Analysis by Keith Rankin.
On Tuesday, I wrote UAE, Israel, And The Hexagon Alliance which illuminated Israel’s duplicity in relation to Hamas, and the understated but very strong alliance between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel. And Israel’s agenda to divide and rule the ‘Middle East’ by creating its own encircling alliance; and setting up two rival Muslim axes (a Shia axis, and a Sunni axis) which Israel would like to see weaken and damage each other.
Here I begin with other candid comments, by recent Israeli leaders, from the Australian 2024 documentary The Forever War. Themes include a mix of empathy and contempt for the indigenous Palestinian population, Benjamin Netanyahu’s trustworthiness, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich as “messianic” “terrorists”, Israel’s hold over the United States, and Israel’s self-inflicted diminishing security.
Excerpts from the Australian ABC documentary
TZIPI LIVNI, FMR FOREIGN & JUSTICE MINISTER: They hate us. We saw the results. The idea of eradicating Hamas completely from Gaza is a just cause.
YEHUDA SHAUL, FMR ISRAELI ARMY COMMANDER: That the IDF is doing everything to avoid civilian casualties is a blunt lie. Straight lie.
YEHUDA SHAUL, FMR ISRAELI ARMY COMMANDER: Y’know, [in the] the beginning I was also full of rage. I also had the feeling that these are animals, we need to go there and bomb the hell out of them. But then you stop for a second and you think, you say to yourself, what did we think is going to happen after 16 years of siege.
AMIRA HASS, OCCUPIED TERRITORIES CORRESPONDENT, HAARETZ: I was surprised and not surprised because I kept warning that people cannot stand the accumulated cruelty accumulated over so many decades. And somehow there will be an explosion. Somehow there will be an outburst. I couldn’t imagine what it would be, but there it came.
…
JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: You’ve spent a lot of time studying this obviously as head of Shin Bet. Could you describe what is the reality for Palestinians here?
AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: It was a life of people who dream about freedom, and don’t see it. Whether we liked it or not, we control the life of millions.
JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: If you were a Palestinian living in the West Bank or Gaza, what would your view be of Israel?
AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: I would fight against Israel in order to achieve my liberty.
JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: How would you fight? How dirty?
AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: I would do everything in order to achieve my liberty. And that’s it.
EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Look, I once was asked some 30 years ago what I have been doing if I were a Palestinian and 30 years ago. I was new enough in politics to tell the truth that if I were born Palestinian probably would’ve joined one of the terror organisations.
…
JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Israel’s famous for its targeted assassinations. I mean you yourself dressed as a woman famously and went into Beirut and met up with Mossad and went and killed a Palestinian leader. Israel’s done that over the years. Why couldn’t they have tried to strategically target Hamas leaders rather than kill those thousands of children?
EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: I never deluded myself to believe that by killing any individual you solve the problem, you give them a blow and they will recover in a way it just delayed the real decision. Real decisions at the end are not about how to kill mosquitoes more effectively. It’s about how to drain the swamp [my emphasis].
…
JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Do you trust Benjamin Netanyahu?
TZIPI LIVNI, FMR FOREIGN & JUSTICE MINISTER: Never.
JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Can there be peace while Benjamin Netanyahu’s the leader here?
TZIPI LIVNI, FMR FOREIGN & JUSTICE MINISTER: No. No.
JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Can the world trust Benjamin Netanyahu?
EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: I don’t think that anyone can trust him. So basically, he lies to everyone and no one trust him.
…
EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: BenGvir and Smotrich, the two racist messianic guys that seems to be to very strong leverage on Bibi. They want to turn it into a major religious war between Israel and the Islam.
JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Are they dangerous?
EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Sure, they’re dangerous.
JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: How powerful are BenGvir and Smotrich and what do you think of them?
AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: I see them as terrorists and as Jewish messianics, they represent only a small minority within the Israel society, but they get their power because of our coalition system.*
JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: But can I just check something? Are you calling the Minister for National Security and the Minister for Finance in Israel? Are you calling them terrorists?
AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: Of course. They are.
JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Is the brutal reality that Benjamin Netanyahu wants to continue this war for his own political survival?
EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Look, I cannot penetrate his soul and tell you for sure, but it’s clear that he acts as if the main objective of this whole event is his survival. He understands that if fighting will have a pause for six weeks or two times six weeks, the Israeli republic will demand accountability in spite of the fact that there is no word in Hebrew for accountability. It was not needed in our culture, but the public will demand it and he might lose his role, the prime minister.
…
excerpt from U.S. PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The state of Israel was born to be a safe place for the Jewish people.
JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: President Biden is a lifelong supporter of Israel.
excerpt from U.S. PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: If Israel didn’t exist we’d have to invent it.
EHUD BARAK, FMR PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Israel cannot fight this regional war without having close relationship with the Americans. We need their support, not just in munitions that we do not produce in a high enough space to supply the needs of such a regional war, but we need them also to protect us in the UN Security Council. We needed them at the beginning of the crisis to deter Iran from getting involved or from activating the Hezbollah against us. And we will need them even in the Hague, to block the prospect that… Israeli commanders or even politically, they might find themselves as a criminal in the Hague or demanded to be broke. Only America can help us to avoid all this.
JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Pro-Israeli lobby groups in the US wield immense power.
NATHAN THRALL, FMR DIRECTOR INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP: Every politician in the United States knows that they can pay a major price with their jobs for not toeing the line. And the level of devastation that we are seeing now has so horrified the world and has so horrified the American public that now we have half of the people who voted for Biden saying that Israel is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza.
…
JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: Do you now fear for the future?
TZIPI LIVNI, FMR FOREIGN & JUSTICE MINISTER: I am worried. I am worried about the future of Israel. Yes, more than ever.
AMI AYALON, FMR HEAD OF SHIN BET: You cannot deter a person or a group of people if they believe that they have nothing to lose. We Israelis, we shall have security only when they will have hope.
JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: What’s the future for Palestinians
AVI DICHTER, CURRENT ISRAELI CABINET MINISTER: Supporting death will not bring you anything. If you don’t believe that the Jewish presence here between the Mediterranean and Jordan Valley is forever, you are going to lose more than you’ve lost till now.
*Coalition System
All electoral democracies – ie with parliamentary or congressional elections – face the problem of a very close electoral result in a partisan House. And, as Keir Starmer is finding out, political parties in traditional duopoly systems (generally ‘First Past the Post’) are themselves coalitions. In 1984, under FPP, New Zealand went to the polls early, because a minority faction of two within the governing National caucus – Marilyn Waring and Mike Minogue – had (or seemed, to Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, to have had) gained the effective balance of power. In Israel today, it is BenGivr and Smotrich who have that balance of power within the parliament, the Knesset.) In the US Senate under Joe Biden’s presidency, it was Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
In the Israel case, Netanyahu is the bigger problem. The BenGivr and Smotrich tails are not wagging the Netanyahu dog.
Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein
Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post episode The anatomy of the Epstein network (9 Feb 2026) noted this 15 Jan 2026 article – “Praise Allah, There Are Still People Like You”: Jeffrey Epstein Nurtured Israel-Emirates Ties Before Abraham Accords – from Drop Site News, and then interviewed one of its authors, Murtaza Hussain. As well as emphasising Israel’s links with UAE, it also outlines Jeffrey Epstein’s longstanding links to both UAE (especially Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, former head of DP World) and to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Yes, the very Ehud Barak who intimated that Gaza and the West Bank (and presumably much of Lebanon to the south and west of Beirut) were swamps in need of draining.
Barak, Prime Minister from 1999 to 2001, was the most recent Labor Party leader of Israel. Labor-constituent parties led Israel from 1948 to 1977, and also for some years in the 1990s. Yitzhak Rabin, a Labor Prime Minister, was assassinated by a Zionist terrorist on 4 November 1995.
From Wikipedia: “According to Barak, they first met in 2003, and no evidence of an earlier meeting has been published to date. Barak stayed at Epstein’s apartments in New York several times over the years. … A large portion of the funds invested by Barak was supplied by Jeffrey Epstein. … In 2023, it was revealed that Barak had visited Epstein around 30 times from 2013 to 2017. … Barak said [in 2015 that] he currently earns more than $1 million a year.”
From the Drop Site News article:
“In the last two decades of his life, American financier Jeffrey Epstein acted as an informal diplomatic bridge between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.”
