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.