Epstein and Alan Dershowitz colluded to attack John Mearsheimer over 'Israeli lobby' paper: Report

Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and lawyer Alan Dershowitz collaborated to circulate allegations of antisemitism against political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt after they published a paper critical of the “Israeli Lobby” in the US.

The trove of emails, reported by the Drop Site News on Tuesday, reveals Epstein giving feedback on talking points to discredit the two academics in 2006. 

Epstein called Dershowitz’s attack on Mearsheimer and Walt “terrific” before concluding an email with “congragulations (sic)”. Epstein then promised to circulate Dershowitz’s rebuttal titled, “Debunking the Newest - and Oldest - Jewish Conspiracy”, among friends. 

“I’ve started,” Epstein responded when asked by Dershowitz’s assistant if he would be “distributing” the article. 

Dershowitz was a Harvard University law professor from 1964 to 2013. The 87-year-old is a regular on cable news shows, stations like Fox, where he has defended illegal Israeli settlements, and downplayed Israeli crimes in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to US audiences. 

He helped defend some of the US’s most high-profile criminal cases, like the infamous Hollywood executive and rapist Harvey Weinstein. The Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, called Dershowitz, Netanyahu’s "attack dog" in the international arena. 

At the same time that Dershowitz and Epstein were plotting on how to discredit Mearsheimer and Walt, the Harvard professor was working as Epstein’s attorney in a case that saw the disgraced financier plead guilty to a sexual offence in 2008. 

The close coordination between Epstein and Dershowitz appears to be a textbook example of the kind of defence of Zionism that Mearsheimer and Walt documented in their work.

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Although the two would later turn their work into a landmark book, The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy in 2007, they faced fierce attacks and were "cancelled" in academia. 

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs cancelled a scheduled talk by the authors in 2007, following attacks by Israeli groups. Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution at the time and a former senior official in the Clinton administration, denounced the work as “grotesque".

The two described how rich and powerful supporters of Israel worked alongside think tanks, philanthropic organisations, and Christian Zionist groups to maintain “unwavering support” for Israel, which they argued could not be justified on strategic or moral grounds for the US.

The paper, and later book, elicited a firestorm of criticism in academia and the think tank world. 

Mearsheimer, a well-known political scientist and R Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, did not rise through the ranks of academia as an expert on Israel. In fact, he became known for his work in realism, which argues that states view international relations through power dynamics and self-interest. 

Mearsheimer’s own recognition has grown in recent years through YouTube and social media, notably as he correctly predicted that Russia would invade Ukraine. 

He has since faced pushback among Washington policy circles for arguing that Nato and the US were responsible for the Russian invasion of 2022.