Is Nixing Aid to Israel a Poison Chalice?

Ending the existing arrangement could result in even more extensive forms of involvement.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

Feb 9, 2026

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/is-nixing-aid-to-israel-a-poison-chalice/

There is a lot of talk about getting rid of the massive agreement that guarantees Israel billions of dollars in military aid each year. And it’s not just critics of Israel: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Senator Lindsey Graham have even said they want to “taper off” the money because Israel is ready to stand on its own two feet.

But while a debate over the annual package would be a most welcome one given the enormous sums of American taxpayer money that has flowed to Israel’s wars in recent years, it is important to keep an eye on what might be a bait and switch: trading one guarantee for a set of others that might be less transparent and more expensive than what’s on the books today.

When President Bill Clinton announced the first Memorandum of Agreement, a 10-year, $26.7 billion military and economic aid package to Israel, he expressed hope that it would complement the advancement of the Oslo Accords, the peace process he had shepherded between the Israelis and Palestinians earlier in his term.

The peace process tied to Oslo pretty much fell apart after expected Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank as outlined in the Wye River Agreement in 1998 never happened; today Israeli settlements considered illegal under international law have exploded, with more than 700,000 settlers living there today and Israelis controlling security in most of the territory. But the 10-year MOU lived on. 

Not only has it been renewed through the Bush and Obama administrations; the total outlays have increased. The current one, signed in 2016, pledged $38 billion over the decade, just under $4 billion a year and now all of it military aid. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Israel is by far the biggest recipient of U.S. aid in history, some $300 billion since its founding, with the greatest proportion coming from those MOUs.

Supporters of the aid say it comes with military and strategic partnerships that are supposed to help keep the neighborhood safe for the U.S., Israel, and its “allies” (there are no treaty allies in the region), but the last 40 years have been pockmarked with wars and waves of human displacement and misery. Beyond financially and militarily supporting Israel’s wars, the U.S. has been bombing, regime-changing, occupying, and fending off terrorist insurgencies created by its own policies in Central Asia, the Horn of Africa, and the Middle East since 1999. Today, with Israel’s encouragement, President Donald Trump is poised to bomb Iran for the second time in his current term in office.

On February 3 the Congress passed the latest installment of the current MOU—$3.3 billion. It was a bipartisan affair, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer assuring a group of Jewish leaders the previous weekend, that “I have many jobs as leader … and one is to fight for aid to Israel, all the aid that Israel needs.” 

But not everyone is on board with the open spigot. And a spigot it is. According to CFR, the U.S. gave $16.3 billion (which included its annual $3.8 billion outlays) to Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks. Israel’s retaliation for those attacks, which killed 1,200 Israelis, has resulted in more than 71,000 recorded Palestinian deaths in Gaza so far, a blockade that has left the 2 million population there largely homeless, starving, sick, and unsafe. Americans have reacted by rejecting the prospects of further aid, with a plurality now—42 percent—saying they want to decrease if not stop aid altogether. That is up from the mid-20 percent range in October 2023.

Beyond Americans’ aversion to funding the slaughter of civilians in Gaza, a conservative fissure over continued, unconditional support for Israel has opened wide over the last year, exposing another rationale for discontinuing the aid: It is not “America First.” It not only siphons off aid from much needed renewal at home, but forces Washington to aid and abet another country’s foreign policy, which is increasingly counterproductive and contrary to our own politics and values. 

The region is not safer, and moreover, it has not allowed for the United States to reduce its military footprint as guarantor of security there. 

One then-congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), was vocal in her opposition to this aid. Israel, she pointed out, has nuclear weapons and is “quite capable of defending itself.” She has pointed out Israel’s universal health care and subsidized college tuition for its citizens, “yet here in America we’re 37 trillion dollars in debt.”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY.) posted on X that he voted against the spending bill on February 3 in part to deny Israel the $3.3 billion in aid. He has said the aid takes money out of Americans’ pockets and proliferates human suffering in our name. “Nothing can justify the number of civilian casualties (tens of thousands of women and children) inflicted by Israel in Gaza in the last two years. We should end all U.S. military aid to Israel now,” he said in May of last year. 

