Jeffrey Epstein, responsible for heinous sex crimes against many girls and young women, reportedly provided valuable services for years to apartheid Israel, including its intelligence services, as exposed by Drop Site News. The western legacy media has, as expected, largely censored out of its flood of reporting on Epstein’s criminal activities his irrefutable ties to Israeli leaders, like former PM Ehud Barak (accused of sadistic crimes), senior Israeli intelligence officers, Israel lobby groups, settler organizations, and key Israel lobby figures in the US. Robert Maxwell, the father of Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, was widely known as “Israel’s superspy.”
Why is this important? Because exposing Israel’s use of such criminal ways to gain influence in many capitals may help shatter its “total impunity” in perpetrating its ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and its accelerated ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Israel’s livestreamed genocide, the world’s first, and its regime of settler-colonial apartheid against all Indigenous Palestinians cannot continue without the complicity of states, corporations and institutions, mostly in the colonial West.
Epstein, a convicted pedophile and sex-trafficking financier, built a massive network of relationships with powerful men – and some women – in the US, Europe, India, UAE, and elsewhere, offering them illicit sexual “services” with minors, access to circles of power, and/or generous payments. Along with the harrowing accounts of dozens of survivors, Epstein and his convicted partner eerily documented much of the horrible sexual abuse and corruption in photographs, videos and emails.
Even The Times of London recently asked, “Was Epstein a Mossad agent?” It cites a senior UK national security official and lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst who says, “Is it possible that Epstein was an asset to the Mossad? Yes.” Whether Epstein directly served Mossad or not, his connections to Israeli intelligence, corporations and political leaders have been methodically exposed by investigative journalists. The Epstein enterprise served Israel well for many years, enhancing its ability to build connections, deals, and influence with decision-makers in several countries.
Yet, many of the staunchest Zionists who have enabled Israel’s regime of oppression, including by striving to repress the BDS movement on Israel’s behalf, are now exposed for their intimate relationships with Epstein. David Schoen, Epstein’s lawyer, “bragged in emails to the disgraced sex offender about helping the Israeli government counter [the] Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement,” according to The New Arab. Schoen, who also represented Donald Trump during his impeachment trial, admitted in those emails his ties to the Israeli government and its legal warfare (lawfare) against the BDS movement.
Aside from Trump, the self-declared “history's most pro-Israel US president,” the Epstein files have implicated, in diverse ways, Israel lobbyist and Epstein’s “co-conspirator” Leslie Wexner; war-crimes advocate Alan Dershowitz; accused war criminal Tony Blair; fanatic anti-BDS former Harvard president Larry Summers; genocide-defender former US president Bill Clinton; Norwegian father of the colonial Oslo Accords Terje Rød-Larsen; leading Zionist UK politician Peter Mandelson; and World Economic Forum president and ardent BDS opponent Børge Brende. They also implicate many tech oligarchs and powerful executives including those enabling Israel’s genocide: Palantir’s Peter Thiel; Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky; Google co-founder Sergey Brin; Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg; LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; among others.
It is crucial to historically contextualize all this. Israel was established in 1948 as a settler-colony in Palestine – by ethnically cleansing most Indigenous Palestinians – as an outpost for British imperialism. It later served as a “tool” of US imperialism, securing its interests in the highly strategic Arab region during the Cold War. Imperialists, Jewish Zionists, Christian Zionists and other anti-Jewish racists in the UK, the US, and elsewhere all agreed, for their own agendas, on creating a Jewish supremacist colony in Palestine. However, with time, the relationship, while still based primarily on common colonial interests, has changed dramatically with Israel becoming far more assertive, aggressive, and, crucially, far more influential in the US and across the colonial West.
While Israel’s leading role in the destruction of international law and the United Nations intersects with the Trump might-makes-right agenda, Israel – especially with its current fascist and unhinged establishment that is “destabilizing” the region – is increasingly seen by experts as a “strategic liability” for the US. Still, it enjoys the loyalty of the White House and the absolute majority of Congress.
