It’s not hard to imagine what would happen if the Jeffrey Epstein saga had any other country at its center.

If the well-connected billionaire sex trafficker was rumored to have ties to the ruling elite and intelligence agencies of, say, Thailand; if emails showed him repeatedly hosting a Thai intelligence officer at his house; if they showed him doing secret, back-channel work for the Thai government through his friendship with a former Thai prime minister; if in private messages, he claimed that he had been involved in that former prime minister’s return to politics in a recent Thai election, aimed at toppling the country’s sitting leader from power — if any of this happened, it would obviously be a massive scandal that would prompt many more questions about that billionaire’s exact relationship to Thailand and its intelligence agencies, particularly given how close he was with various members of the US elite, including one former president and the one currently in office. It would also no doubt be a major scandal in Thailand itself, if it turned out that a character as unsavory as Epstein was not only remarkably close with one of its leading political figures, but that he claimed he had been meddling in its elections from behind the scenes.

But this is not what has happened in the reality we inhabit, in which Epstein’s links are not to Thailand but to Israel.

In the world we live in, mainstream news has all but ignored Drop Site’s constant drip of major disclosures about Epstein’s work for the Israeli government, which show him brokering arms deals between it and other states, acting as a back-channel diplomat, sourcing funding to help it develop new weapons, and, on three different occasions, hosting an Israeli intelligence officer for up to multiple weeks at a time at his Manhattan town house. This is all thanks to Epstein’s relationship with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, which turns out to have been far closer and more intimate than Barak claimed to the public.

And now, Jacobin’s report last week that Epstein privately claimed he had been involved in the 2019 Israeli elections has triggered a firestorm in Israel — not because of that bombshell claim, but because Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for some reason decided to share it on X.

https://t.co/l86238C0yh

— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) November 21, 2025

Israel’s entire anti-Netanyahu bloc has pounced on this (admittedly baffling) development to savage Netanyahu for giving credence to what they say is a sinister pack of lies, amplifying a magazine critical of Israeli policies (meaning us), and producing “the greatest propaganda disaster Israel has ever faced since its establishment.” (With all due respect, that award really belongs to the monstrous war that the corruption-embroiled Netanyahu has waged on Gaza for the past two years).

What’s remarkable in these denunciations is how little concern there is about Epstein’s actual claim about the 2019 election, let alone all the Drop Site revelations that show him deeply involved in their country’s foreign policy. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that many Israeli politicians and commentators aren’t bothered by the revelations that one of history’s most prolific child sex abusers was secretly this deeply involved in their politics — just that anyone is now finding out about it.

This is a far cry from the US reaction to the unfolding Epstein scandal. In the United States, the saga of Epstein and his connections to political and business elite across the political spectrum has, quite rightly, become an all-engulfing scandal that’s triggered alarm, questions, and inquiries among both Democrats and the Right about how deep it all went and who was involved.

Not so in Israel, where the leading response seems to be to plug up one’s ears and shout “conspiracy theory” as loud as possible, in between volleying attacks on Netanyahu. It is particularly disappointing to see this from the normally reasonable Haaretz, where former Jacobin contributor Joshua Leifer stopped just short of explicitly painting all of this reporting as simply rabidly antisemitic conspiracizing:

it is through antisemitism that tinfoil hats of rival ideologies really began to converge. If on the right, Epstein’s Jewishness added to the demonic, anti-Christian quality of the Democrat-pedophile sex conspiracy, on the paranoid left it pointed in a different direction: that Epstein was a Mossad operative, or at the very least, an Israeli asset.

What’s ironic is that Barak’s involvement with Epstein — the actual substance of the story Leifer is discussing — was once understood as a major, scandalous story by the Israeli press. It was the very outlet Leifer wrote his denunciation in, Haaretz, along with other Israeli outlets that arguably derailed Barak’s attempted comeback in 2019 that Epstein talks about in the released messages, after Barak’s ties to the billionaire pedophile were exposed in a series of damaging stories that forced him to effectively step back from the campaign. Now these major new revelations about that relationship are simply being ignored or buried under a hail of ugly and false smears.

But it is not just Leifer. “There is no substantial evidence of any ties between Epstein and Israeli intelligence,” the Times of Israel charged in the wake of the controversy, before claiming that accusations of such ties are largely driven by “the fact that he was Jewish.”

On the more extreme end is former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who has called the story “a false conspiracy theory propagated by Israel’s antisemitic enemies.” Or Barak himself, who called Jacobin an “extremely antisemitic” magazine.

נתניהו הפיץ שלשום מאמר ובתוכו תאוריית קונספירציה שקרית של אויבי ישראל אנטישמיים כאילו הפדופיל ג׳פרי אפשטיין היה סוכן של המוסד הישראלי.

מעל 4 מיליון איש נחשפו לפרסום השקרי של נתניהו.

מעל 20,000 (!) שיתופים של זה בטוויטר.

אויבינו חוגגים ברשתות ומאשימים את חיילי צה״ל ברצח…

— Naftali Bennett נפתלי בנט (@naftalibennett) November 23, 2025

What all of these responses have in common — besides crudely and shamefully trivializing the accusation of antisemitism for political purposes — is that none of them even remotely bother to engage with the actual substance of the reporting.

We do not know what Epstein’s role in the 2019 election was beyond what he claimed in his message to Steve Bannon, and we at Jacobin never claimed we did. We noted that Epstein was a “notoriously unreliable narrator prone to self-aggrandizement.” But those dismissing the possibility out of hand have no evidence whatsoever on their side, other than Barak’s recent dismissal of it as “nonsense” — a claim undercut by the fact that Barak also misled the public for years about the nature and extent of his relationship to Epstein, making his denial less credible.

Israeli politicians and commentators should be demanding more information from Barak — not angrily demanding that everyone shut up about the whole thing or be accused of being a bigot.

Meanwhile, after Drop Site’s reporting, how can anyone now claim with a straight face that there is no evidence of Epstein’s ties to Israeli intelligence? Again, Epstein had an Israeli military intelligence officer stay at his town house at least three separate times, once when he was still officially serving in the Israeli defense ministry. This reporting was both linked to in the Jacobin piece and has been out there for nearly two weeks. Ignoring it, as writers like Leifer have, smacks of either journalistic laziness or a willful effort to simply pretend it doesn’t exist.

There are long-standing real and legitimate concerns about the extent of Israel’s interference in the US political system. But the Israeli public itself should also be concerned if someone as vile as Epstein was meddling in their own politics, which all of these disclosures suggest was happening. Unfortunately, it is being let down by an Israeli media and political establishment that seems more concerned with either damage control or creating a partisan problem for Netanyahu.