Ronen Bergman

Ronen Bergman  link Sourcewatch Twitter (Investigative journalist)
File:Ronen Bergman.jpg
Born	16 June 1972
Nationality	Israeli
Israeli journalist who published Rise and Kill First: The secret history of Israel's targeted killings - in reality a very flattering limited hangout.

Ronen Bergman is an Israeli investigative journalist and author. He is a senior political and military analyst for Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest-circulation daily.

Career

Ronen Bergman has written for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Newsweek in the United States, and for The Times, The Guardian, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Europe.

Publications

Bergman's "explosive" book Rise and Kill First: The secret history of Israel’s targeted killings details such Israeli plans as the assassination of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat which included a plot to blow up passenger planes and football stadiums. Bergman persuaded many agents of Mossad, Shin Bet and the military to tell their stories, some using their real names. The book strongly suggests that Israel used radiation poisoning to eventually kill Arafat, an act its officials have consistently denied.

Problems with official narrative

Israel Shamir is very critical of the book:

Bergman willingly submitted his study of Mossad assassinations to...Mossad censorship. While this prudence saved Bergman’s neck from the fury of the Kidon, as the Mossad assassination unit is called, it certainly had made his mammoth book much less useful. A book on assassins censored by an assassin committee is an exercise in hagiography, not a critical appreciation of history...There are practically no new revelations in Bergman's book. So many cases, so much detail, and not even one big case previously unknown...Bergman does his best to obscure By Way of Deception, the scary book by Victor Ostrovsky...the word sayan does not even appear in the index of Bergman’s book.

AIPAC

In 2021 Bergman gave a talk to the Israel lobby group AIPAC, lavishing praise on it for its support of Israel:

I've been all over the U.S. with AIPAC and it’s always a great pleasure...I know that you’ve got our backs. It's such a great feeling.