Jeffrey Epstein is back in the headlines, this time via claims published last Saturday by ‘independent’ news site Drop Site News that - according to newly discovered emails from former Israeli PM Ehud Barack - Epstein helped Israel build a “secret back-channel to Russia” over Syria between 2013 and 2016. Before anyone starts assembling a Netflix exposé, however, let’s pause to state the obvious: if this is the big reveal, it’s about 20 years late and several billion dollars short.

Because here’s the problem. Israel didn’t need Epstein to reach or persuade Moscow, on Syria or any other issue. The two already had a busy direct line — and not a discreet one. The Moscow-Tel Aviv pipeline was public, well-documented, militarised, and very lucrative.

Let’s begin with the basics:
2005 – Vladimir Putin becomes the first Russian leader in decades to visit Israel.
2008 – Russia and Israel sign a visa-free travel deal.
2009–2010 – Russia buys over $450 million worth of Israeli drones and signs a military cooperation agreement.
2011 onward – Netanyahu meets Putin more times than any other world leader.
2015 – Russia intervenes in Syria; Israel and Russia immediately establish a deconfliction hotline, openly coordinating their airstrikes.
2019: Netanyahu makes his close alliance with Putin a key selling point in his election campaign.
2022: Putin fulsomely welcomes Netanyahu back to power (again) following the latest election with the message, “I hope that the new government under your leadership will continue the line of strengthening Russian-Israeli cooperation in all areas for the benefit of our peoples, in the interest of ensuring peace and security in the Middle East,”

Not one of these facts came from “leaked emails.” All of it was press-released.

And yet, the latest Drop Site piece insists that Epstein was somehow brokering a “back-channel” to help Ehud Barak convince Moscow to remove Assad. That’s a curious claim, given that Russia staked its military prestige on propping Assad up, and Israel itself repeatedly signalled it could live quite comfortably with Assad in power — so long as he kept the border quiet and his artillery pointed inward. If Epstein was meant to sabotage that alignment, he clearly failed. Or more likely: the entire “secret pressure” narrative has been reverse-engineered to suggest there was ever daylight between Moscow, Jerusalem, and Damascus to begin with.

So the real mystery isn’t: Why would Israel have needed Epstein?

It’s: Why are people pretending Israel and Russia weren’t already aligned long before 2013?

The only people who ever needed to invent a Russo-Israeli ‘secret channel’ are the same ones who need to maintain the fairy tales that Russia was an anti-imperialist power, Assad was the last standing defender of Palestine, and Israel spent the Syrian war trembling in fear of Assad continuing in power. In reality, Moscow and Tel Aviv were already on first-name terms, and both preferred Assad exactly where he was: ruling by terror, facing inward, and keeping Syria crushed and broken enough to pose no trouble across the border which was protected by his regime, like his father before him.

Israeli pundits and military officials regarded the Assad regime, father and son, as a safe, if unlovable pair of hands – the blood those hands were drenched in was, after all, Arab and therefore expendable. In the words of Moshe Maoz, former Israeli government advisor and ‘Syria expert’ at Hebrew University’s Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace. “You want to work with the devil you know.”
Speaking in 2011, Eyal Zisser, then-head of Mideast Studies at Tel Aviv University, noted, “Despite problematic aspects, Bashar maintains a stability. The border is quiet. You know where you stand with him. On the other hand, when you go toward the unknown, it is really unknown.”

And on the other side of the battlefield? Iran — allegedly Israel’s existential foe — was also backing Assad with troops, cash, and militias. Not because Tehran wanted freedom for Syria, Palestine, or indeed Iranians or anyone else, but because both Iran and Israel share the same core red line: no Arab freedom, and no empowered, Sunni-majority, post-dictatorship state that might genuinely support Palestinians and others on their own terms. Iran’s regime called Syria its “35th province.” Israel called it a source of “stability”. Different slogans, same contempt for Arab self-determination.

Russia understood this wholly cynical realpolitik perfectly. Israel understood it perfectly. The only people who didn’t — or pretended not to — were the “anti-imperialists” now clutching their pearls over Ehud Barak’s Gmail folder.

So who benefits from claiming that the abysmal Epstein was the key to Israel’s relationship with Russia? Enter Drop Site News, the self-styled ‘anti-establishment’ outlet behind these new leaks — co-founded by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim. These are not neutral journalists parachuting in with truth bombs. They’re two of the same people who spent years, made money and built reputations on running interference for Assad, denying genocide, recycling Kremlin and Iranian regime talking points, and mocking Syrians who rose up for freedom. Now they’ve added a new twist to their standard ‘Assad the resistance king’ narrative; poor old Bashar was the tragic victim of a secret Russo-Israeli back-channel set up by a dead pedophile pimp with connections to every fellow wealthy sleazeball on Earth. This isn’t investigative reporting. It’s narrative laundering for yesterday’s propaganda, dressed up as a scoop.

Let’s be blunt.
A dead American sex criminal didn’t broker the Russia-Israel axis on Syria.
Geopolitics, ams sales, shared counter-revolutionary priorities, and a mutual interest in ensuring that Syrians stayed crushed between a dictator, a theocracy, and superpowers keen to safeguard the continuity of authoritarian rule did that.

The scandal here isn’t the non-news that Epstein networked domestically and globally with fellow criminals and sleazy grifters who share his morally bankrupt worldview but whose own wealth and power means they’re equally unlikely to face justice in this life.

It’s that so many supposedly principled and progressive journalists and pundits have spent more than a decade running genocide-denial propaganda alongside the far-right and desperately denying the unsavoury truth; that while squabbling over whose boots should bear the heaviest weight on the region’s neck, Russia, Israel, and Iran were and are ultimately on the same authoritarian side — never the side of Syrians, Palestinians or any other people’s freedom.

The ‘revelations’ about Epstein’s sordid dealings with Ehud Barak aren’t new. The only thing being laundered, yet again is the truth. And the people trying to hide it know exactly what they’re doing.

By Ruth Riegler

Photo: Putin and Netanyahu, pictured during a visit by Netanyahu to Russia in February 2010. Via Putin's 2008-2012 Prime Ministerial website archive