Israel: Safe Haven for Pedophiles?

An Examination of Darryl Cooper's Claim that Israel Functions as a Safe Haven for Criminals and Pedophiles Escaping Justice

In his recent interview with Tucker Carlson about Jeffrey Epstein, Darryl Cooper made the claim that Israel doesn’t extradite criminals to the United States. He later clarified, in a comment on Twitter: “I didn’t say they never did it … Any government can do anything on a case-by-case basis, but they’re not bound to do so by the extradition treaty if the offender is a citizen.”

Cooper has been widely denounced and vilified for his statements about Israel’s extradition policy, with many pointing out that Israel does in fact have an extradition treaty with the United States. But the existence of the extradition treaty hardly invalidates the broader point Cooper was making.

Israel adopted a law on extradition, which set forth the conditions under which it would seek or ratify extradition treaties with other states, in 1954. In 1978 it passed an amendment to its extradition law which unilaterally prohibited the extradition of Israeli citizens, including to states with which it had already concluded extradition treaties. Instead, citizens who commit crimes in states with which Israel had extradition treaties would henceforth be tried in Israel’s domestic courts and, if convicted, serve their sentence in Israel.

Israel is hardly unique in prohibiting the extradition of citizens. France, Russia, and Japan, among others, have similar laws. But that’s where the comparison ends.

What sets Israel apart is that pursuant to its 1950 Law of Return, any individual born anywhere on the planet with at least one Jewish grandparent and who does not profess a religion other than Judaism is – as the law’s name implies – considered to be from Israel and entitled to automatic citizenship immediately upon setting foot in the country. Spouses of those who claim Israeli citizenship in this manner are similarly entitled, irrespective of their religion.

In theory, an American eligible for Israeli citizenship pursuant to this legislation could commit a gruesome murder in the United States, flee to Israel before s/he is arrested, and live out the rest of their days beyond the reach of the US justice system. In practice, that is also precisely how it worked.

In 1997 Samuel Sheinbein, a 17-year-old high school student in Maryland and US citizen, together with a former classmate, Aaron Benjamin Needle, murdered Alfredo Enrique Tello, 19, and then dismembered and burned his body. According to the authorities, the killing was a practice run for another murder the pair intended to commit, against the boyfriend of a young woman Sheinbein was besotted with and hoped to replace.

The second murder never took place because Tello’s remains were discovered several days later by a realtor in the garage of a vacant home he was preparing for sale. Initially believing the corpse to be a deer carcass, it was subsequently confirmed as human, then as belonging to the missing Tello, and from there the police were quickly able to identify Sheinbein and Needle as suspects. Before the pair could be arrested, they fled Maryland for New York City, where Needle was soon apprehended. Sheinbein, however, successfully evaded the law and with the help of his father, Sol, fled to Israel.

Since the murder was committed in Maryland, the US government demanded Sheinbein’s extradition. The Israeli authorities, ever attuned to US official and public opinion, and keenly aware of the outrage and disgust the case had produced in the United States, arrested Sheinbein and duly commenced with extradition proceedings. Confronted with the prospect of spending the rest of his days in a US prison, Sheinbein quickly claimed and received Israeli citizenship.

In a further twist, Sheinbein claimed citizenship through his father. Sol Sheinbein had been born in Palestine in 1944, but left Israel, which was established in 1948, for the United States in 1950, when he was only six years old. He remained in the US until the Tello murder, nearly half a century later.

Eager to wash their hands of the affair amidst the growing outrage from across the ocean, which produced threats by several members of Congress to freeze aid to Israel, the judge in the case, Moshe Ravid, proposed that Sheinbein be sent to the US for trial but serve his sentence in Israel. Sheinbein, represented in court by David Libai, who until the previous year had been Israel’s Minister of Justice, accepted the proposal but the US Department of Justice dismissed it out of hand. Keenly aware of the howls of outrage emanating from Washington, Ravid then ruled the murderer could be extradited, on the grounds that despite being a citizen he had no meaningful connection to the state which the Law of Return claims had been his real home all along.

