Genocide, Institutions and Abuse

In an online panel called “Decolonial Jewish Practice in Art and Visual Culture After Gaza,” filmmaker and scholar Alexandra Juhasz encouraged participants that “if things feel like they are connected for you, then they are.” For me, a set of relations of force connect in the persistent revelations of rape and sexual assault by elite figures, the institutions that protect them and the genocide in Gaza.

In the past week or so, the re-revelations of what was already known but then repressed in the now-posthumous memoir by Virginia Guiffre—the young woman trafficked and assaulted by Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, the former “Prince” Andrew and many others— connected to settler colonialism in general and the genocide in Gaza in particular. Forcing a recognition of what happened to her cost Guiffre her own life.

This cycle of dissociation, forgetting, rediscovery and breakdown reveals the relations of force and the psychic violence of settler colonial and racial capitalism. The mentality of sovereigns and sovereignty has been exposed here, however briefly. It is the will to supremacy—whether white, male, or Jewish—mediated by institutions and expressed in and on the bodies of others.

This glimpse behind the curtain shielding the self-appointed First Class is at once subject to the mechanisms of dissociation and dissimulation. The hegemonic task at hand is to challenge and overturn this mentality of dominance and hierarchy in the institutions that constitute the infrastructure of supremacy.

As an opening (above), I’ve begun to map these relations of force as intersections between institutions (green), abusers (red) and those they target (black). Obviously, it could be widely extended but, even in this form, it shows how educational, financial and even art institutions support abusers as part of the structure of dominance, while their targets are entirely disposable.

I put myself in this map because it also maps my past history in direct and analogous ways, as readers will know (see the link if not). While this is systemic and structural, it is not a quiet, calm, cybernetic network. Building on the long legacy of “legalized lawlessness” that is colonialism, it destroys people for a night out.

Subjugation, Slavery and Supremacy

Racial patriarchal capitalism always entails systemic abuse. It’s not an add-on or a “benefit” to the elite but central to the mechanisms by which humans become subjugated to capital against their will. This has been known so long, from Frederick Douglass to C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe and so many more. Dissociation, forgetting and re-repression are central to the system of violence.

As Cedric Johnson argued in Black Marxism, what matters to capitalism is hierarchy, “woven into the tapestry of a violent social order.” At first that hierarchy was within Europe. Absolute binary distinctions, such as male/female, or civilized/barbarian then became racialized.

People do not willingly or comfortably accept subjugation. This racialized distinction was enforced violently and intrusively. In Olaudah Equiano’s narrative of his life while enslaved, he recalled how

Note that Equiano saw these assaults as all constituting “cruelties,” while highlighting the “constant practice” of rape. Whatever the individual motive, the structural effect was one of sustaining racializing hierarchy through rape and other “sexual” assaults. While there is not space here to write the history of this institutionalized abuse, it can be traced from the slave ship to the factory, the school, the prison and colonial institutions like those of the Israeli occupation in Palestine.

If Francesca Albanese highlighted the role of “colonial racial capitalism” in her July report to the UN, in September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry highlighted that in the genocide: “sexual and gender-based violence has been widespread and systematic, perpetrated in different forms since 7 October 2023.” These two modalities of mapping the genocide need to interact and intersect. The expropriation, extraction and exploitation by corporate entities, as well as by the occupation, target both individual and social bodies.

In order to map and challenge the settler colonial will to supremacy, let’s begin to triangulate colonialism, higher education and museums.

Infrastructures I: Colonialism

In in To See In The Dark, I argued that the British elites who colonized Palestine during the Mandate (1918-48) were prepared to do so by violence and sexual assault in their public schools: “children were prepared for isolation and the segregation that colonialism required; they were desensitized to violence; and learned to take the practices of violence, and sexual assault as given; and then, to inflict it themselves, first on their peers at school, later, on their subordinates in the colonies, and finally in British politics.”

