By Ullekh NP

Ahead of the two-day BRICS Summit slated for September 12-13 in New Delhi, noted American economist and public intellectual Jeffrey D Sachs has expressed shock at India increasingly warming up to Israel, a country he says is bent upon wreaking havoc in the Middle East thanks to its reckless goal of creating Greater Israel. Sachs, a former director of Earth Institute at Columbia University and adviser to three UN secretaries-general, also disapproved of India veering towards the West and the Trump administration which he said is incapable of thrashing out a peace formula for the region.

In the wake of reports in a section of the media lapping up a Trumpian post-war strategy in the Middle East, Sachs, author of several best-selling books, said, “There is no way in the world that the Trump Administration is going to come up with a meaningful plan for peace in the Middle East.”

Sachs adds, “Trump is corrupt, in the hands of the Israel Lobby, short-sighted, anti-Palestinian, anti-Iran, and wholly incapable of strategic thinking. Amazingly, India has signed on to some of this by linking too closely with Israel, which destabilises the region through its perpetual wars in pursuit of Greater Israel.”

Greater Israel (Eretz Yisrael HaShlema) is a biblical as well as a Zionist political concept of Israel that stretches from the Nile River to the Euphrates, covering all of the existing Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon, parts of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. In August last, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview that he was on a historic and spiritual mission to expand his country.

Although India-Israel relations are older, it was normalised only in the early 1990s and in a marked departure from earlier convention, in 2017 Narendra Modi became the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel. Since then, India-Israel relations have grown rapidly.

For his part, Sachs maintains that instead of playing the cheerleader to the West, India and other countries in the Global South had better use BRICS as a platform to bolster their cooperation among its members and with the rest of the emerging and developing countries, in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Western Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Sachs is a vehement critic of American policy and the disproportionate influence of the Israel lobby on Washington’s strategic choices. He has for long argued consistently that US foreign policy should be guided by constitutional principles rather than external agendas. His recent books include Ethics in Action for Sustainable Development (2022), The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions (2020); and A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2018).