Materials released from the Jeffrey Epstein files reveal a roughly 3.5-hour conversation he held with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, apparently in 2014. The discussion, which also included former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, focused on Barak’s post-political business prospects but also featured a number of controversial remarks.
Among other things, Barak told his interlocutors that in the future Israel would be able to bring in “high-quality immigrants,” contrasting this with the past, when, he said, the state’s founders were “forced” to “deal with” waves of immigration from North Africa and Arab countries. He also spoke about dismantling the monopoly of the Chief Rabbinate, said that ultra-Orthodox Jews are “more productive” than Arabs in terms of birthrates, and criticized opposition leader Yair Lapid. Listen:
Conversation between Jeffrey Epstein and Ehud Barak
(Recording: Drop Site News)
During the conversation, apparently held in 2014—Barak notes several times that he is 71 years old and he is now 83—the former prime minister addressed tensions between Israel and Iran. “Something will happen in Iran. Maybe we’ll succeed, maybe we won’t, and it will only make things worse,” he said.
The discussion later turned to Israel’s demographic situation. “The demography seems terrible,” Epstein said. “Nobody sane seems to be procreating, and everybody insane in their own way seems to have five children… whether it is Arabs or Orthodox, they have five or so. Regular Israelis have one-and-a-half children, two.” Barak replied: “The ultra-Orthodox are more productive than the Arabs. It’s becoming something bizarre.”
According to Barak: “The future in Israel is waking up in the right moment, before it’s too late. To put a wedge in the slide down the slippery slope toward one state. Because one state will accelerate it even faster. First a binational state, and then, within a generation, an Arab majority.”
Barak also said the monopoly of the Orthodox Rabbinate over marriage, burial, and defining “who is a Jew” must be broken, and made a racist remark about immigrant communities from North Africa and Arab countries. “Open the gates for massive conversion to Judaism. It’s a successful country. Many will apply." He added that: "We can control quality much better than the state’s founding fathers did.”
According to Barak: “We can control the quality much more effectively, much more than the founding fathers of Israel did. They took whatever came just to save people. Now, we can be more selective.”
He added that Israel can absorb another million immigrants, and not just any immigrants. "The Russian million changed Israel dramatically. Many would prefer to be Jews rather than Russians. Lots of young people, including women. We can easily absorb another million.”
Barak also took aim at current opposition leader Yair Lapid. “There was a much more genuine social protest in the past, and now suddenly they take the son of a well-known journalist, who appears on television every Friday, and overnight make him the head of the second-largest party," he said.
Last weekend, the U.S. Department of Justice released more than three million pages, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. This marked the final tranche of documents the Trump administration was legally required to release under U.S. law, despite the objections of President Donald Trump, who had been a close associate of Epstein.
Many prominent names surfaced in the documents, spanning countries and cultures—from President Trump to filmmaker Woody Allen, Britain’s Prince Andrew, former U.S. president Bill Clinton, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Barak, among many others.
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Ehud Barak next to Epstein, with legendary director Woody Allen and financier Thomas Pritzker also sitting at the table
(Photo: House Oversight Committee Democrats/AFP)
Among the materials published was a birthday greeting Barak sent Epstein in January 2014, long after the financier and pedophile had been convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution. “I am proud to call you my friend,” Barak wrote, among other things.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the issue at the start of Sunday’s cabinet meeting, launching a sharp attack on what he called Barak’s “new racial theory.” Netanyahu added that no news channel had opened its broadcasts with the story and urged ministers “to respond forcefully to these remarks.” “The good friend of the pedophile, who visited him more than 30 times at his home and elsewhere—the man is simply shameless,” he said.
“I’ll quote what Eli Goldschmidt of the Labor Party, one of his supporters, said about him: ‘I am ashamed of Ehud Barak. Ashamed that I supported him in the past. The fact that no one in the left-wing parties is shocked or responds shows that they think like him.’ If, God forbid, I had said something like this, every newscast would have opened with a huge uproar. You all need to respond,” Netanyahu also said.