In an interview with The American Conservative last week, he said he is speaking for his Kentucky district and despite a retaliatory 2026 primary challenge driven largely by Trump and donors linked to the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), he will continue to raise the issue in Congress. He said he has asked his GOP constituents every year whether to maintain, increase, or cut Israel annual aid since 2012. 

“I’ve polled that [question] every election cycle in my congressional district among likely Republican voters, and this was the first year that a majority of people answered nothing [no aid] at all, or less,” said Massie. “It’s not a third rail back home. It’s a third rail inside of the Beltway.” 

According to reports last month, Israel is “preparing for talks” with the Trump administration to renew the MOU for another 10 years. One might be flummoxed to hear, however, that Netanyahu is giving interviews in which he says he wants to “taper off” American aid in that decade “to zero.” Israel has “come of age” and “we’ve developed incredible capacities,” he said in January. 

Immediately after, Graham, who seems to spend more time in Israel than Washington these days, said he heartily agreed and hoped to end the aid sooner. “I’m going to work on expediting the wind down of the aid and recommend we plow the money back into our own military,” he said. “As an American, you’re always appreciating allies that can be more self-sufficient.”

The idea of self-sufficiency and furthermore the concept of Israel releasing itself from any “ties” that might come from the aid is not a new one among supporters here and especially the hardline right in Israel. “Cut the US aid, and Israel becomes fully sovereign,” Laura Loomer charged on X in November. In March of last year, the Heritage Foundation called for gradually reducing the direct grants in the next MOUs starting in 2029 and transitioning gradually to more military cooperation and then finally arms transfers through the Foreign Military Sales by 2047. 

Israel, the report concludes, should be “elevated to strategic partner for the benefit of Israel, the United States, and the Middle East. Transforming the U.S.–Israel relationship requires changing the regional paradigm, specifically advancing new security and commercial architectures.” The plan also leans heavily on future Abraham Accords ensuring trade and military pacts with Arab countries in the neighborhood.

Therein lies the fix, say critics. The reason these staunch advocates of Israel including Netanyahu, the most demanding of its leaders over the last 30 years by far, is willing to forgo MOU aid, is that they envision it will come from somewhere else, less politically charged.

“The emerging plan is to substitute formal military funding—known as Foreign Military Financing—with greater U.S. taxpayer-funded co-development and co-production of weapons with Israel,” says the Institute for Middle East Understanding, which adds that instead of extricating from Israel’s messes, the U.S. will be further “enmeshed” in them.

The think tank points out that the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), the most unreconstructed pro-Israel organ in the United States, came out with its own report on the aid, and surprise, also advocated phasing out the MOU. In addition to a commitment by Israel to spend more of its GDP on defense and other co-investments with the U.S. on research and development, the U.S. would “provide Israel $5 billion each year through what would be known as a Partnership Investment Incentive—or PII. This PII would provide funding via existing foreign military financing (FMF) mechanisms that Israel would use to procure American military hardware.” The difference would be that it would have to be spent entirely in U.S. industry and on cooperative partnerships in the region, all while maintaining Israel’s “Qualitative Military Edge.” 

Geoff Aronson, longtime Middle East analyst and occasional TAC contributor, said the aid has been “an important if not vital competent in ensuring American and Israeli hegemony in the region” and is linked intrinsically to balancing U.S. strategic relations and normative Israeli peace with Egypt and Jordan, which gets billions in military aid (not as much) from the U.S. too. None of this is going to go away, he surmised to TAC. 

“The question that is being posed is how can we continue to support Israel's ability to work its will in the region without committing ourself to X, Y, Z or committing to a new partnership, a new agreement,” he said. “Watch what you wish for, because it might come true.”

The death of 'America First'

The phrase has been corrupted and distorted by hawks cheering on a more interventionist Trump foreign policy. Time for something new.

Jack Hunter

Feb 06, 2026

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/america-first-trump/

In 2019, John Bolton described how he defined “America First."

"The idea that actually protecting America was the highest priority,” he said. A fair, though vague, point by one of the most hawkish men in Washington at the time.

Bolton continued, “In 2008, John McCain, the Republican nominee, had as his slogan ‘Country First.’ Now who in this room wants to guess what country he was talking about?”