“Epstein’s … claim of having an intimate friendship with Sulayem is now corroborated by a flood of his emails from the House Oversight Committee, a U.S. federal court case, and the hacked inbox of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.”
It appears that much of Epstein’s correspondence with Sulayem was cc.ed to Ehud Barak; keeping Israel – if not Netanyahu – fully in the loop of UAE’s deepening links with Epstein, a man sufficiently notorious as a child sex offender to bring down the likes of the former prince, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. (The Epstein Affair has close parallels with the 1963 Profumo Affair, which brought down the British government and also came close to entangling the Royal Family; as viewers of The Crown will appreciate. I’m surprised that the Andrew-obsessed British media seems to downplay this parallel.)
The article adds:
‘In a November 2022 interview about the Abraham Accords, Epstein’s close friend Ehud Barak told journalist Afshin Rattansi, “I’m glad that the Emirates and Bahrain went ‘out of the closet’ and are ready to formalize relationships with us [Israel], and I hope that others will follow. It’s a positive development; of course, it’s not a real peace, it’s not a major breakthrough. We know these people for 25 years, and we have a very intensive relationship with them in many arenas”.
‘The relationship between Israel and the UAE has only deepened in the years since, even as the Israeli genocide in Gaza has provoked global outrage. In December 2025, the UAE signed a $2.3 billion defense deal with Elbit Systems, one of the largest arms sales in Israeli history.’ [What are the odds that the RSF in Sudan are now using some of those weapons?]
‘Although Epstein did not live to see these agreements come to fruition, the private channels he helped cultivate between Emirati and Israeli elites helped make them possible.’
Epstein’s Ponzi Scheme
How did Epstein make his massive fortune and become so influential and entitled? The whole story is of course murky, especially in the years of the 1990s and 2000s. Most of the information we have today relates to the post-2008 period, after Epstein’s conviction for ‘procuring for prostitution’.
I discovered a very interesting story relating to an earlier part of Epstein’s life, when he was working closely with Steven Hoffenberg. From Epstein’s Wikipedia page: “In 1993, [Hoffenberg’s] Towers Financial Corporation imploded when it was exposed as one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in American history, losing over US$450 million of its investors’ money (equivalent to $1 billion in 2025). In court documents, Hoffenberg claimed that Epstein was intimately involved in the scheme.” Epstein worked with Towers Financial Corporation, which perpetrated that Ponzi scheme in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
From CBS (Jeffrey Epstein worked at financial firm that engaged in massive Ponzi scheme in 1980s and 1990s, by Brian Pascus and Mola Lenghi, 13 Aug 2019): ‘Hoffenberg’s financial crimes in the 1990s drew major public attention, as the Towers Financial Ponzi scheme was the largest financial fraud in American history prior to Bernie Madoff’s crimes a decade later, according to The New York Times. … “Jeffrey was my partner in what we did raising the billion dollars. He worked with me every day, seven days a week and he was in the mix with everything that I did,” Hoffenberg told CBS News. “I was the CEO of Towers Financial Corporation, a public company, and Jeffrey was my main assistant, associate, or partner. And the company did do a billion dollars in raising money. And it was criminal”.’
And note How Epstein got so rich, by Timothy Rooks for Deutsche Welle, 16 Feb 2026.
Conclusion
By focussing on Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes, we may be letting him and his contacts off lightly.
Epstein was a money man; a miner of money, paying minors while playing majors. An Israel man. A scholar, majoring in influence, with particularly strong links to politicians and businessmen on the right of the political left; people like Peter Mandelson and Ehud Barak. A Hexagon Alliance man, who died ignominiously before his work came to its present fruition. A man trading in big guns and little women. A man serving what has become the world’s most lucrative and secretive industry; the high-tech high-chat world of asymmetric warfare, geopolitics, and draining swamps. Many of Epstein’s many contacts, now distancing themselves from him, will have imbibed the same Kool-Aid.
Epstein was a man who did much towards creating the new circum-Arabia circular economy, whereby Israel facilitates the UAE to supply military tech to the RSF to extract gold and materials from Sudan so that Israel (and its proxies, big and small) can devise, manufacture, and test more military tech to sell to the UAE to supply RSF terrorists …
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
