Professor Jeffrey Sachs has delivered a searing, unflinching indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu as a pernicious and dangerous figure whose three-decade political dominance has directly enabled mass murder in Gaza, the systematic erosion of Israeli democracy, and the catastrophic entanglement of U.S. foreign policy in regional atrocity. Sachs does not treat Netanyahu as a flawed statesman but as the architect of a deliberate, institutionalized descent into racialized violence — one that now threatens to ignite full-scale war with Iran.

The economist anchors his argument in the immediate post-election reality inside Israel: Netanyahu’s Likud party lost its parliamentary majority, and Palestinian citizens of Israel turned out at an unprecedented 75–80% rate — decisively holding twenty Knesset seats. That bloc is no longer marginal. It is the decisive swing force capable of ousting Netanyahu through coalition-building or confidence-and-supply arrangements within Israel’s formal institutions.

Sachs rejects the label “democracy” for Israel outright. He calls it instead a racist society whose legal and political architecture has long privileged Jewish citizenship while systematically disenfranchising its Arab citizens — a structure that, under Netanyahu, has tipped over into mass murder. This is not rhetorical hyperbole. It is a forensic assessment grounded in decades of legislative exclusion, judicial complicity, and military impunity.

He traces Netanyahu’s rise to the Oslo Accords’ collapse and his subsequent consolidation of power through perpetual emergency governance. Every major escalation — from the 2008–09 Gaza War to the 2023–24 assault — served both domestic political survival and the expansion of settler-colonial control. Trump’s recent endorsement of Netanyahu is not an aberration. It is the logical culmination of a shared authoritarian playbook rooted in ethnonationalism and anti-democratic spectacle.

U.S. complicity is not incidental. It is structural. American arms transfers, diplomatic cover at the UN, and unconditional financial aid have sustained Netanyahu’s war machine while insulating him from accountability. That complicity now risks dragging the United States into direct confrontation with Iran — a conflict Sachs warns would shatter global energy markets and deepen famine across the Global South.

Crucially, Sachs locates agency not in distant capitals but within Israel itself. The political leverage now rests with Palestinian citizens of Israel — those who hold Israeli passports, vote in Knesset elections, and sit inside the very parliament that legislates their second-class status. Their collective decision to withdraw support from Netanyahu-led coalitions represents the only viable, nonviolent, institutionally grounded path toward de-escalation and justice.

This is not a call for external sanctions or humanitarian appeals. It is a demand for internal political accountability — led by those most targeted by the regime, operating precisely within the rules of the system they are forced to inhabit. Sachs insists that if this bloc acts in concert, Netanyahu falls — and with him, the machinery of mass murder begins to stall.