The United States obviously. But what was Bolton really trying to say? With a straight face, he added, “So explain to me what's so different, at least at the bumper sticker rhetorical level, between the McCain and Trump approaches.”

Oh boy.

A major reason John McCain lost the 2008 presidential election is because Americans wanted a change in the disastrous interventionist foreign policy of the Bush administration, and the Arizona senator, who had been in Washington since 1982, was only promising more of the same. In 2016, Donald Trump was promising a less interventionist foreign policy, something President Barack Obama had also pledged, but ultimately failed to deliver as he escalated a major killer drone war through the aughts.

McCain was clearly the pro-war, neoconservative candidate. Obama ran as an antiwar candidate. So did Trump.

The Trump phenomenon was supposed to be a changing of the old Republican guard, however imperfectly, for a new foreign policy ethos that was closer to Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul than Bill Kristol and David Frum. That’s exactly why so many neoconservatives and War Party Republicans got behind the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

So seven years ago, when Bolton tried to redefine Donald Trump’s America First brand as a continuation of McCain-Bush interventionism, I laughed. Did Bolton really think the conservative base was this gullible?

I’m not laughing anymore.

Hawks, including old neoconservatives, now present pro-war interventionism as America First all the time.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the neoconservatives’ preferred presidential candidate in 2016 to continue the Bush-Cheney foreign policy legacy in the same way McCain once tried to do, is perhaps more effective at rebranding America First than any other Trump official. He says America First means U.S.-led regime change in Venezuela, a potential American takeover of Greenland, and threatening a new war with Iran. Regime change in Cuba is also on the table.

Vice President JD Vance says that America First could mean negotiations with Iran, but could also mean bombing Iran. “We’re running out of time,” he also warns, echoing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s three-decade long claim — that Iran is on the cusp of developing a nuclear weapon.

Last month Vance framed ousting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro as being an American national interest, “In our neighborhood, the United States calls the shots. That's the way it's always been. That's the way it is again under the President's leadership.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said seven months before the U.S. struck Venezuela, “to put America first, we will put the Americas first. We will do this by confronting shared threats across this hemisphere, serious threats that require a serious response.”

In June, Hegseth announced that the U.S. had “obliterated” and "devastated the Iranian nuclear program.”

"What you're watching in real time is peace through strength and America first," Hegseth said just before those June attacks.This week he said the Pentagon was “more than prepared” to bomb Iran again should it refuse negotiations over its nuclear program, something Americans were told was already destroyed last summer.

Frustrated that his base wasn’t entirely in lockstep behind those Iran strikes, Trump told Michael Scherer at The Atlantic that he decides what America First is. “Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that.”

No one is saying that Trump always stuck to a restraint America First script. He clearly didn’t and doesn’t. His first term was littered with interventionist decisions that often contradicted his rhetoric.

But he is further away from those days than ever before, aided by supporters and surrogates who are happy to appropriate that script.

Take steadfast neoconservative Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who has been allowed to hijack MAGA with zeal, even going so far as to say Trump’s mission is to “Make Iran Great Again” by the U.S. waging war on it. The president has deployed the same motto without irony.

Pro-war conservative personalities in Trump’s base, like Mark Levin, have also taken these cues.

Is “America First” so empty that it is essentially unusable, if not dead?

Those who have embraced the anti-interventionist spirit of America First, like populist former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and libertarians like Congressman Thomas Massie and Senator Rand Paul, are now loathed by Trump in exchange for golf rounds with Sen. Graham. Trump just called Massie a “moron” at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Libertarian historian Brion McClanahan wrote approvingly of Trump after he delivered a major foreign policy campaign speech in April 2016: “

Trump’s traditional American foreign policy is a refreshing departure from the bomb-away mentality of the modern Republican Party. Certainly Ron Paul offered a similar reprieve from American adventurism during his failed presidential bids, and Pat Buchanan made nonintervention a core theme of his run for the presidency in the 1980s and 1990s, but Trump has been able to rally more people around his candidacy and thus has made nonintervention sexy again.”

“Perhaps the endless wars and pointless American bloodletting will finally stop under a Trump administration,” McClanahan added. “In forty years, historians might call this period ‘America First.’ Or maybe it will be the Age of Trump.”

Historians might call this time America First. Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham might call it that, too. But so much of it won’t be. Not anymore. The people in charge have ruined that.

