Haley Strack :Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs: U.S. Is ‘Complicit’ in Israeli ‘Genocide’ in Gaza
Columbia University’s Director of the Center for Sustainable Development said Sunday that U.S. support for Israel makes America complicit in genocide.
Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia professor and Harvard-educated climate activist, joined Al Jazeera‘s “The Bottom Line” this weekend to discuss Hamas’s war on Israel, which he said could end if the United States stopped supplying munitions to its longtime ally.
“Of course, what the government of Israel doing, is unconscionable. World opinion is united against Israel,” Sachs said. “The problem is the United States remains complicit in these war crimes because it’s traditional in U.S. politics that politicians show no space between the United States and Israel.”
“It is, I think quite likely, that the International Court of Justice is going to find that Israel is in violation of the genocide convention. And does the United States want to be complicit in genocide?” he added. “This is a pretty straightforward question.”
Sachs called Israel’s campaign in Gaza “absolutely inhumane,” and blasted Israeli Defense Forces for destroying universities, mosques, and hospitals — civilian hideouts Hamas terrorists are known to take cover in. Nations should also resume and increase funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), a Palestinian aid agency that houses thousands of Hamas affiliates, Sachs added.
“UNRWA does heroic work in a war zone,” he said. “And it has lost a huge number of staff to this war. Israel targets the United Nations. Israel uses the United Nations as its punching bag, and UNRWA has taken the brunt of this.”
Israeli intelligence revealed that at least one dozen UNWRA staffers participated in Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel, including two employees who attacked kibbutzim in the South, where hundreds of Israeli civilians were massacred. Hundreds of additional UNRWA staffers are either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives and approximately ten percent of UNRWA employees have been connected to Hamas. Nevertheless, Sachs said, Israel should “know better” than to attack UNRWA. The U.N. agency has admitted that it was “horrified” by the report and has since launched an internal audit.
The only way for the war to end, the professor added, is for the U.S. to stop providing munitions to Israel.
“What, of course, a strong, effective U.S. president would do, would be to stop the flow of munitions if those munitions are being used for slaughter, for killing tens of thousands of innocent people, which is exactly what’s happening,” he said.
Hamas’s health ministry said on Sunday that at least 31,645 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7. The health ministry’s numbers are unverified, don’t differentiate between civilians and combatants, and don’t account for deaths due to misfired rockets or Hamas operations. Israel estimates that it has killed 13,000 members of Hamas in Gaza.
Sachs taught at Harvard University for over 20 years. He was appointed University Professor at Columbia in 2016.
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