The Epstein Network and Attempts to Discredit Israel Lobby Study Follow an Elite Playbook to Silence Dissent

A book by two top American scholars in 2007 argued that there was in the United States a powerful network of well-funded pro-Israeli interest groups (mostly Christian) that more or less ensured American state support for Israel. Any deviation from that line by prominent politicians or scholars was, they claimed, intolerable and met with immediate charges of antisemitism and pro-Nazi leanings. They were immediately embroiled in a storm of choreographed protest, demonstrating their argument.

The release of thousands of documents from the Jeffrey Epstein estate further vindicates Stephen M. Walt (Harvard) and John J. Mearsheimer (Chicago), authors of the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (2007). There was a dedicated, malicious, coordinated and well-funded campaign, orchestrated by several individuals like Epstein and networks to which he belonged, to smear the scholars, to silence them, and send a chilling message across the academy: cross the line at your peril.

According to an FBI photograph taken in 2020, but made public only recently, Jeffrey Epstein’s Little St James residence in the Virgin Islands contained, among many things, a small chalkboard in his private study bearing two words that have drawn particular attention in the latest document releases: “deception” and “power”. A third word appears to be “intellectual,” according to a Guardian report.

Taken at face value, the juxtaposition is almost banal – two or three abstract nouns that could belong to any graduate seminar on Machiavelli or Foucault. In the specific context of Epstein’s documented activities, however, they acquire a more sinister resonance. Newly disclosed emails from Epstein’s accounts show him reviewing drafts of Alan Dershowitz’s rebuttals of Walt and Mearsheimer’s paper, offering editorial suggestions, and coordinating with senior figures at Harvard’s Kennedy School – where he had been a major donor – to limit institutional endorsement of the study.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

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The episode is instructive not because it proves a grand conspiracy, but because it illustrates a familiar pattern in elite damage-control: the rapid mobilisation of philanthropic leverage, legal firepower, and media amplification to police the boundaries of acceptable debate. Epstein’s role was symptomatic – he was neither the architect nor the financier of the counter-offensive, but he positioned himself as a willing node in a pre-existing network that included influential lawyers, university administrators, and pro-Israel advocacy organisations.

The chalkboard words, then, can be read as a didactic reminder of the operating principles of that network: deception not in the sense of crude falsehood, but as the strategic management of perception; power not as overt domination, but as the quieter ability to define what counts as legitimate knowledge.

None of this is unique to the Israel lobby question – similar dynamics have surfaced around debates on financial deregulation, climate policy, and intelligence oversight. What Epstein’s case adds is a particularly stark illustration of how personal compromise and institutional influence can intersect. The same individual who trafficked minors also helped shape which arguments about American foreign policy were deemed respectable and which were branded beyond the pale.

Same old, same old

The campaign against Walt and Mearsheimer is the twenty-first century’s most vicious rendition of an age old American elite norm: to crush the books, knowledge and viewpoints that dare to shine a light on the Establishment’s activities, to expose their anti-democratic core, to speak truth to and about power. Flak from the Right, as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman argued back in 1988, is a powerful means of closing down debate.

In March 2006, when Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt uploaded a modest faculty working paper titled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” to the Kennedy School website at Harvard, they probably did not imagine that they were stepping onto terrain that American philanthropy had spent almost a century fortifying. But the warning signs were there. The Atlantic – which had commissioned the piece – would not publish it. The firestorm that followed – accusations of antisemitism, disavowal by Harvard, the sudden emergence of lavishly funded counter-programmes – looked at first like a uniquely post-9/11 story about Israel, money and speech. It was not. It was the latest, most ruthless iteration of a system I have spent three decades documenting: the deliberate use of tax-exempt private foundations to police the boundaries of legitimate knowledge in the service of American imperial power.

The playbook was written long before Jeffrey Epstein bought his way into the Harvard donors’ inner sanctum. In Foundations of the American Century (2012) I showed how the Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford foundations, from the 1920s onward, systematically identified ideas that threatened the emerging liberal-international order. They targeted, among others, Charles Beard, Robert Lynd, and WEB DuBois – and starved them of funds while building parallel networks of “moderate” scholars who would produce the knowledge required for Pax Americana. The post-2006 campaign against Walt and Mearsheimer followed the same five-stage sequence, only accelerated by the neoliberal university’s financial desperation and perfected by a new generation of ideological billionaires who no longer even pretended to serve a broader national interest.