But it certainly is the Age of Trump.

A new Red Sea axis: Israel, India, UAE, Ethiopia converge in Somaliland

Israel’s recognition of Somaliland has realigned the Horn of Africa, linking India, Israel, the UAE, and Ethiopia to secure Red Sea routes and counter rivals.

A Cradle Correspondent

FEB 6, 2026

https://thecradle.co/articles/a-new-red-sea-axis-israel-india-uae-ethiopia-converge-in-somaliland

On 26 December 2025, Israel formally recognized what it termed the Republic of Somaliland, marking a significant shift in its policy toward the Horn of Africa. 

The move altered the political equation along one of the world’s most sensitive maritime routes. In Hargeisa, it was seen as a long-awaited validation. In Addis Ababa, it opened a new strategic space. In Beijing, Ankara, Cairo, and Riyadh, it raised immediate concern.

It consolidates a four-party alignment linking Israel, India, the UAE, and Ethiopia. This emerging axis centers on securing maritime chokepoints in the Gulf of Aden and Bab al-Mandab, while laying the groundwork for an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in eastern Africa.

The timing followed months of escalating regional pressure. The Israeli–Iranian confrontation in June 2025, along with the Yemeni maritime blockade targeting vessels bound for Israeli ports, exposed the vulnerability of southern sea lanes. 

Securing these waterways became a core component of Israeli national security planning. The southern maritime gateway now sits firmly within Israel’s broader regional strategy.

Somaliland’s geography explains its importance. Overlooking one of the world’s busiest maritime arteries, it holds proximity to trade flows linking Asia, Africa, and Europe. 

For Israel and its partners, the territory offers a platform for strengthening a stable functional entity capable of securing its coastline, hosting infrastructure, and attracting technological and security investment under formal recognition. 

That recognition – particularly if followed by allied states – provides political legitimacy to an entity that has exercised de facto self-governance for more than three decades. It opens the door for structured military cooperation, infrastructure expansion, and advanced technological integration that were previously constrained by diplomatic ambiguity.

Building the maritime axis

India’s strategic outlook aligns closely with these developments. New Delhi has long viewed East Africa, and particularly the Horn of Africa, as an extension of its maritime sphere within the Indian Ocean. 

Through the SAGAR initiative – whose name means ‘sea’ in Hindi – launched by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015 during his visit to Mauritius, New Delhi articulated a vision of “Security and Growth for All in the Region,” positioning itself as a coordinating force among Indian Ocean littoral states.

The MAHASAGAR (‘Great Ocean’) – a follow-on framework – reinforced this direction by emphasizing regional maritime security management, coordinated naval leadership, and shared surveillance systems.

These doctrines place India in the role of a primary maritime security provider across an expansive oceanic space. International trade – including Chinese and Turkish shipping – increasingly depends on the security environment shaped by India and its partners, among them Israel and the UAE. 

The effect gradually reduces the need for direct American or Russian involvement in safeguarding the Asia–Africa–Europe corridor, replacing external oversight with a regionally anchored structure.

Ethiopia serves as the continental anchor within this framework. During Modi’s December 2025 visit to Addis Ababa, bilateral relations were elevated to a strategic partnership, formalizing Ethiopia’s position within the alignment. 

As a landlocked state of approximately 126 million people, access to maritime outlets is a structural necessity. Dependence on Djibouti, where Chinese influence remains significant, has imposed economic constraints. Somaliland and the port of Berbera provide Addis Ababa with an alternative outlet less exposed to Beijing’s leverage. The Berbera–Ethiopia corridor thus becomes a central economic artery within the broader Indian–Israeli alignment.

Defense considerations reinforce the trajectory. India had set a target of raising defense exports to roughly $5 billion by the 2025–26 fiscal year as part of its broader push to expand its defense manufacturing footprint.

The Horn of Africa presents a receptive market. Somaliland offers an environment in which Indian systems – often integrated with Israeli technologies – can be marketed, tested, and embedded within local security structures. 

India contributes capacity building and infrastructure development, while Israel adds advanced technological capabilities. Together, these elements form a coordinated security and development framework.

