Open Letter to Israel Foreign Minister Sa’ar, as an American Jew I cannot tolerate what Israel is doing in Gaza, between genocide and famine

Dear Mr. Foreign Minister of the Government of Israel, I am writing to you following your speech to the United Nations Security Council on August 5. I attended the session but was unable to speak with you immediately afterward. I would like to share my thoughts on your speech .

In his speech, he failed to acknowledge why nearly the entire world, including many Jews like me, is horrified by his government's behavior. According to most of the world, with which I agree, Israel is engaged in mass murder and famine; this does not seem to come across in his speech. He failed to acknowledge that Israel has caused the deaths, to date, of approximately 18,500 Palestinian children , whose names were recently listed by the  Washington Post . He held Hamas responsible for all mass murders of civilians by Israeli forces, while the world watches daily videos of Israeli forces cold-bloodedly murdering starving civilians as they approach food distribution points. He lamented the starvation of 20 hostages, but failed to mention Israel's starvation of 2 million Palestinians . He failed to mention that his prime minister has actively worked over the years to finance Hamas, as the  Times of Israel has documented .

Whether your oversights are the result of obtuseness or prevarication, it would be a tragedy for Israel alone, were it not for the fact that you attempted to implicate me and millions of other Jews in your government's crimes against humanity . You declared at the UN session that Israel is "the sovereign state of the Jewish people." This is false. Israel is the sovereign state of its citizens. I am Jewish and a citizen of the United States. Israel is not my state and never will be . The language you have used in your discourse about Jews has dug a wedge between us. You have defined Judaism as a nationality. This is indeed the Zionist construct, but it is at odds with 2,000 years of Jewish faith and life. It is an idea I and millions of other Jews reject.

Judaism, for me and countless others outside Israel, is a life of ethics, culture, tradition, law, and faith that has nothing to do with nationality. For 2,000 years, Jews have lived in every part of the world, in countless nations. The great rabbinic sages of the  Babylonian Talmud , in fact, explicitly forbade a mass return of the Jewish people to Jerusalem , enjoining the Jewish people to live in their homelands ( Ketubot  111a). Unfortunately, the Zionists undertook massive campaigns, including financial subsidies and intimidation tactics, to induce Jewish communities to abandon their homelands, languages, local cultures, and relationships with their fellow citizens, in order to lure them to Israel.

I have traveled the world, visiting nearly empty synagogues and abandoned Jewish communities, with only a few elderly Jews remaining, and where these few remaining Jews insisted that their communities once lived in peace and harmony with the non-Jewish majority. Zionism has weakened or ended countless vibrant communities of our coreligionists around the world.

It is ironic that when the Zionists persuaded the British government in 1917 to issue the Balfour Declaration , the only Jew in the Cabinet, Sir Edwin Montagu , strenuously objected, asserting that he was a Jewish British citizen, and not a member of a Jewish nation: “ I assert that there is no such thing as a Jewish nation. Members of my own family, for example, who have lived in this country for generations, have no kind of community of views or wishes with any Jewish family in any other country, beyond the fact that they profess, to a greater or lesser extent, the same religion .” In this context, it is also worth remembering that the Balfour Declaration clearly and unequivocally states that “ nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine .” Zionism has failed this test.

Your government is committed to the permanent occupation of all of Palestine and violently and relentlessly opposes a sovereign Palestinian state. The Likud 's founding platform in 1977 makes no secret of this, openly declaring that "between the Red Sea and the Jordan River, there will be only Israeli sovereignty ." To achieve this goal, Israel demonizes the Palestinian people and physically oppresses them through mass famine, murder, ethnic cleansing, administrative detentions, torture, land expropriation, and other forms of brutal repression. You yourselves have shamefully declared that " all Palestinian factions" support terrorism.

Your counterpart at the UN Security Council session, Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour, stated precisely the opposite. He stated clearly: “ The solution is to end this illegal occupation and this disastrous conflict; it is the realization of the independence and sovereignty of the Palestinian state, not its destruction; it is the respect of our rights, not their continued denial; it is the respect of international law, not its violation; it is the implementation of the two-state solution, not the reality of a one-state solution with the Palestinians condemned to genocide, ethnic cleansing, or apartheid .”

Israel opposes nearly the entire world in its attempt to block the two-state solution. Already, 147 countries recognize the State of Palestine, and many more will soon do so . One hundred and seventy United Nations member states recently voted in support of the Palestinian people's right to political self-determination, with only six against (Argentina, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, Paraguay, and the United States). Its presentation completely ignored the powerful " New York Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of the Palestinian Question and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution ," issued by the world community at the High-Level International Conference on the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, held on July 29, 2025, just a week before its address to the UN Security Council. Saudi Arabia and France co-chaired that high-level conference. Arab and Islamic nations around the world have called for peace and normalization of relations with Israel, provided that Israel respects international law and decency, in line with the two-state solution.

Your government rejects peace, seeking instead domination over all of Palestine . Israel clings to its extremist position by the barest of threads, supported (so far) by the United States but no other major power. We should also acknowledge one of the main reasons for the United States' support thus far: evangelical Christian Protestants who believe that the gathering of Jews to Israel is a prelude to their damnation or conversion and the end of the world. These are your government's allies.

As for the American public at large , disapproval of Israel's actions now stands at 60%, with only 32% approval. Mr. Minister, the global revulsion you cite is against your government's actions, not against Jews. Israel is threatened from within by fanaticism and extremism, which in turn leads to global disapproval of Israel by Jews and non-Jews alike. The great threat to Israel's survival is not the Arab nations, the Palestinians, or Iran, but the policies of the extremist Israeli government , led by Benjamin Netanyahu , Bezalel Smotrich , and Itamar Ben-Gvir .

The two-state solution is the way—and the only way—for Israel's survival . You may believe that nuclear weapons and the US government are your salvation, but brute force will be weak if Israel's grave injustice toward the Palestinian people continues. The Jewish prophets repeatedly taught that unjust states do not survive for long.

Sincerely yours,

Jeffrey D. Sachs, New York City