Epstein and the quiet financing of occupation
There are crimes that shock because they are brutal, and there are crimes that endure because they are respectable, well documented, tax-deductible, and protected by silence. The story that emerges from the Epstein financial records belongs firmly to the second category, not because it is less violent, but because it shows how modern violence survives through institutions that look lawful, ethical, and even benevolent.
Jeffrey Epstein is usually remembered as a symbol of sexual abuse, elite corruption, and judicial failure, but this memory, while necessary, is also incomplete. Epstein was not simply a criminal operating outside the system; he was a man fully embedded within it, moving money through charities, donating to universities and foundations, attending elite gatherings, and participating in the same financial and moral ecosystem that sustains global power. It is here, not in his private crimes alone, that the Epstein files become politically unsettling.
Among the financial records associated with Epstein are documented donations to the “Friends of the Israel Defence Forces,” a US-based charity that raises funds for the Israeli military, and to institutions connected to the Jewish National Fund, an organisation historically central to settlement building, land acquisition, and the permanent dispossession of Palestinians. These are not claims drawn from polemic or speculation, but entries recorded in formal financial documents, the kind that usually function as proof of legitimacy rather than as evidence of complicity.
This is where the documents stop being evidence and start becoming an indictment.
The most disturbing thing about the Epstein files is not that a powerful man funded violence, but that he did so openly, legally, and without consequence, because this is how modern atrocities survive. They are not always hidden; they are processed, donated to, and normalised through institutions that speak the language of charity while producing the reality of dispossession. Epstein did not need to believe in Zionism to fund its machinery, just as the system did not need to care about his crimes to accept his money, and in that exchange lies the true scandal of our age: a world where elite abuse is condemned in words but rewarded in structure, and where Palestinian suffering is not denied, only endlessly postponed behind procedures, excuses, and paperwork.
This matters because Israeli military power and settlement expansion do not exist in isolation, and they are not sustained by nationalism alone, but by transnational money, elite donors, and charitable networks that transform occupation into a respectable cause, shielding it from moral scrutiny while its consequences are lived daily by Palestinians who lose land, homes, and futures without ever appearing in donor reports or fundraising speeches.
The historian Ilan Pappé has shown that the dispossession of Palestinians was not an accident of war but a planned and continuous project, administered through institutions that made ethnic cleansing appear bureaucratic, necessary, and normal. What the Epstein files reveal is how this project extends far beyond the Israeli state itself, relying on private wealth that circulates freely across borders, insulated from accountability, and protected by political loyalty.
Thomas Suarez, writing on Zionist colonial infrastructure, demonstrates how organisations like the Jewish National Fund were never neutral environmental or cultural bodies, but legal and financial mechanisms designed to secure land permanently for one group while excluding another. When figures like Epstein donate to such institutions, the question is not personal belief but structural participation, the quiet reinforcement of a system that converts inequality into permanence.
What links Epstein’s sexual crimes and his political donations is not ideology but entitlement, the belief that certain bodies exist to be used, managed, or discarded, whether for pleasure, profit, or geopolitical strategy; and that consequences are for the powerless, never for those who fund institutions, sit on boards, or enjoy proximity to intelligence agencies, governments, and elite universities.
This defence is reinforced by Western governments that continue to speak the language of legality and self-defence while materially enabling the conditions that make such violence permanent.
Liberal defenders will object at this point, and they will say that private donations are not the same as state policy, that charitable giving does not equal endorsement of every military action, and that linking Epstein’s crimes to his political donations risks moral overreach. This objection misunderstands how power actually functions. Colonial violence has never depended on personal intent alone, only on sustained support, indifference, and plausible deniability. No donor needs to approve every bomb to make bombing possible, just as no shareholder needs to endorse every death to profit from a system built on harm. When money flows consistently toward institutions whose purpose and effects are well known, neutrality becomes a comforting fiction rather than a moral position. As Pappé reminds us, history does not judge systems by what their supporters claim they meant, but by what their support made inevitable.
Western governments continue to insist that Israel has the right to defend itself, but what remains largely unspoken is how that defence is subsidised by private wealth moving through tax-exempt channels, protected by diplomatic alliances, and insulated from public scrutiny, while Palestinians experience the results not as abstract policy debates but as checkpoints, displacement, bombardment, and the slow erosion of life itself.
The danger of focusing only on Epstein’s personal depravity is that it allows the system around him to remain intact, as if his crimes were an aberration rather than a symptom. This is precisely how elite violence reproduces itself, by isolating individuals while preserving structures, condemning abuse while continuing to reward the conditions that make abuse possible and profitable.
Gaza today exposes this contradiction with brutal clarity, not only because of the scale of destruction, but because of the calm administrative language used to justify it, fund it, and manage its aftermath. When financial records reveal donors supporting military and settlement institutions at the same time that international law is suspended and humanitarian language emptied of force, the claim of accident becomes impossible to sustain.
The question, then, is not whether Epstein supported Israeli institutions, but why such support is treated as normal, uncontroversial, and even admirable in elite spaces, while Palestinian resistance is criminalised, Palestinian grief is interrogated, and Palestinian existence is framed as a demographic or security problem rather than a human one.
What the Epstein files ultimately expose is not a hidden conspiracy but a familiar and coherent order of power. A world capable of funding occupation through charity, laundering violence through institutions, and protecting abusers through procedure will always find ways to describe destruction as lawful, exploitation as incidental, and Palestinian life as expendable.
This is not hypocrisy; it is design. The same system that allowed Epstein to abuse with impunity also allows an occupation to endure with legitimacy, because both are sustained by money, bureaucratic language, and the quiet agreement that certain harms do not require accountability. Palestine remains not the exception to the global order, but its most honest _expression_, proof not of a system that has failed, but of one that is functioning exactly as intended.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.