Regional reactions and strategic countermoves

For China, the emerging alignment presents a direct challenge to its Djibouti-based influence model. Beijing’s strategy in the Horn has relied on infrastructure finance and port management agreements that generate long-term leverage. The Indian-Israeli approach offers a competing framework built around diversified partnerships and security integration.

China is unlikely to remain passive. Increased military activity at its Djibouti base, diplomatic pressure within the African Union to prevent collective recognition of Somaliland, and expanded investment in Mogadishu’s port infrastructure are among the expected responses.

Turkiye also faces strategic recalibration as Ankara has invested extensively in Somalia, training its armed forces and managing critical facilities. Israel’s recognition complicates this position. Expanded drone deliveries to Mogadishu and closer military coordination with Pakistan aimed at counterbalancing Indian influence are plausible responses. Turkiye may also mobilize diplomatic efforts within the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to challenge the recognition.

Iran remains part of the broader security equation. The Indian–Israeli alignment seeks to reduce opportunities for Tehran to project pressure into the Red Sea through asymmetric tactics, including cyber operations or unmanned systems. Strengthening maritime security in the Gulf of Aden limits such avenues.

The economic dimension extends beyond security. The India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) represents a major counterweight to China’s Silk Road networks. Within this framework, the UAE provides financial and logistical depth. 

The Horn of Africa becomes a southern hinge within this corridor. Somaliland functions as a stabilizing node, particularly as India deepens trade agreements with the US, EU, and UK. Western capitals view the alignment as a mechanism to protect supply chains from Chinese port dominance and secure maritime routes from regional disruption.

Structural pressures and points of friction

Despite its strategic coherence, the alignment faces structural challenges. The principle of inherited colonial borders remains central within both the African Union and the Arab League. Wider recognition of Somaliland raises concerns about territorial precedent. 

Indian diplomacy must persuade skeptical African and Arab states – including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar – that Somaliland represents a stabilizing case rather than a fragmentation trigger.

Technological competition remains active. Turkish drones maintain a reputation for affordability and operational effectiveness, while Pakistan continues expanding its defense exports. The India–Israel partnership must demonstrate sustained operational and cost advantages under regional conditions.

Ethiopia’s internal stability is another decisive factor. Addis Ababa functions as the continental pivot. Political instability would affect the viability of the Berbera corridor and weaken the economic foundation of the alignment.

Saudi Arabia’s position introduces further complexity. Abu Dhabi has aligned firmly with the emerging axis, viewing stability in Somaliland and Ethiopia as essential to safeguarding its port investments, particularly through DP World’s stake in Berbera. 

Riyadh has historically maintained a more flexible policy in the Horn, at times balancing Turkish and Pakistani engagement in Mogadishu. A deeper Emirati security alignment with Israel and India may prompt Saudi recalibration.

Regional balancing and external leverage

Egypt views developments through the lens of the Nile dispute. Israeli recognition intersects with Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam file, heightening Cairo’s concerns about strategic encirclement. 

Additionally, Egypt has strengthened military coordination with Mogadishu and pursued legal initiatives within regional institutions to reinforce territorial integrity norms. Maintaining Somaliland in legal ambiguity constrains investment and slows corridor expansion.

Officially, Washington maintains the One Somalia policy. In practice, it has expanded security cooperation with Somaliland. The 2026 National Defense Authorization Act established a framework for military cooperation with Hargeisa, including access to facilities in Berbera. 

Functional engagement has advanced without formal diplomatic recognition. For US planners, the four-party alignment offers a means to reduce reliance on Chinese-influenced Djibouti while limiting Iranian reach in the Red Sea. At the same time, Washington maintains working relations with Mogadishu to preserve counterterrorism coordination.

The India–Israel alliance through Somaliland reflects a recalibration of power along the Red Sea rim. Maritime security, technological integration, and corridor politics now intersect in a territory whose strategic weight exceeds its size. 

Israeli expertise, Indian ambition, Emirati capital, and Ethiopian necessity converge in a project designed to secure trade routes and reshape regional alignments. The durability of this framework will depend on continental stability, diplomatic management, and the responses of rival powers unwilling to concede influence in the Horn of Africa.

