Opinion...

A thesis confirmed: Epstein, Dershowitz and the Israel lobby

A billboard in Times Square calls for the release of the Epstein files on July 23, 2025 in New York City. [Photo by Adam Gray/Getty Images]

by Dr Binoy Kampmark
December 29, 2025 
Middle East Monitor.

Conman, convict, paedophile and a life terminated in circumstances of purported suicide. The list for Jeffrey E. Epstein, figure of cosmic social and political influence in the United States, is long. Trafficking in female flesh for his extensive client list, lubricated by his lover Ghislaine Maxwell, tends to be the crowning feature of most discussions about his sordid legacy. Another shrouded aspect has been neglected.

The fuss about releasing the Epstein files – the slowness with which the US Justice Department is undertaking that task, the erratic nature of its redactions, and what gold nuggets might be found – gives us a chance to examine the Israeli dimension in US politics. In November, Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain of Drop Site News showed the seedier side of that dimension in exposing Epstein’s role in what can be loosely termed the Israeli lobby. This involved a dedicated effort to discredit the work of two scholars, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who had done much to sketch the outlines of the very thing his own conduct affirmed.

Originally commissioned in late 2002 by The Atlantic, the article, written as a working paper, was simply entitled “The Israeli Lobby”. The subject, however, had become heated and worrying to the editors. When the article was ready for publication, the United States was involved in a futile, bloody conflict in Iraq that Mearsheimer and Walt argued was “motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure.” The authors were offered a “kill fee” of $10,000 for their consent to pull the piece. “That’s the fastest $10,000 we ever made,” quipped Mearsheimer in an interview with Tucker Carlson.

The article eventually found a home at the London Review of Books, to be followed in book form, having an immediate, incendiary effect. It notes the Israeli Lobby as an extensive, fanning presence in the American political landscape, comprising think tanks, the muscular American Israel Public Affairs Committee, neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, and journalists with clout. Its aims are clear: “Maintaining US support for Israel’s policies against the Palestinians is essential in so far as the Lobby is concerned, but its ambitions do not stop there. It also wants America to help Israel remain the dominant regional power.” Hand in hand, Israel and pro-Israel groups in the US had “worked together to shape the administration’s policy toward Iraq, Syria and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East.”

Epstein proceeded to play a role in the campaign against Walt and Mearsheimer. His pro-Israel credentials were impeccable. He had a close relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. He aided the brokering of various deals for Israeli intelligence and security interests. These included oiling a security agreement between Israel and Mongolia; aiding the creation of a backchannel between Israel and Russia during the Syrian Civil War and facilitating a security agreement between Israel and the West African state of Côte d’Ivoire. He hosted an Israeli intelligence officer, Yoni Koren, on at least three occasions in Manhattan. “He was a dealmaker and a fixer at a very, very elite level,” says Hussain.

One need not bother about the accusation that Epstein might have been in the specific pay of the Israeli intelligence service to show where his allegiances lay. He was a dedicated spear carrier for Israeli interests. In the apoplexy that broke out among members of the lobby to the Walt and Mearsheimer paper, he featured prominently, as emails from his Yahoo! account reveal. Epstein’s specific role in targeting the two scholars came from correspondence obtained by the non-profit whistleblower entity Distributed Denial of Secrets and made available to Drop Site News.

Of interest here is the correspondence between Epstein and Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz, himself a devoted apologist for Israeli causes. During the first week of April 2006 Dershowitz, who also acted for Epstein in criminal matters, passed on several drafts of his article “Debunking the Newest – and Oldest – Jewish Conspiracy” to the financier. That tatty, travesty of a piece accused Walt and Mearsheimer of putting together “little more than a compilation of old, false, and authoritatively discredited charges dressed up in academic garb”, incarnating in modern form the conspiratorial tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

After Epstein’s warm congratulations for the libellous effort, the question of how best to distribute the piece comes to the fore. To a query from Dershowitz’s email address sent by an assistant regarding progress on the matter, Epstein replies: “yes I’ve started.” Here, the vital entrails of the Lobby become clear: Epstein’s relationship with Harvard (donor of sums over $9 million between 1998 and 2008); Epstein as trustee and president of the family financial office of retail mogul and philanthropist Leslie Wexner, himself a donor of almost $20 million to the Kennedy School between 2000 and 2006 via a foundation bearing his name and responsible for a scholar program for visiting Israeli government officials to study a one-year Master’s degree.

The effect of such strategizing was to curb the reach of Walt and Mearsheimer. Scheduled talks were cancelled or readjusted to include a pro-Israeli voice. Mearsheimer, in reacting to the emails, proved characteristically unflappable. “I’m not surprised to see these emails, because Dershowitz and Epstein were close and both have a passionate attachment to Israel.” It will be a frigid comfort for both he and Walt that their thesis on the bewitching influence of the Israeli lobby’s workings has been so profoundly vindicated.


The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.