Appealing the verdict in Israel’s Supreme Court, Libai and his team successfully argued that although the 1962 extradition treaty between Israel and the US makes provisions for the extradition of Israeli citizens, this had been rendered null and void by the 1978 amendment to Israel’s 1954 extradition law. The Supreme Court accepted that Sheinbein was a US citizen, was not a resident of Israel and, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Theodor Or, “has no connection to Israel”. Nevertheless, Or and his colleagues ruled that the murderer could not be extradited because, having recently arrived in his home of the past 3,000 years to escape justice, Sheinbein was a bona fide Israeli and the state had to treat all citizens equally. Distinctions in rights and treatment, after all, apply only to Arabs.

If Israel had citizenship laws even remotely approaching those of any other state, Sheinbein could never have been naturalised before extradition proceedings against him had been launched and concluded, and would have been rejected on account of his criminal background. This is the crucial distinction between Israel and other states that prohibit the extradition of citizens. France, for example, would not have recognized his status as a French citizen merely because he had been born to a French father. It would have required proof that his father had actually registered his son as a citizen and, failing that, required more than a document demonstrating that at least one of his grandparents is French to complete the process. Under the best of circumstances, naturalisation can take several years.

Sheinbein was tried and convicted in Israel, and sentenced to twenty-four years in prison, considerably shorter than what awaited even a white juvenile convicted of first-degree murder in the US. He also enjoyed weekend furloughs, until he in 2014 shot three prison guards with a gun smuggled into the prison and was killed in the subsequent exchange.

Shaken by the widespread and intense anger the case had produced at both the official and public levels in the United States, then as now Israel’s most important sponsor and arms supplier, Israel’s extradition law was subsequently amended in two respects. In 1999, a law was passed stipulating that in order to avoid extradition citizens who commit crimes abroad must be domiciled in Israel, not only for the previous 3,000 years but also at the time of the application for their extradition. And in 2001 another amendment was passed that allowed for the extradition of any citizen, on condition that the foreign government provide a guarantee that the citizen can serve their sentence in Israel upon conviction by a foreign court. The latter formula is precisely the one rejected by the US in the Sheinbein case.

Sheinbein is hardly the only killer given refuge by Israel in this manner. Andy Green and Keith Fuchs, two American members the Jewish Defence League (JDL), the Ku Klux Klan of the Zionist movement, are wanted in the US for questioning about their role in the 1985 bombing of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) office in Santa Ana, California, which killed the ADC’s West Coast Regional Director, Alex Odeh.

Unlike Sheinbein, Green and Fuchs have not been arrested by Israel after fleeing their native US, “returning” to Israel, and taking up residence in its illegal West Bank settlements where they continued with their extremist violence. Green, formerly a close associate of JDL founder Meir Kahane, changed his name to Baruch Ben-Yosef and is single-mindedly obsessed with blowing up the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. For leading a plot to fire a missile at the mosque, he did serve a brief stint in Israeli prison. Fuchs (who changed only his first name, from Keith to Israel) for his part was imprisoned for somewhat longer after shooting up a Palestinian car, recognisable by its distinct license plates, after it splashed him with water while driving through a puddle on a rainy day. But both Green and Fuchs have remained otherwise unmolested by the Israeli authorities. Green in fact obtained a law degree from Bar-Ilan University, has become a public figure as the Israeli very-far-right’s lawyer of choice, and is said to be close to the convicted terrorist and fellow Kahanist who now serves as Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Over the years a string of leaked FBI memos and statements from US law enforcement officials have attested to the constant stonewalling and lack of cooperation from Israeli authorities. Questioned about this by the journalist Sam Husseini in 1998, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu responded with one of the more memorable Freudian slips of recent decades: “I assure you that our policy is to cooperate fully with the murderers.”

Green and Fuchs’s partner in crime, the JDL’s Robert Manning, was less fortunate. In addition to being wanted for questioning, along with his wife Rochelle, regarding the murder of Odeh, the JDL couple was also wanted for the 1980 murder of Patricia Wilkerson. The Wilkerson murder, it later emerged, was a contract killing commissioned by real estate developer William Ross, who had also been active in the JDL and was involved in a real estate dispute with a woman named Brenda Crouthamel Adams. Hoping to resolve the dispute by blowing up Adams with a letter bomb assembled and mailed by the Mannings, the explosion instead killed Adams’s secretary, Wilkerson.

