The Epstein files read less like scandal than documentation, testimony folded into depositions, affidavits, settlements. Human experience reduced to case material: catalogued, cross-referenced, and stripped of moral urgency.
The abuse of minors did not unfold as a rupture in an otherwise moral order. It unfolded as a managed process. Girls were recruited through vulnerability and poverty. They were transported, paid and silenced.
Lawyers assessed exposure. Institutions managed risk. Reputations held. Harm was not denied, it was routinised.
One survivor, Virginia Giuffre, describes being used and then passed to other men. Another Maria Farmer, explains that she understood very quickly that she did not matter, that she existed only to serve the appetites of people who would never face consequence.
These are not metaphors. They are procedural descriptions of how power encounters the powerless.
Yet, such revelations, grotesque as they are, should not shock us. For why would an elite long practised in killing overseas suddenly observe a moral boundary at home?
A moral revelation
For decades, the evidence was not hidden. It was televised.
In Iraq, sanctions and war contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, a toll acknowledged and then justified as the price of policy. Cities were levelled, civilian life extinguished, devastation explained away as strategy, security, national interest.
The devastation of Gaza by this same elite is not a moral anomaly. It belongs to the same hierarchy of human worth; some lives are fully human, while others are expendable
At Abu Ghraib, detainees were stripped, sexually abused, photographed, mocked, and humiliated. Their bodies were turned into instruments of domination; their suffering documented, briefly scandalised, then quietly absorbed.
The violence was framed as exceptional, confined to distant deserts and occupied cities, to brown bodies and nameless prisoners. It was not read as a moral revelation, but as an unfortunate operational excess exercised abroad.
The truth long overlooked in western societies is this: an elite willing to starve populations, flatten cities, and sexually brutalise detainees abroad has no qualms about brutalising those it deems inferior at home.
The boundary between foreign brutality and domestic morality was always imaginary, a comforting fiction sustained by distance, racism, and narrative.
What is handled through statements, censorship, and calibrated expressions of concern abroad is handled through settlements and non-disclosure agreements at home.
The devastation of Gaza by this same elite is not a moral anomaly. It belongs to the same architecture. The same hierarchy of human worth. The same assumption that some lives are fully human, while others are expendable.
Children abused on a private Caribbean island.
Children buried beneath rubble in Gaza.
Children placed aboard aircraft chartered to satisfy the appetites of the rich and powerful, flown discreetly, quietly, to be used and abused without consequence.
Children killed by aircraft dispatched openly and repeatedly to serve the strategic interests of the powerful, bombed from the sky at their discretion, their deaths ignored, minimised, or narrated as necessity.
Entitlement and impunity
The perpetrators are animated by the same unshakable sense of entitlement and impunity, by the belief that they possess the right to dictate the fate of others, to brutalise them if they so choose, whether in Florida or in Gaza.
This same class now dominates global capital. The tech oligarchs, financiers, and war profiteers who extract wealth at home and profit from destruction abroad move within the same elite ecosystem Epstein curated.
The faces may differ; the logic is unchanged. Exploitation here. Annihilation there. Profit everywhere.
Among the figures who moved comfortably through Epstein’s private world was former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who met with Epstein repeatedly between 2013 and 2017 and stayed at his New York residence on multiple occasions.
According to reported correspondence, Epstein advised Barak to "look at Palantir", a company then emerging as a powerful player in data analytics, surveillance, and intelligence software.
That suggestion is revealing. It situates Epstein’s world not merely as a site of personal excess, but as a junction where elite indulgence, intelligence logic, and cutting-edge war technology converged.
Consider Palantir Technologies, the intelligence-software company whose tools were built for surveillance states and modern battlefields. Since October 2023, Palantir has deepened a close, openly ideological partnership with the Israeli government and military, presenting its technology as indispensable to contemporary AI-driven warfare.
In January 2024, the company announced a strategic agreement with Israel’s Ministry of Defence to support active war operations, with senior executives travelling to Israel to formalise the partnership.
Palantir’s platforms - Gotham, Foundry, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform - fuse intelligence, logistics, and targeting into what military doctrine now calls the "digital kill chain".
Human judgment is compressed. Moral hesitation is automated. Violence becomes workflow. Distance is no longer a buffer; it is a feature.
This alignment is not merely technical but ideological. Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, has publicly framed support for Israel as a civilisational obligation. War is not simply serviced; it is philosophically endorsed.
The same language of necessity and moral exemption that once shielded private abuse now sanctifies public destruction - only this time it is encoded into software.
What Epstein curated socially: access, insulation, mutual implication, companies like Palantir now operationalise technologically.
Contempt for human life is no longer merely personal; it is institutional, contractual, and programmable.
Violence rationalised
When violence is embedded this deeply - in software, policy, and profit, it no longer requires disguise. It can be stated openly, even proudly, as principle. What once had to be rationalised is now declared.
"Might is right," as US President Donald Trump’s national security adviser Stephen Miller put it with unguarded clarity. That is the ethic: in Gaza, in Venezuela, or behind closed doors in Florida.
Ironically, and obscenely, this same elite presents itself as the global standard of enlightenment and morality: the apex of civilisation; the arbiter of the world
This elite is not merely powerful; it is raised on a sense of exceptionalism: entitlement, privilege, and immunity. It inhabits a closed world of prestige and insulation where rules are for others and consequences negotiable.
It is precisely for this reason that so many among this class gravitated toward Epstein, and so easily became ensnared by him.
His real offering was not pleasure alone, but confirmation: that the ordinary moral order did not apply. His gatherings were not simply parties; they were auditions. His private aircraft and secluded estates functioned as rituals of belonging.
To be welcomed into his orbit was to receive a badge, admission into an inner circle where consequence did not apply.
Epstein did not merely exploit elite decadence; he weaponised it. He translated entitlement into leverage, excess into vulnerability, and privilege into a trap.
The irresistible pull of exclusivity goes a long way toward explaining Epstein’s success. What drew the powerful into his orbit was not merely vice, nor even the normalisation of transgression, but the seduction of prestige and access, the promise of belonging to a realm beyond scrutiny.
Epstein understood that for the truly powerful, status is more intoxicating than pleasure. By positioning himself as a gatekeeper, he transformed indulgence into initiation and excess into qualification.
The powerful did not simply fall into Epstein’s web - they became hostages to it. What they believed was a forbidden playground functioned instead as an intelligence apparatus, converting excess into evidence and transgression into permanent vulnerability.
A logical outcome
Ironically, and obscenely, this same elite presents itself as the global standard of enlightenment and morality: the apex of civilisation; the arbiter of the world.
It passes judgment on other nations, depicting them as backward, irrational, violent, or savage; then weaponises those pronouncements to justify domination and subjugation.
Gaza was not a deviation from the values of the elite that oversaw its annihilation. It was their culmination.
It was the moment a class long accustomed to exercising power without restraint enacted that power in full view of a horrified, watching world.
The Epstein files expose the private face of this order.
Gaza exposes its public one.
Together, they strip away the last illusions, revealing the ugliness of an elite that consumes the vulnerable in silence at home, and destroys them openly abroad.
This was not a failure of values.
It was their logical outcome.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
David Rene de Rothschild head of Rothschild Inc
Eric Trump is married to Lara Yunaska who has two Jewish parents
@mikec4845
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