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March 15th, 2023 
Awake Goy On paper, Ronen Bergman is supposed to be a staff writer at the New York Times. His latest appalling article suggests that he is actually an undercover publicist for Mossad, the murderous Israeli spy agency. His awful report may represent a Times attempt to compensate, possibly unconsciously, for the tidal wave of negative news about Israel over the past few months.
Bergman’s article is breathtaking in its immorality and dishonesty. His subject is supposedly a new exhibit of photographs in Tel Aviv by Sylvia Rafael, a Mossad agent in the 1960s and ’70s whose “work as a photographer was just a cover for her espionage activity” in Europe, the Mideast and elsewhere. She died in 2005.
Bergman informs us that “the curators of the exhibition” judge that her pictures “show great talent.” But his main aim in the article is to glorify her work for Mossad, including her participation in the spy agency’s murder squads. His starry-eyed, worshipful tone would not have been out of place in Exodus, the 1958 pro-Israel propaganda novel.
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To put Rafael on a pedestal, he has to omit and lie. Most disgusting is this sentence: he says that Sylvia Rafael’s identity became known in the 1970s, “when she was arrested as a member of a Mossad team that had planned to kill another top Palestinian militant in Norway but shot the wrong man.”
The Mossad team didn’t just “shoot” the wrong man; they murdered him, in what became known as the Lillehammer affair. The victim was an innocent Morocco-born waiter named Ahmed Bouchiki, but Bergman doesn’t even have the decency to tell us his name. Rafael was arrested in Norway (along with others in the Mossad assassination team), convicted of murder there, and sentenced to five and one-half years in prison. She was released and deported after serving 15 months.
None of these details are in Ronen Bergman’s article. Instead, there’s mainly just heroine-worship:
‘Sylvia was someone special,’ said Moto Kfir, who was serving as the commander of Mossad’s Clandestine Operations Academy at the time Ms. Rafael was recruited and trained there.
And:
‘Sylvia’s story fascinated me,’ said Ilan Schwartz, one of the the curators of the [photography] exhibition. . . ‘She was a woman who went against conventions at a very young age, left her comfort zone, and agreed to sacrifice so much.’
Bergman’s article is lavishly illustrated with five examples of Rafael’s photographs. There are no photos of Ahmed Bouchiki, the waiter who was murdered in Norway.
How could such a one-sided article appear in the year 2023? The 2005 feature film Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg with a screenplay by well-known playwright Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, at least tried to reach beyond one-dimensional propaganda to attempt a partly balanced look at Israeli murder squads in the 1970s.
Here’s a theory: Fox News isn’t the only big media outlet that is afraid to challenge its audience. Over the past few months, the news from Israel/Palestine has been arguably more negative than ever for the New York Times’s pro-Israel readers. Combine the threat to Israel’s “democracy” from Benjamin Netanyahu’s new far-right wing government with the settler/colonist pogroms in occupied West Bank Palestine, and a significant portion of the Times’s audience must be extraordinarily unsettled.
So Ronen Bergman and his editors decided to ignore the truth, and show the pro-Israel faithful someone they could be proud of.
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