Before Donald Trump and Israel attacked Iran, Jeffrey Epstein was the biggest story in the world. It’s not hard to see why.
Epstein captured the public’s imagination not just because his case exposed the extent of elite depravity and lack of accountability, but also because the world’s most notorious pedophile was almost certainly an Israeli intelligence asset. That fact adds a whole new geopolitical dimension to the already twisted and complicated Epstein saga.
But Epstein is not an aberration. For decades, Israel has served as a sanctuary for sexual predators while the US government looked the other way. Israel’s allies on the American Christian Right have always remained conspicuously silent on the issue.
Fugitives, Fixers, and Years of Delay
The Law That Made Israel a Safe Haven for Criminals
In 1978, Israel banned the extradition of its own citizens. The law, pushed through under Prime Minister Menachem Begin, was intended to protect Jews from hostile courts, but it later created a loophole that allowed Israeli citizens accused of crimes abroad to avoid extradition.
In September 1997, Samuel Sheinbein killed 19-year-old Alfredo Enrique Tello Jr. in Maryland and fled to Israel, where he claimed Israeli citizenship through his Israeli-born father and became protected from extradition to the US. His father, Sol, an attorney with dual citizenship, brought him a passport and a ticket to Tel Aviv, and that case became a major precedent in Israel’s extradition law.
Israel’s Supreme Court blocked Sheinbein’s extradition in a 3–2 decision, despite demands from Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and congressional threats to suspend aid. Chief Justice Aharon Barak, who wrote the dissenting opinion, argued that Sheinbein should be extradited and warned that the ruling could turn Israel into a haven for criminals. Sheinbein received 24 years in an Israeli prison, far short of the sentence he could have faced in the US.
Israel amended the law after the scandal, allowing the extradition of Israeli citizens under specified conditions. The Sheinbein case exposed a conflict between Israel’s domestic extradition law and its extradition obligations to the US, and prompted a broader overhaul of the country’s extradition framework. During the debate over the reform, Hanan Porat, head of the Knesset’s Law Committee, warned against allowing Israel to become a “safe house for criminals abroad.”
By 2020, Jewish Community Watch had identified more than 60 accused child-sex offenders who had moved from the US to Israel since 2014, and believed the true number was higher. Activists blamed both Israel for failing to address the problem and the US for not pursuing extradition aggressively, according to CBS News.
Hellbound and Down 