As far back as 2001, Israeli PM Netanyahu dismissed the relevance of US disagreement with his policies, bragging that “America is something you can easily maneuver and move in the right direction.” This was not merely a typical expression of Israeli colonial hubris; it was also an indicator of Israel’s growing self-confidence due to its unprecedented influence in the US. An Al Jazeera suppressed undercover investigation in 2016 revealed some of the insidious tactics used by the Israel lobby to gain this influence. World renowned US economist Jeffrey Sachs goes as far as accusing Israel, its lobby groups, and neocon friends of instigating US wars against several states in the “Middle East” that Israel regarded as enemies and wanted to subjugate or break up.
Mainly due to its genocide, Israel’s support at the grassroots and civil society levels is collapsing worldwide, even in the US (including among younger Jewish Americans) and Europe. Yet the unconditional military, financial, technological, intelligence, diplomatic, media and other forms of US and European support have kept flowing. While many US and European corporations have profited enormously from the genocide, Western states’ complicity in it has harmed the collective West’s standing, even interests, in the Arab region and among the Global Majority, some have argued. Even before the genocide, when the West’s unmasked colonial hypocrisy over Ukraine vs. Palestine became abundantly clear, a senior G7 diplomat told the Financial Times, “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South. All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost . . . Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”
Colonial affinity and interests aside, one major factor behind the West’s deepening complicity is the unprecedented influence that Israel has gained in Washington and, by extension, Brussels, London and beyond. As prominent US political scientist John Mearsheimer argues, "The reason you need a lobby is because Israel is not a strategic asset, it's a strategic liability." Israel's connections to Jeffery Epstein must be understood in this wider context.
There are diverse motives for powerful Western leaders, corporate oligarchs, artists, academics, and others to continue supporting genocidal Israel. Some politicians argue that it still serves their states’ interests. Many are motivated by ideological commitment to Zionism (Jewish Zionists and Christian Zionists) and to maintaining Israel as a Jewish supremacist entity in Palestine. In some cases, self-interest (profits, fame, access, etc.) is the main motive.
But in many other cases, support for Israel cannot be reasonably attributed to ideological commitment or interests being served by it. There is more compelling evidence now on how Israel, directly or through its lobby groups and well-placed “assets,” has used coercion, extortion, and bribery to ensure loyalty. For instance, it has deployed the export of its weaponized spyware, as well as its disinformation and election-rigging services, as diplomacy tools to gain influence in many countries, south and north.
The US Congress and the White House, regardless whether Democrat or Republican, are Exhibit A and Exhibit B of such crimes, as many prominent US experts have affirmed. This reality is increasingly being recognized not just on the political Left but also within Trump’s own MAGA movement. Leaders in both major parties in the US, which has a fundamentally anti-democratic, oligarchic, and exceptionally corrupt election system, are “bought and paid for” by various lobby groups, including the weapons lobby, tech lobby, and the Israel lobby – the latter exposed by mainstream figures in US media and academia. The fact that over 95% of members of Congress received money from Israel lobby groups in the election cycle of 2023-2024, for instance, explains repeated statements by Jeffrey Sachs that: “The Israel lobby dominates American politics.”
The “Israel First” agenda of the US administration and Congress has not only secured tens of billions of dollars in support of Israel’s apartheid regime over the years, including over $30B spent by the US to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This agenda has been a decisive factor behind US wars in South-West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) that have directly and indirectly killed millions of Iraqis, Afghanis and others, devastated their societies, and cost US taxpayers trillions, all at the expense of healthcare, fair jobs, education, affordable homes, social services, etc. It has also cost the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians and the livelihood of millions of Palestinians across historic Palestine, as well as mass devastation in Lebanon and Syria.
Israel is certainly not the only factor behind US imperialist wars that go back decades, but it has become an undeniably leading factor. Epstein, who arguably served Israel as a weapon of mass extortion, has been caught, but others may still be out there. It is a moral obligation to escalate nonviolent BDS pressure to end Israel’s “stranglehold” over US foreign policy, and beyond, as one necessary step towards ending complicity in Israel’s genocide and apartheid.
For Palestinians and other Arabs, for the peoples of the wider SWANA region, Latin America, Greenland, the people of the US, and for humanity at large, we need to form the broadest possible strategic, intersectional, anti-racist coalitions that recognize our common principles, fight for accountability and an end to impunity, and build a critical mass of people power to end injustice and oppression. We all deserve and will relentlessly strive for freedom, justice and equality, from Palestine and Lebanon to Venezuela and Cuba, and everywhere across the world.