The criminal elite exposed in the Epstein files are burying the truth

Jonathan Cook

5 February 2026

A handful of figures will be sacrificed - but only to protect a wider culture that believes rules don't apply to the ruling elite

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/criminal-elite-exposed-epstein-files-burying-truth

If you struggle to cope with the endless pressure to communicate in an ever-more connected world, spare a thought for the late serial paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. 

The flood of three million documents released by the US Department of Justice over the weekend confirm that Epstein spent an inordinate amount of time corresponding with the huge network of powerful acquaintances he had developed. 

Emailing alone looks to have been almost a full-time job for him - and in a real sense, it was.

The personal attention he devoted to billionaires, royalty, political leaders, statesmen, celebrities, academics and media elites was how he kept himself at the heart of this vast network of power. 

His address book was a who’s who of those who shape our sense of how the world ought to be run. But it was also critical to how he drew some of these same powerful figures deeper into his orbit, and into a world of debauched and exploitative private parties in New York and on his Caribbean island. 

Apparently there are another three million documents still being withheld. Their contents, we must presume, are even more damning to the global elite cultivated by Epstein. 

The more documents that come to light, the more a picture emerges of how Epstein was shielded from the consequences of his own depravity by this network of allies who either indulged his crimes, or actively participated in them.

Epstein’s modus operandi looked suspiciously like that of a gangland boss, who requires initiates to take part in a hit before they become fully fledged members of the mob. Complicity is the safest way to guarantee a conspiracy of silence. 

Network of power

It is not just that the late paedophile financier was for decades hiding in plain sight. His network of friends and acquaintances were hiding with him, all assuming they were untouchable. 

His abuse of young women and girls was not just a personal crime. After all, for whom were he and his procurer-in-chief, Ghislaine Maxwell, doing all this sex trafficking?

This is precisely why so many of the millions of documents released have been carefully redacted - not chiefly to protect his victims, who are apparently too often identified, but to protect the predatory circles he serviced. 

What is notable about the latest tranche of Epstein files is how suggestive they are of a worldview associated with “conspiracy theorists”. Epstein was at the centre of a global network of powerful figures from both sides of a supposed - but in reality, largely performative - political divide between the left and right. 

The glue that appears to have bound many of these figures together was their abusive treatment of vulnerable young women and girls. 

Similarly, the photos of rich men with young women suggest that Epstein accumulated, either formally or informally, kompromat - incriminating evidence - that presumably served as potential leverage over them. 

In true Masonic style, his circle of peers appear to have protected each other. Epstein himself certainly benefited from a “sweetheart deal” in Florida in 2008. He ended up being jailed on only two charges of soliciting prostitution - the least serious among a raft of sex trafficking charges - and served a short term, much of it on work release. 

And the mystery of how Epstein, a glorified accountant, financed his fantastically lavish lifestyle - when his schedule seems to have been dominated by emailing chores and hosting sex parties - grows a little less mysterious with every fresh disclosure. 

His cultivation of the super-wealthy and their hangers-on, and the invitations to come to his island to spend time with young women, all smack of the traditional honeytrap famously employed by spy agencies. Most likely, Epstein wasn’t financing all of this himself.

Israel's fingerprints

That should be no surprise. Once again, the fingerprints of intelligence services - particularly Israel’s - are to be found in the latest dump of files. But the clues were there long before. 

There was, of course, his intimate, preternatural bond with Maxwell, whose media tycoon father was exposed after his death as an Israeli agent. And Epstein’s long-standing best buddy, Ehud Barak, a former head of Israeli military intelligence who later served as prime minister, should have been another red flag. 

That partnership featured prominently in a flurry of stories published by Drop Site News last autumn, from an earlier release of the Epstein files. They showed Epstein helping Israel to broker security deals with countries such as Mongolia, Cote d’Ivoire and Russia. 

An active Israeli military intelligence officer, Yoni Koren, was a repeated houseguest at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment between 2013 and 2015. An email also shows Barak asking Epstein to wire funds to Koren’s account.

But the latest release offers additional clues. A declassified FBI document quotes a confidential source as saying Epstein was “close” to Barak and “trained as a spy under him”. 

