Israel Has Sheltered Over 60 Sex Offenders. Epstein Was Just the Most Famous.

Jun 04, 2026

You land at Ben Gurion Airport and hear the passport stamp fall with a sharp, bureaucratic thud. The world is often taught to hear this sound as a moment of relief, a return to “home.” But from where I stand, bearing witness to the ongoing erasure of my own people, I see it differently. This airport is the beating heart of a settler-colonial project known as “Israel.” It is a mechanism designed to weaponize historical Jewish trauma, transforming it into a shield for the theft of Palestinian homes, the fracturing of our families, and the entrenchment of an apartheid state.

I was eight years old the last time I passed through those gates in 1995. My mother, my sister, and I were returning from a trip to Romania, a journey my mother, a single mom who loved to travel, had carefully planned because she couldn’t always afford the more expensive destinations. Romania offered the cheapest tickets and the easiest visa requirements, so she seized the chance to show us something beyond Gaza. We stood there while Israeli soldiers tore open our bags. They held my mother’s underwear up in front of everyone, laughing as they played with her bras and panties like some kind of sick game. Female soldiers joined in, turning the search into a public circus. My mother stood firm, looking them in the eye and saying, “Yes, these are my clothes.” Their attempt to humiliate our family wasn’t childish. It was drunk on power.

None of it was out of the ordinary though. These were similar soldiers to the ones who lived in our building in Al-Zaharna for years, occupying the roof, imposing random curfews, and barging into homes in the middle of the night or at dawn just for fun. But the moment that still chills me was when one soldier leaned close to my face as I hid half behind my mother and demanded, “Show me your smile.” I didn’t smile. I couldn’t smile. In that instant, at eight years old, I understood that Israeli soldiers didn’t see us as children. We were merely Palestinians, a future obstacle in their machinery of displacement, marked for eventual erasure. A female soldier then grabbed my mother and pulled her away into a closed barrier designated for Palestinians. I couldn’t see her anymore, but I could hear the soldiers shouting: “Do you have any weapons?” “Who packed your bags?” When my mother finally came back, she looked humiliated. She didn’t meet my eyes or say a word. There is something uniquely harmful to one’s self-image when you are degraded in front of your own children. I felt a profound, wordless grief for her, one that I couldn’t yet articulate.

That same airport, that same system of control and humiliation, still operates today. And for some who walk through these same doors, it offers something darker still: a clean escape from the police, the courts, and the survivors they harmed then left behind.

I have spent countless hours examining the mechanics of these arrivals. The records reveal a shocking reality. Over the past two decades, more than 60 cases of accused or convicted sex offenders from the U.S., Australia, and Europe have used this system to relocate to Israel while legal proceedings remained active back home.

Doctors, teachers, rabbis, and community leaders. The excuses always sound routine: bureaucracy, appeals, “mental health.” But when you sit with these files, the pattern becomes so clear. Power protects its own and delay becomes the weapon.

The “Law of Return” was presented by Israeli propaganda as a sacred refuge. But on the ground, it functions as a tool of expansion for the occupation. It grants instant citizenship to anyone with a single Jewish grandparent, bypassing the deep background checks that protect ordinary communities. This speed is intentional and opens the door wide for predators, weaving their impunity into the foundation of a state built on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Once predators who fit the criteria land in occupied Palestine, the promise of justice for their victims evaporates. A court may approve an extradition, but the Israeli occupation’s Minister of Justice holds the final word.

The Leifer Blueprint: 13 Years of Delay

No case illustrates the machinery of impunity better than Malka Leifer’s.

She was the principal of Adass Israel School in Melbourne. In 2008, after allegations that she had sexually abused multiple students, she fled to “Israel.” Australia formally requested extradition in 2014. What followed was 13 years of legal hell.

For years, she claimed she was too mentally ill to face a courtroom, undergoing more than 30 psychiatric evaluations. But private investigators watched her shopping, driving, and living a normal life, proving it was a lie. In 2019, doctors finally ruled she was faking her illness. Even then, the system dragged its feet. It took until December 2020 for the Supreme Court to clear the way, and January 2021 for her to be extradited, thirteen years after she first fled. In April 2023, she was convicted on 18 counts of rape and child sexual abuse against two sisters. By August 2023, she was sentenced to 15 years in prison, eligible for parole around 2034.

The delay deepened the trauma for the three sisters who came forward, shattered trust, and forced them to relive their abuse in public, over and over. Meanwhile, former Israeli Health Minister Yaakov Litzman was caught red-handed pressuring officials to keep her evaluations favorable. In 2022, he pleaded guilty to breach of trust. Want to guess his punishment? A small fine (3,000 NIS, which was roughly $900 USD) and a suspended sentence of eight months, so no jail time.

This is what impunity looks like, not total escape, but years stolen from the vulnerable by a system that treats accountability as optional.

More Than One Blueprint

Leifer is not alone, as the pipeline runs deeper among predators and Jewish supremacists within the Zionist state.

Jimmy Julius Karow fled the United States in 2000 after being accused of sexually assaulting a 9-year-old girl in Oregon. He lived freely in “Israel” for nearly two decades under the name Yosef Chaim. While there, he was convicted in a separate child molestation case. He was only confronted again years later. His story shows how the system can shelter someone long enough for new victims to emerge on Palestinian stolen land.

There was Gershon Kranczer, a Brooklyn rabbi, who fled to “Israel” in 2010 after allegations that he had sexually abused young female relatives. It took until 2021 for him to be extradited, over a decade of delay. In 2023, he was sentenced to nine years in a U.S. prison. Another case where survivors waited years while the accused found shelter in the very colonial state that claims moral refuge.

Another was Mordechai YomTov, who violated his parole after a child abuse conviction in the U.S., fled using a fake passport, and was sheltered in Israel until advocacy groups tracked him down. And Uriah Assis, an Israeli settler indicted for over 100 counts of rape and sexual abuse against dozens of children in his community. And there was David Kramer, who fled Australia after convictions for indecent assault on minors at a yeshiva and continued offending patterns after reaching “Israel.” These were never isolated failures or loopholes in the law. They are the predictable outcome of a system designed on injustice and abuse.

This culture of shielding predators reaches the very top. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, long before the world began to confront his record as a war criminal who ordered devastating assaults on Gaza, was already forging close ties with Jeffrey Epstein. Even after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for sex crimes against children, Barak continued to meet with him dozens of times between 2013 and 2017, flying on his private plane and discussing business. Barak claims he knew nothing of the abuse, but the reality is clear. A man who wages war on Palestinian children without consequence feels entirely at home networking with a man who preys on them.

His impunity sent a clear message to the Epstein class and those connected to them: consequences are flexible. The same machinery quietly handles abuse within tight knit ultra-Orthodox networks, closing ranks, discouraging reporting, and shielding perpetrators. While similar rot exists in insulated groups worldwide, here it combines with the so-called Law of Return and political protection to create an impenetrable distance between sexual predators and justice. It mirrors the very tactics used to silence Palestinian voices demanding basic dignity and human rights.

Across more than 60 tracked cases, the toll is staggering, hundreds of victims, mostly children, years of agonizing limbo, and too many offenders who found shelter instead of handcuffs because Israel extradites them only when international pressure grows too loud to ignore.

This is the logical outcome of a system built on hierarchy, supremacy, and ethnic cleansing above all else. A settler colonial state engineered to preserve one group’s dominance will, by design, protect its predators as readily as its power.

Daftar

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?