When Tommy Robinson was released from prison in August 2018, Jeffrey Epstein sent an email to Steve Bannon, a long-time ally and lynchpin of the global populist Right. “Tommy Robinson. !!,” he wrote. “Good work.” Bannon replied with one word: “Thanks.”

For Robinson, this exchange — and another in which Bannon tells Epstein that Robinson is the “backbone of England” — may have proved deeply embarrassing. Robinson’s critics have seized on these emails as evidence that he is, at best, compromised by ties to foreign money or, at worst, “Tommy Robinstein”: an Israeli asset sent to undermine British nationalism. Now, the anti-Islam activist is attempting to set the record straight.

Writing on Wednesday for The Jerusalem Post, Robinson claimed he had never spoken to Epstein, condemned him as a “despicable, predatory, and evil man”, and offered a rebuttal to arguments that the paedophile financier was working for Israeli intelligence. In neat prose with more than a whiff of ChatGPT about it, he argued that it is a “crude caricature” to describe Epstein as a “Zionist agent”.

“Epstein,” wrote Robinson, “did not live or behave like someone ideologically committed to the Jewish state.” This is an odd claim to make about someone who donated to the Friends of the Israeli Defence Force and the Jewish National Fund and who, according to his own lawyer, used to wear an IDF t-shirt “proudly”. Putting the strength of his argument to one side, however, the more interesting question is how Robinson came to be published by The Jerusalem Post in the first place.

In recent decades, as Israel has shifted to the Right, its leaders have cultivated bonds with national populists across Europe. For many sceptics of liberalism, such as Bannon, the Jewish state provides an example of how an ethnically exclusionary democracy might be built. For Benjamin Netanyahu, pro-Trump leaders make for more reliable allies than Europe’s traditional elite. It is for this reason that Viktor Orbán is welcome in Jerusalem while Labour MPs are banned from entering the country.

Robinson’s introduction to Israeli politics appears to have come via Betar, a Revisionist Zionist party founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the paramilitary leader and hard-Right rival of Israel’s national father, David Ben-Gurion. Much diminished in the 21st century, the party nonetheless helped organise a recent trip by Robinson to Israel in which he was celebrated by Amichai Chikli, the minister for the diaspora, to shrieks of outrage in London.

“Tommy Robinson is an extremely popular figure in Israel, and a leader the Jewish people greatly appreciate,” Betar’s spokesperson, Daniel Levy, told me on Thursday. The group’s leaders have known him since the early years of the English Defence League and now think of him as “one of the world’s finest journalists,” he said. Levy claimed that Robinson is now writing for The Jerusalem Post because it is a “friendly outlet” unlike “the liberal left of centre Jewish Chronicle, which sides with the woke British Board of Deputies and entities which are often hostile to the Jewish state”.

This Israeli connection marks no pivot for Robinson, who has always courted Zionist support. In 2010, shortly after the creation of the EDL, the activist founded a Jewish division of the group to “lead the counter-Jihad fight in England”. Writing on Facebook, one supporter compared its members to Shayet-13, an IDF special forces unit. In the years since, Robinson has taken funding from pro-Israel sources, including the Middle East Forum, a think tank, and Robert Shillman, a US tech billionaire.

In the eyes of these longstanding American backers and his new Israeli friends, the former tanning salon owner is an ordinary working-class man standing up for British values. “The writer is a British patriot, street-level activist, and unapologetic truth-teller who has spent two decades exposing the rot in Britain’s institutions,” reads his bio on The Jerusalem Post’s website. To many in Britain, the truth is rather different.

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Felix Pope is a reporter based in London.

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