After the Mannings fled their country and “returned” to Israel to escape justice, they were in 1988 formally indicted in the United States for the Wilkerson murder. Although protected by the Israeli government, which claimed it had no knowledge of the Mannings or their whereabouts, they were in fact living in the illegal West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, arguably the most fanatic human settlement on the face of the earth. It took a lone journalist, Chris Hedges, at the time a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, to locate and expose those whom the Israeli government, its police force, and intelligence services claimed could not be found.

Since the Israeli authorities had made no effort to themselves arrest or prosecute the Mannings, they had little choice but to cooperate in extradition proceedings. Robert Manning was arrested in 1991 and extradited to the US in 1993 where he was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after thirty years. Rochelle Manning died in 1994 while still fighting extradition.

True to form, the New York Times on 26 March 1991 provided an entirely different account of the matter. In its sanitized version of events, the complications in bringing the Mannings to justice had nothing to with Israel operating as a safe haven for terrorists and obstructing the efforts of US authorities to apprehend them, but rather stemmed from US “diplomatic sensitivity” that a demand for Israel to carry out an arrest in the West Bank could imply recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied territory.

In October 2023, to the outrage of the Odeh family in particular, Manning successfully obtained parole. At the US Department of Justice, it is common knowledge that the Mannings, along with Green and Fuchs, are directly responsible for the murder of Alex Odeh. But the US has an established tradition, actually a policy, of giving the killers of Palestinian-Americans, its own citizens, a free pass. As in other matters concerning US discrimination against Palestinians and opposition to their rights, this policy too is applied without distinction and also encompasses Palestinian-American Christians like Alex Odeh and Shereen Abu Akleh. And just as the Biden administration and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in particular spared no effort to cover for Israel in the 2022 assassination of Abu Akleh, it refused to indict Manning for the killing of Odeh and supported his release from prison. To date, in fact, four decades after Odeh’s murder, the first indictment of his known killers has yet to be issued. For this to happen, pigs would first need to fly at hypersonic speed.

French Zionist extremists, among others, have similarly availed themselves of the ability to “return” to a foreign state, Israel, to escape prosecution for crimes committed in their homeland. As the Manning and Odeh cases show, the problem has less to do with the formalities of Israel’s extradition laws than with the policies of the states concerned. In Israel’s case, protecting terrorists who bomb and murder for the cause, and for Western governments a willingness to accept Zionist terrorism but drawing the line at bombings and murders that are unconnected to the cause they have sponsored and supported for over a century.

Cooper’s point was however made not in connection with terrorists who flee to Israel and avail themselves of the fiction that they are returning to their homeland in order to escape justice, but rather in relation to paedophilia, and the Jeffrey Epstein case in particular.

In his interview with Tucker Carlson, Cooper pointed out that, in a highly unusual move, Epstein was after his (first) 2007 indictment permitted to keep his passport. Epstein subsequently left the United States for Israel, and during his absence Alan Dershowitz negotiated the extraordinarily lenient - actually scandalous – plea bargain. It was only after the deal had been concluded that Epstein returned from Israel to the United States.

Cooper’s claim is that Epstein had the ability to escape a sentence commensurate with his crimes by claiming Israel as his homeland, thus preventing extradition, and would have used the US authorities’ knowledge of these realities to bargain for the limp slap on the wrist he ultimately secured.

Some might dismiss Cooper’s views on the grounds that Epstein was not domiciled in Israel, was not known to have acquired Israeli citizenship, and thus could not have availed himself of the benefits of Israel’s extradition laws in their current form. While this might be true, Epstein was also extraordinarily well connected in Israel. Among his closest associates was Ehud Barak, who has served as Israel’s prime minister, minister of defence, chief of the general staff of the Israeli military, and head of military intelligence. Epstein also had easy access to the country’s political and business elite, and had substantial investments in the country.

One doesn’t need to believe Epstein was cooperating with Israel’s intelligence agencies – though all indications suggest he was – to conclude that he could have easily arranged a declaration that he was in fact a domiciled citizen and therefore not extraditable. Whether to protect Epstein or themselves, Israel’s leaders would have had ample reason to resist any demand for extradition as best they could. Bearing in mind that Epstein was at the time not yet the world’s most notorious paedophile, his Israeli associates could most likely have procrastinated, misled, and stonewalled the US authorities long enough to get their way. In other words, Cooper’s version of events is entirely plausible.