In an email exchange between the pair in 2018, ahead of a meeting with a Qatari investment fund, Epstein asks Barak to allay potential concerns about their relationship: “you should make clear that i dont work for mossad. :)” 

And in newly released, undated audio, Epstein advises Barak to find out more about US data analysis firm Palantir and meet its founder, Peter Thiel. In 2024, Israel signed a deal with Palantir for AI services to help the Israeli military select targets in Gaza. 

Predictably, these revelations are gaining almost no traction in the establishment media - the very same media whose billionaire owners and career-minded editors once courted Epstein. 

Instead, the media seem much more engrossed by weaker leads that suggest Epstein might have also had connections with Russian security services. 

Faustian pact

There is a reason why the demand for the Epstein files has been so clamorous that even US President Donald Trump had to give in, despite embarrassing revelations for him too. Much of what we see happening in our ever-more debased, corrupt politics appears to defy rational, let alone moral, explanation. 

Western elites have spent two years actively colluding in mass slaughter in Gaza - widely identified by experts as a genocide - and then labelling any opposition to it as antisemitism or terrorism.

Those same elites twiddle their thumbs as the planet burns, refusing to give up their enriching addiction to fossil fuels, even as survey after survey shows global temperatures relentlessly climbing to the point where climate breakdown is inevitable. 

A series of reckless, illegal western wars of aggression in the Middle East, as well as Nato’s long-term goading of Russia into invading Ukraine, have not only destabilised the world, but risk provoking nuclear conflagration.

And despite expert warnings, artificial intelligence is being rushed out with apparently barely a thought given to the unpredictable and likely massive costs to our societies, from eviscerating much of the job market to upending our ability to assess truth. 

The Epstein files proffer an answer. What feels like a conspiracy, they suggest, is indeed a conspiracy - one driven by greed. What was always staring us in the face might actually be correct: there is a steep entry price for being accepted into the West’s tiny power elite, and it involves putting to one side any sense of morality. It requires discarding empathy for anyone outside the in-group.

Maybe a soulless, flesh-eating elite in charge of our societies is less of a caricature than it appears. Maybe the Epstein files have such purchase on our imaginations because they teach us a lesson we already knew, confirming a cautionary tale that predates even the West’s literary canon.

More than 400 years ago, English writer Christopher Marlowe - a contemporary of William Shakespeare - drew on German folk stories to write his play Doctor Faustus, about a scholar who, through the intermediary Mephistopheles, agrees to sell his soul to the devil in return for magical powers. 

Thus was born the Faustian pact, mediated by the Epstein-like figure of Mephistopheles. The great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would revisit this tale 200 years later in his two-part masterwork Faust.

Degenerate logic

Perhaps not surprisingly, however, the media noise over the Epstein files is serving chiefly to drown out a more truthful story struggling to emerge. 

The same elite that once prized Epstein as its ringmaster is now trying to draw our attention away from its complicity in his crimes, to direct it to a few select individuals - notably in the UK, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson. 

The pair hardly count as sacrificial lambs. Nonetheless, they serve the same purpose: to satiate the growing public appetite for retribution.

Meanwhile, the rest of his circle either deny the well-established evidence of their friendships with Epstein or, if cornered, hastily apologise for a brief lapse in judgment - before scurrying for cover.

This is a false reckoning. The Epstein files don’t just show us the dark choices of a few powerful individuals. More significantly, they highlight the degenerate logic of the power structures behind these individuals.

The powerful figures who took Epstein’s Lolita Express to his island; who got “massages” from young, trafficked women and girls; and who casually joked about the abuse these youngsters suffered, are the very same people who quietly helped Israel commit mass slaughter in Gaza - and in some cases, noisily defended its right to do so. 

Are we surprised that those who raised not a whisper of opposition to the murder and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children, and the starvation of hundreds of thousands more, were also those who connived in rituals of abuse against children - or condoned such rituals - far closer to home?

These are the people who required anyone hoping to raise their voice in defence of Gaza’s children to spend their time instead condemning Hamas. These are the people who sought at every turn to discredit the mounting death toll of children by attributing it to Gaza’s “Hamas-run health ministry”. 

These are the people who denied Israel’s targeting of hospitals needed to treat Gaza’s wounded and sick children - and ignored Israel’s mass starvation of the entire population. And these are the people now pretending that Israel’s continuing murder and torture of Gaza’s children amounts to a “peace plan”. 

