like Palestinian Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah.
"Where did that war come from? You know what? It's quite surprising. That war came from Netanyahu, actually,” said Sachs, an economist.
"Netanyahu had, from 1995 onward, the theory that the only way we're going to get rid of Hamas and Hezbollah is by toppling the governments that support them. That's Iraq, Syria, and Iran. And the guy is nothing if not obsessive, and he's still trying to get us to fight Iran this day, this week," he said, calling the Israeli leader a "deep, dark son of a bitch."
"He's gotten us into endless wars, and because of the power of all of this in the US politics, he's gotten his way, but that war was totally phony," Sachs added, perhaps referring to the disproven “weapons of mass destruction” claims then-President George W. Bush used to justify the war.
Sachs also claimed that in 2011, then-US President Barack Obama instructed the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government.
The post came on the eve of Trump's Jan. 20 return to White House and amid Israel's continued devastating attacks on Palestine, which since October 2023 have killed over 46,000 people and reduced much of the Gaza Strip to rubble.
Speaking to Anadolu last November, Sachs said Trump could benefit from Türkiye's “excellence in diplomacy” in dealing with wars in the Mideast and Ukraine.
Before Trump's Nov. 5 election, sending him back to the White House for a second term, sources close to Netanyahu said he favored a second presidential term for Trump over his Democratic Party rival.
During Trump's first term in office, he and Netanyahu were said to have a good relationship – with Trump taking pro-Israel steps such as relocating the US Embassy to Jerusalem – but reportedly not without some tensions and disagreements.