The outstanding question is of course whether Israel offers safe haven to paedophiles similar to the protection it provides for terrorists. Here too the record is clear.

The year after Epstein’s demise, on 28 February 2020, the Israeli website Ynetnews.com, published by Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, posted an article by the columnist Tamar Kaplinksy with the headline, “Israel, The Promised Land for Pedophiles”, and the subheading, “Among the tax evaders and smugglers who have found a safe haven in the Jewish state is a particularly nasty subset of criminals who for some reason are allowed to live freely without fear of reprisal for their heinous actions in their own countries”.

For those who might think the editors resorted to a sensationalist headline to attract readers, the article is worth quoting in full:

According to a CBS investigation aired this week, more than 60 sex offenders from Jewish communities in the United States have fled to the Promised Land and are hiding mainly in ultra-Orthodox communities in Rehavia, Jerusalem.

The law enforcement agencies have failed to address the problem, leaving the work to civilian organizations like the Jewish Community Watch (JCW) in the U.S., which tracks down these people in Israel and helps arrest them.

This was the case with Jimmy Karow, a dangerous sex offender who appeared on Interpol's 50 most-wanted list and who hid in Israel for last 20 years having fled there after sexually assaulting a nine-year old girl in Oregon.

Since his arrival in Israel, where he is known as Yosef, Karow was convicted in another pedophilia case and even jailed but was never punished for the assault in Oregon. It was only last year, thanks to the JCW, that he has finally been arrested.

Another offender, Mordechai YomTov, was convicted in the United States on three counts of child abuse and violated his terms of parole in order to flee to Israel under a false identity. In Israel, he is living a carefree, happy life.

And then there is Malka Leifer, who is wanted in Australia for no less than 74 counts of sexual assault and rape involving eight of the girls at the ultra-Orthodox school in Melbourne where she was the principal.

After fleeing to Israel in 2008, Leifer was arrested, but managed to dodge a trial on the grounds of mental incompetence. Only in February 2018 was she re-arrested on suspicion of pretending to be mentally ill in order to avoid extradition.

Her re-arrest was the result of work by JCW, which documented her leading a normative life despite her claims of mental incapacity. A short time later, a team of expert psychiatrists determined that the 54-year-old was indeed an impostor and, contrary to her claim, was certainly fit to stand trial.

That should have been the end of it, but Israeli law enforcement agencies seemed to be doing everything in the power to prevent her facing justice.

The fact is that in September 2019, Jerusalem District Court ordered a new panel of experts to determine once again whether Leifer was qualified to stand trial. In January 2020, a new unanimous committee once again determined that Leifer was indeed completely mentally fit to stand trial.

But that wasn't enough: Last week, Leifer's defense attorney received permission to investigate the members of the second committee over their findings.

Who knows, perhaps a third committee of experts will be appointed and they can also determine that Leifer is faking and is actually eligible for prosecution, and then those experts can be grilled on the stand, and then new experts can be appointed and so ad infinitum.

Meanwhile, Australia can keep waiting for her extradition and her victims Dassi Erlich, Ellie Sapper and Nicole Meyer can keep waiting for justice.

Incidentally, Health Minister Yaakov Litzman is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation over suspicions that he used his position to help Leifer. And while the legal shenanigans continue, she stays put in the wonderland for the wicked in which we live.

This is perhaps a paradise lost to those who live here, but to the worst people in the world, it is a friendly haven from the law, where you can leave your victims in your wake as if they mean nothing. In such a place, we should all be worried for our children.

Malka Leifer, who fled Australia in 2008, was eventually extradited back to her homeland in 2021. Her case is particularly telling given that she perpetrated her crimes at a Jewish religious school, where she raped and abused Jewish students. Nevertheless, the state did everything within its power to protect her for well over a decade.

By comparison with Jeffrey Epstein, Malka is what Ghislaine Maxwell would have dismissed as powerless “trash”, a nothing. The others mentioned by Kaplinksy, and the many others not mentioned in her article, even more so.

Draw your own conclusions about Darryl Cooper’s claims. And, for that matter, about the prospects of Netanyahu and other fugitives wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) being extradited to The Hague if ICC member states continue to provide these indicted war criminals free access to their airspace.