Stage one: rapid identification of a “threat to consensus”

Just as the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1930s quietly withdrew support from Beard, DuBois and Lynd, because their work undermined the moral and political case for America’s new global role, the donor complex that coalesced around the “Mega Group”, the Wexner Foundation and later Epstein himself instantly recognised the “lobby thesis” as lethal. According to emails obtained by the non-profit whistleblower organisation Distributed Denial of Secrets and provided to Drop Site News, Epstein advised Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz on ways to discredit Mearsheimer and Walt, and mobilised his networks to promote anti-semitism charges against the academics.

It was not the antisemitism charge that worried the anti-scholar network the most – that was the public-facing weapon. The real danger was structural: Walt and Mearsheimer had demonstrated, with meticulous research and sourcing expected of top-tier scholars, that a network of domestic well-funded interest groups, think tanks, foundations, and individuals, exercised outsized influence on American foreign policy. Once that analytical template was legitimised, especially at the highest tier universities, it could be turned on any number of sacred cows of the American Establishment.

Stage two: the creation of counter-institutions

The Carnegie Corporation’s and Rockefeller Foundation’s funding of the Council on Foreign Relations, among a plethora of other internationalist organisations, in the 1920s and 1930s had shown how quickly an alternative intellectual infrastructure could be built. After 2006 we watched the same process at triple speed and overtly politicised. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s (WINEP; founded in part with AIPAC support in 1985) budget ballooned. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies – bankrolled by Paul Singer, Bernard Marcus and Sheldon Adelson, all Mega Group alumni – went from obscurity to omnipresence on cable news. The Tikvah Fund, seeded with tens of millions from the Zalman Bernstein estate and later amplified by the Moskowitz and Schusterman fortunes, began funding fellows at Hoover, Princeton and NYU whose principal research broadly supported neoconservative views of Israel.

Stage three: the purchase of a new generation of gatekeepers

Foundations never need to buy any let alone every scholar; they only need to declare an interest in a field or topic to restructure everyone else’s incentives. As the British academic, Harold Laski, noted almost a century ago, “The foundations do not control, simply because, in the direct and simple sense of the word, there is no need for them to do so. They have only to indicate the immediate direction of their minds for the whole university world to discover that it always meant to gravitate swiftly to that angle of the intellectual compass.”

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By 2010 any PhD student in Middle East politics understood the new hierarchy. A year at WINEP or a Tikvah post-doc at Stanford paid better than most assistant professorships and came with guaranteed op-ed columns. Conversely, citing Walt and Mearsheimer – even to criticise them – became the disciplinary equivalent of admitting you had once attended a John Birch Society meeting. The phrase “Israel lobby” virtually disappeared from scholarly view after 2008. It was replaced by euphemisms – “pro-Israel community”, “strategic relationship”, “shared values” – that performed the same linguistic screening function that “communist sympathiser” had once performed in the 1950s.

Stage four: the racial-imperial deflection

One of the most consistent findings in my earlier work on Rockefeller and Carnegie funding of “race relations” research was the way structural critiques of power were deflected into cultural-pathological ones. The same mechanism operated here with ruthless efficiency. Any analysis that treated Israel-Palestine as a question of power, land and international law was re-coded as prejudice against Jews. The charge of antisemitism became a linguistic device that protects empire by shifting debate from material interests to the supposed psychological defects of the critic. When students at Columbia or UCLA waved Palestinian flags in 2024, the multi-million-dollar infrastructure swung into motion to ensure the conversation remained about campus “safety” rather than about the highest documented civilian death toll of any twenty-first-century conflict.

Stage five: structured silence

By 2018, the suppression was near total. Major political-science journals had published nothing sympathetic to the lobby thesis in the preceding decade. University presses did not engage with the subject. The Middle East Studies Association watched its endowment evaporate as donor flight was orchestrated by the Israel on Campus Coalition (itself funded by many of the same foundations). The chilling effect was not imposed by government censorship – the First Amendment remained intact – but by the privatisation of intellectual life itself.