The school served and serves as a model to subjugate the students into the relations of force that structure the colony and the metropole alike. For example, Orde Wingate who organized the notorious Special Night Squads during the Palestine uprising of 1936-39, attended Charterhouse school and the Royal Military Academy. Wingate put into practice the humiliation and physical violence he learned at these institutions in Palestine. In turn, a grateful Moshe Dayan, IDF Chief of General Staff and Israeli Defense Minister, said Wingate “taught us everything we know.”

In domestic examples of these relations of force, consider as elite a figure as Earl Charles Spencer,Lady Diana’s brother. His 2024 memoir detailed how he was abused and subjected to extreme violence at school. He connected this violence to the need to train colonial officials and define domestic politics in terms of hierarchy, as epitomized by prime ministers Boris Johnson and David Cameron.

Once such violence is disinibited, it unfolds. In some of the most difficult pages of her book, Virginia Guiffre described being raped and choked to the point of passing out by a leading prime minister in 2002, when she was eighteen. She was later forced to have a second encounter with this politician on board Epstein's plane.

Although Google search in the US won’t link to them, press reports outside the US are widely identifying this leader as Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, based on her naming him in court documents. Guiffre described herself as "terrorized" after this attack. Barak sent Epstein a birthday letter in 2016, eight years after his conviction as a sex offender, noting coyly "you know everything about everyone." Of course, Barak denies the assaults.

When visible, these relations of force threaten sovereignty itself. Guiffre's testimony and emails revealed in a 2023 legal case between the US Virgin Islands and JP Morgan have led Andrew to be stripped of all his titles and honorifics. As British public opinion swung against both Andrew and the royals in general, the very notion of a sovereign was at risk. Is it finally “time, gentlemen, time” for this literally perverse tradition invented to support the 19th century empire? Hovering in the wings is the fascist Nigel Farage, ready to reinvent the kingdom in Trump’s image.

Infrastructures II: Universities

If many have been puzzled at the apparent collapse of integrity in higher education and related institutions such as finance capital and museums, whether in relation to Gaza or fascism, we should not have been: it was never there in the first place. Guiffre blew the whistle on them too.

In extracts published in British media, she described how Epstein sent her to the five-star The Breakers resort in Palm Beach and trafficked her to "Billionaire No. 1" and a “famous psychologist with white hair." No doubt it is a coincidence that this description matches Steven Pinker, who  knew Epstein from 2002 and flew on his plane. Pinker denies it is him because she spelled his first name wrong with a “ph.” Because rapists always spell their names out to those they assault.

Pinker was just one among many as Guiffre described:

Academics who took sexual advantage included the late Marvin Minsky, founder of the AI lab at MIT; while both Harvard and the prestigious MIT Media Lab were funded by him. Megastars like Stephen Hawking, Stephen Jay Gould and Oliver Sacks received funding from Epstein. His lawyer Allen Dershowitz was from Harvard. Harvard researchers investigated whether it was a crime to transport a minor into a state where having sexual relations with a minor is not illegal—it isn’t. Epstein was fascinated with eugenics, describing bizarre plans to impregnate hundreds of women himself: the “master race” fantasy.

Abusive institutions (meaning institutions where abuse happens and where abusers work) like Harvard, MIT and Oxford continue to dominate (pun intended) higher education, obsessed with rankings, endowments and all other indices of that dominance. Who can be surprised that their faculty act it out? 

The 21st century university no longer describes itself in terms of knowledge, let alone critique. Rather, they deploy, as Harvard’s mission statement puts it, a “transformative power” on those recruited. “Transformative” is used five times in just three paragraphs—was it written by AI?—so that no reader can miss its priority. The repression of protest around Gaza revealed that this transformation is required to take certain forms and that force will be deployed against any who choose a different path.

Infrastructures III: Art, Museums and Finance

While academics disgraced themselves with Jeffrey Epstein, it was financiers who serve on museum boards and use art as an index of their power that gave Epstein his power to abuse. Current Museum of Modern Art, New York, board member and former chair Leon Black was key to this intersection of abuse, art and finance.  He has suffered little consequence. Black did not even have to step down as chair after his Epstein ties became known, he simply did not stand for reelection.

In turn, in the type of connection once documented by the artist Mark Lombardi, Epstein served as a trustee of the Leon Black Foundation from 1997. In 2005, Epstein was a Visiting Fellow in Harvard’s Psychology Department, despite having no academic qualifications.