Neoliberalism and Zionism

Set aside his paedophilia for a moment. Epstein was the ultimate personification of the twin corrupting ideologies of neoliberalism and Zionism, which dominate western societies. That is reason enough why he excelled for so long in their upper reaches.

The ultimate destinations of those ideologies were always going to lead to a genocide in Gaza, and in the years or decades ahead - unless stopped - to a planet-wide nuclear holocaust or climate collapse.

Epstein could serve as a salutary warning of what is so deeply amiss with the West’s political and financial culture. But the wake-up call he represents is now being smothered in his absence as much as it was in his lifetime. 

Neoliberalism is the pursuit of money and power for its own sake, divorced from any higher purpose or social good. Over the last half century, western societies have been encouraged to venerate the billionaire - soon to be trillionaire - class as the ultimate signifier of economic growth and progress, rather than the ultimate marker of a system that has rotted from within. 

Predictably, the super-rich and their hangers-on have been drawn to the advocates of “longtermism”, a movement that justifies the world’s current gross inequalities and injustices - and is resigned to a coming climate and environmental apocalypse as the world’s resources are used up. 

Longtermism argues that humanity’s salvation lies not with reorganising our societies politically and economically in the here and now, but with intensifying those inequalities to achieve longer-term success via a class of Nietzschean Ubermensch, or superior beings. 

A tiny financial elite needs absolute freedom to amass more wealth in search of the solutions - via tech innovations, of course - to overcome the difficulties of surviving on our fragile planet. The rest of us are an impediment to the super-rich’s ability to steer a course to safety.

Ordinary men, women and children must be left on the sinking ship, while the billionaires requisition the lifeboats. In the words of one of longtermism’s gurus, Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosopher, what lies ahead is “a giant massacre for man, a small misstep for mankind”. 

To borrow a term from video-gaming, members of the neoliberal elite view the rest of us as non-player characters, or NPCs - the filler characters generated in a game to serve as the background for the actual players. Seen in this larger frame, what does it matter if children suffer, either in Gaza or in the mansions of a billionaire? 

No moral outlier

If this sounds a lot like traditional, “white man’s burden” colonialism, updated for a supposedly post-colonial era, that’s because it is. This helps to explain why neoliberalism pairs so comfortably with another depraved colonial ideology, Zionism. 

Zionism gained ever-more legitimacy in the aftermath of the Second World War, even as it brashly preserved through the postwar era the depraved logic of the very European ethnic nationalisms that had earlier culminated in Nazism. 

Israel, Zionism’s bastard child, not only mirrored Aryan supremacy, but made its own version - Jewish supremacy - respectable. Zionism, like other ugly ethnic nationalisms, demands tribal unity against the Other, values militarism above all else, and constantly seeks territorial expansion, or Lebensraum. 

Is it any surprise that it was Israel that, over many decades, reversed the advances of an international legal system set up precisely to prevent a return to the horrors of the Second World War?

Is it any surprise that it was Israel that carried out a genocide in full view of the world - and that the West not only failed to stop it, but actively colluded in the mass slaughter? 

Is it any surprise that, as Israel has found it harder to conceal the criminal nature of its enterprise, the West has grown more repressive, more authoritarian in crushing opposition to its project?

Is it any surprise that the weapons systems, surveillance innovations and population-control mechanisms that Israel developed and refined for use against Palestinians make it such a prized ally for a western billionaire class looking to use the same technological innovations at home? 

That is why the home secretary of a UK government that threw its weight behind the genocide in Gaza, and defined opposition to it as terrorism, now wants to revive the 18th-century idea of the Panopticon prison, an all-seeing form of incarceration, but in an AI version. In Shabana Mahmood’s words, her Panopticon would ensure that "the eyes of the state can be on you at all times”.

Nearly two decades ago, it became clear that Jeffrey Epstein was a predator. In recent years, it has become impossible to maintain the idea that he was a moral outlier. He distilled and channelled - through depraved forms of sexual gratification - a wider corrupt culture that believes rules don’t apply to special people, to the chosen, to the Ubermensch.

A handful of his most disposable allies will now be sacrificed to satisfy our hunger for accountability. But don’t be fooled: the Epstein culture is still going strong.