The Epstein scandal briefly threatened to expose the wiring diagram. Court documents revealed not just the $9 million to Martin Nowak’s (Evolutionary Dynamics) programme at Harvard but the overlapping directorships: Leslie Wexner on the Mega Group and the Harvard Corporation visitor committee; Charles Bronfman bankrolling both Birthright and the “combating antisemitism” initiatives that targeted Walt and Mearsheimer; Leon Black, Epstein’s closest financial confidant, chairing Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) while steering millions to the same advocacy networks.

For a fleeting moment in 2019–20 it seemed possible that universities might return the money, launch genuine investigations, acknowledge the conflict of interest. Instead, the same foundations mobilised again. Articles appeared – some in outlets still receiving seven-figure advertising from Wexner-linked entities – insisting that Epstein’s academic giving was unrelated to Israel advocacy and that any suggestion otherwise was itself antisemitic. The window closed.

The deeper tragedy is how completely the model has been privatised. Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford at least maintained the fiction that they served a broad American public interest. The new donor class – Wexner, Schusterman, Marcus, Singer, Moskowitz, Tikvah – makes no such pretence. Their foundations exist explicitly to advance one ethno-nationalist project, and they do so with a single-mindedness that would have startled even the most cynical Gilded Age robber baron.

We can measure the success in concrete terms. A generation of American scholars under forty has grown up believing that the lobby thesis belongs in the same category as Holocaust denial. When Israel’s military operations in Gaza from 2023 to 2025 produced death tolls that dwarfed every other twenty-first-century conflict, the American academy’s response was near-total silence – punctuated only by ritual denunciations of student protesters as “antisemites” and the rapid construction of new “antisemitism task forces” funded by the same foundations that had buried Walt and Mearsheimer two decades earlier.

According to a University of Maryland survey, “Self-censorship remains rampant while actual censorship appears to be increasing. The percentage of US-based Middle East scholars who say they have personally experienced new pressures or restrictions from their institutions related to the Gaza war has risen to 43% in this round compared to 34% in the fall of 2023… And while scholars of the Middle East have always faced pressure over issues related to Israel and Palestine, 78% now say that the period since October 7 [2023] has been the worst or among the worst of their professional career.”

This is not a story about Jewish power; far more American Zionists are Christian, including Presidents Trump and Biden. It is a story about the privatisation of the American knowledge system itself. The foundations that once built the intellectual architecture of the American Century have been replaced by narrower, more ideological vehicles that no longer even pretend to serve the public. The result is a foreign-policy discourse that is “rigged at birth”.

Until universities reject tainted money, scholarly associations develop independent funding streams, departments defend junior scholars who ask uncomfortable questions, the United States will continue to produce scholarship that is free in the formal sense but unfree in every sense that matters. Jeffrey Epstein is dead, but the network he serviced is thriving. Its greatest triumph is that most Americans born after 1985 have hardly encountered a serious, evidence-based structural critique of the Israel lobby – because the machinery built to suppress Walt and Mearsheimer succeeded beyond its architects’ wildest dreams.

The American university was once the envy of the world because it combined intellectual freedom with material abundance. Today it may more realistically be said to combine intellectual servitude with material dependence. That reversal is the predictable but shocking outcome of a century-long process in which private wealth was allowed to determine which questions could be asked, which scholars could be hired, and which truths could be spoken. Walt and Mearsheimer were bloodied but unbowed. But the campaign against them has taken its toll and shows little sign of faltering.

Inderjeet Parmar is a professor of international politics and associate dean of research in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City St George’s, University of London, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and writes the American Imperium column at The Wire. He is an International Fellow at the ROADS Initiative think tank, Islamabad, on the board of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences, USA, and on the advisory board of INCT-INEU, Brazil, its leading association for study of the United States. Author of several books including Foundations of the American Century, he is currently writing a book on the history, politics, and crises of the US foreign policy establishment.

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