Ronen Bergman has a résumé that likely makes fellow Israeli journalists seethe with envy. Or, at least, the left-wing ones who wish they could peddle their wares so successfully on both sides of the ocean.
A staff writer for The New York Times, a senior commentator for the Hebrew daily Yediot Achronot and author of the 2018 best-selling book, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, Bergman is routinely presented, at home and abroad, as an oracle on matters of war, intelligence and national security.
Add to that his cultivated network of purportedly top-level sources and his longstanding career covering Israel’s clandestine operations, and you have a figure whose so-called “scoops” are treated as revelations, rather than what they usually are: musings, based on anonymous leaks, with a political bent.
Take his April 3 piece in Yediot’s adjacent news site Ynet as a prime example. Though its title, “Launching Messages,” is supposed to describe the ostensibly contradictory utterings of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump, it actually depicts Bergman’s own barrage of bile against both leaders.
To make sure that readers didn’t miss the gist of his lengthy diatribe—poorly disguised as well-informed “analysis”—he introduced it on X with the following passage:“For those who couldn’t stay awake through the [air-raid] sirens until President Trump’s urgent address to the nation on Friday night [sic; it was Wednesday night], it can be summed up in three sentences. First, the war by Israel and the United States against Iran is just about over and has achieved all of its objectives—those that were precisely defined on its very first day. Second, the objectives it did not achieve—we didn’t really want to achieve anyway. Third, if Iran stands in our way of achieving them, we will return it to the Stone Age.
“Aside from the fact that this text includes an explicit threat to commit war crimes—targeting civilian infrastructure to the point of ‘returning a country to the Stone Age,’ something tantamount to the use of nuclear weapons—it is a mix of falsehoods and internal contradictions that should alarm anyone who understands the power held by the leader of the free world.
“As for Netanyahu—after realizing he wouldn’t be able to recycle the same claims he made at the end of the previous round last June, when he spoke of having removed ‘two existential threats’—he, like Trump, is trying to read the terrain and retroactively adjust the strategy. … But in the final analysis, none of the operations has increased the distance between Iran and producing its first nuclear bomb. And so, Netanyahu—who now says of the regime [in Tehran] only that ‘sooner or later, it will fall’—is no longer talking about removing the existential threat.
“He knows why.
“Because after all, when it comes down to it, none of the operations has pushed Iran further away from a nuclear weapon. And so, Netanyahu, who once placed the elimination of that existential danger at the very tip of his strategic doctrine—something meant to ensure Israel’s survival for generations—is now pointing elsewhere as the source of endurance. In other words: ‘We are all required to continue standing firm’ (behind Netanyahu, of course), ‘and thus, with God’s help, we will ensure the eternity of Israel.’”
This was just a taste of the sweeping, sarcastic assertions that made up the rest of Bergman’s polemic. Nor did the scathing rant need to have been so lengthy.
In fact, he could have spared us the verbiage, since the “messages” he was “launching” were as tired and tiresome as his prose. Yes, according to Bergman—whose reputation as an Israeli with inside dope in both Washington and Jerusalem outranks even that of Axios/CNN/Channel 12 reporter Barak Ravid—Trump and Netanyahu are lying about their goals and achievements in the war on the Islamic Republic.
Worse, as per Bergman, Iran is just as close as ever to producing nuclear weapons. In other words, two bumbling, deceitful heads of state are conducting a reckless military campaign whose already vague aims keep morphing.
That this is nonsense doesn’t bother Bergman, of course. After all, he’d rather see Trump and Netanyahu ousted than witness a historic victory over the mullah-led regime that’s been terrorizing its own people and the world since 1979.
Such is his motive. Demoralizing the Israeli public is part of his method.
And while he stated that the text of Trump’s April 1 speech “includes an explicit threat to commit war crimes,” it is he who engages regularly in unethical behavior, benefitting from a kind of journalistic arbitrage.
The maneuver is to publish material in the Times that would be nixed in the Hebrew press by the military censor, and then recycle it for Yediot, citing himself as a “foreign source.”
It’s a neat trick—a loophole provided by the separate location and language of his platforms—adding a patina of fact to slanted speculation. Another transparent ploy is the Times’ peculiar habit of attaching multiple bylines to stories, among them Bergman’s.
The idea, apparently, is to convey a sense of extra effort and expertise that goes into research. In practice, it has the opposite effect.
When responsibility is diffused among a committee of reporters, accountability evaporates and the craftmanship crucial to good writing becomes meaningless. On the other hand, it’s precisely what gave Bergman the opportunity to add a Pulitzer Prize to his bio—for being part of the NYT team honored for reporting on the events of and after Oct. 7, 2023.
Naturally, the key culprit in Bergman’s universe was and remains—who else?—Bibi, whom he and fellow Pulitzer-winners at the Times accused last July of “Prolong[ing] the War in Gaza to Stay in Power.”
Disseminating bald-faced lies is nothing new for Bergman or the outlets whose pages he graces with his poison pen. But the current circumstances require constant reminders that his credentials should never be mistaken for credibility.