Emails revealed by the New York Times show that as late as 2015–seven years after Epstein became a convicted sex offender in relation to minors—Black was funding Epstein to the tune of what the abuser called “the usual $40 million per year.” Total revenues for Epstein from Black amounted to $158 million from 2013-17 alone. 

What exactly Black was paying for remains unclear as the supposed “financial services” the unqualified Epstein was offering could be found at any corporate accounting firm for far less.

In the notorious 50th birthday book created by procurer Ghislaine Maxwell, signed by Trump among many others, Black described Epstein as “wet dream and cauchemar [nightmare].” Wet dream for whom? Nightmare I get. 

In 2016, Black sold Epstein a Giacometti statue for $25 million that he used to buy a Cézanne. The rollover helped Black avoid tax, the one thing that billionaires find more erotic than assaulting minors. Epstein claimed that he helped Black buy Munch’s The Scream in 2012, which Black of course now denies. 

By the same token, Black has been accused of a series of rapes, including at Epstein’s townhouse, although between his lawyers and checkbook, these allegations always seem to go away. Eight women, including three associated with Epstein, were paid millions by Black to buy their silence. 

What is the systemic intersection of art with financial power and sexual assault? As well as being a MoMA Trustee, Black personally owns a range of “master”pieces— and that word gives us a clue to the nexus at stake. Epstein, Black, Pinker, Clinton, Minsky, Bannon and all the others so connected, want above all to be “master,” racially, sexually and financially dominant.

Intersection: Maxwell and me

In and around 1981-83, I was at Balliol College, Oxford, where Maxwell was also a student. Of French, apparently. I can’t remember now if we ever spoke although in a small institution like that, you knew everyone. She was, in her way, famous even then.

Maxwell lived in the upper strata of Oxford, associating with the likes of Boris Johnson and the violent Bullingdon Club. She and her elite friends passed me by, not like ships in the night, but like a private jet flying above a cheap charter flight: hierarchy manifests even in metaphor.

Maxwell was there despite her poor academic record at Marlborough School, which has a documented history of assault. While there's no indication that Maxwell was assaulted or carried out assaults, it seems all too likely. She suffered from anorexia as a child and her father, the notorious publisher Robert Maxwell, had a history of sexual harassment.

Robert had smoothed his daughter’s entry into Balliol by making a large donation soon after she was born, ensuring plausible deniability. A Holocaust survivor, Maxwell first made money licensing scientific research carried out in Nazi Germany by Springer-Verlag. Yes, it’s that same Springer that has helped bankrupt university libraries the world over with their excessive demands for journal subscriptions.

I never saw her again in person but as soon as the scandal broke, I recognized her at once in the incessant stream of photographs. She’s haunted me ever since.

Exit Ghost(s)?

In the end, I’m not the person to write this history because I need to distance myself from it for my own health and safety. It’s a fine line to walk between acknowledging and attesting to violent institutions and not having escaped from them.

I’ll end here. Something has to be said about the fact that Maxwell, Epstein, Weinstein, Black and many others involved in this story are Jewish. Every Philip Roth novel was about the desire of Jewish men to act as sexual predators, just as they imagined their Gentile peers to do. It was the act of assimilation to power. This observed domination had to be lived and acted out, not just claimed.

That desire to dominate is central to the occupation of Palestine. Jews in Israel are not at all ready to set that aside. But elsewhere maybe they are. Here in New York, it looks like Zohran Mamdani will be elected Mayor, despite unending (false) assertions of antisemitism that destroyed other politicians like Jeremy Corbyn.

Amongst ourselves, as at the panel with which I began, there’s open discussion of reevaluating and decentering the Holocaust. There’s a recognition of the need to create new, different institutions, rather than change the personnel or policies. That work is the undoing of systemic domination and the search for non-hierarchical ways to be Jewish (in this case) without demanding supremacy. Early days, yes. Let’s keep walking that road so that the Epsteins, Maxwells, and Netanyahus of this world don’t get to define us.