Exposed: The Israeli Spies Who Write America’s News

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“One year after the October 7 attacks, Netanyahu is on a winning streak.” That’s the title of a recent Axios article in which the Israeli prime minister is riding an unbeatable wave of successes. These stunning military “successes,” according to author Barak Ravid, include the bombing of Yemen, the assassination of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the pager attack on Lebanon.

The same author recently went viral for an article in which he claimed that Israel’s attacks against Hezbollah “are not aimed at war, but are an attempt to achieve ‘de-escalation through escalation’.” Ravid was mocked on virtual communication networks for this bizarre, Orwellian argument. But what almost everyone missed is that Barak Ravid is an Israeli spy – or at least he was until recently. Ravid is a former analyst with Israel’s spy agency Unit 8200 and was a reservist in the Israel Defense Forces until last year.

Unit 8200 is Israel’s largest and perhaps most controversial spy organization. It has been responsible for many high-profile espionage and terror operations, including the recent pager attack that injured thousands of Lebanese civilians. As this investigation will show, Ravid is far from the only Israeli ex-spy working in major U.S. media outlets, working hard to generate Western support for his country’s actions.

White House insiders

Ravid has quickly become one of the most influential figures in the Capitol Hill press corps. In April, he was awarded the prestigious White House Press Correspondents’ Award for “overall excellence in White House reporting” – one of the highest honors in American journalism. Judges were impressed by his “in-depth, almost intimate sourcing in the United States and abroad” and selected six articles as exemplary works of journalism.

Most of these stories simply consisted of printing anonymous sources from the White House or Israeli government, making them look good, and distancing President Biden from the horrors of Israel’s attack on Palestine. Thus, there was virtually no difference between these stories and White House press releases. For example, one story selected by the judges was titled “Scoop: Biden tells Bibi that a three-day pause in fighting could help free some hostages,” and portrayed the 46th president of the United States as a committed humanitarian desperate to alleviate suffering. Another described how “frustrated” Biden was with Netanyahu and the Israeli government.

Protesters had called on reporters to avoid the event in solidarity with their fallen colleagues in Gaza (at the time of writing, there are at least 128 journalists). Not only was there no boycott of the event, but the organizers awarded their highest award to an Israeli intelligence officer who, as a reporter, has earned a reputation as perhaps the most dutiful stenographer in power in Washington.

Ravid was personally presented with the award by President Biden, who hugged him like a brother. That a known (former) Israeli spy could hug Biden like that speaks volumes not only about the close ties between the United States and Israel, but also about the extent to which the establishment media holds power to account.

Ravid has made a name for himself by uncritically reprinting flattering information given to him by either the U.S. or Israeli governments and passing it off as a “scoop.” In April, he wrote that “President Biden gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an ultimatum in their phone call: If Israel does not change course in Gaza, we will not be able to support you,” and that he made “his strongest push for an end to fighting in Gaza in six months of war and warned for the first time that U.S. policy on the war will depend on Israel’s compliance with its demands,” which include “an immediate ceasefire.” In July, he repeated anonymous sources who told him that Netanyahu and Israel were seeking “a diplomatic solution”—another highly dubious claim.

Other articles by Ravid that follow the same pattern include:

This ruthless whitewashing by the Biden administration has sparked much ridicule online.

Axios Exclusive: After selling Netanyahu millions of dollars worth of weapons, Biden played Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood – loudly. “‘Everyone could hear it,’ says source close to Biden,” tweeted X user David Grossman. “I continue to hand over large amounts of money and weapons, but I shake my head so everyone knows I don’t agree with it,” quipped comedian Hussein Kesvani in response to Ravid’s recent article claiming Biden has become “increasingly suspicious” of the Israeli government.

During this supposed split between the US and Israel, the Biden administration has continued to voice enthusiastic support for Israeli offensives, blocked ceasefire resolutions and Palestinian statehood at the UN, and shipped $18 billion worth of weapons to Israel over the past 12 months. Regardless of how questionable these Axios reports are, they serve an important role for Washington because they allow the Biden administration to distance itself from what international bodies have called genocide. Ravid’s job is to generate approval for the administration among the liberal elite who read Axios so that they can continue to believe that the US is an honest broker for peace in West Asia, rather than a key stooge of Israel.

Ravid makes no secret of his open contempt for the Palestinians. In September, he retweeted a post that said: “That’s the way of the PaliNazis, they take concessions without giving anything in return and then use those concessions as a basis for the next round of negotiations. PaliNazis don’t know how to tell the truth.”

Less than a week later, he circulated Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s highly dubious claim that Israeli forces had found a picture of the children of Al-Qassam Brigades leader Mohammed Sinwar celebrating in front of a giant image of planes crashing into the World Trade Center. Gallant said the picture – which was clearly an attempt to falsely link Palestinians to 9/11 – was found in a tunnel “where the Sinwar brothers were hiding like rats.”

A notorious espionage department

Founded in 1952, Unit 8200 is the largest and most controversial division of the Israeli military.

Since October 7, 2023, the group, which is responsible for covert operations, espionage, surveillance and cyber warfare, has been the focus of global attention. It is widely identified as the organization behind the infamous pager attack on Lebanon, which left at least nine people dead and about 3,000 injured. While many in Israel (and Ravid himself) hailed the operation as a success, it was condemned worldwide as an egregious act of terrorism, including by former CIA director Leon Panetta.

Unit 8200 also created an artificial intelligence-assisted kill list for the Gaza Strip, recommending tens of thousands of people (including women and children) for assassination. This software was the main targeting mechanism used by the IDF in the first months of its assault on the densely populated Strip.

Dubbed Israel’s Harvard, Unit 8200 is one of the country’s most prestigious institutions. The selection process is highly competitive; parents spend a fortune on their children’s science and math classes in the hope that they will be selected to serve there, which will enable them to pursue a lucrative career in Israel’s burgeoning high-tech sector.

It also serves as the centerpiece of Israel’s futuristic repressive state apparatus. Using massive amounts of data collected on Palestinians by tracking their every move using facial recognition cameras that monitor their calls, messages, emails, and personal information, Unit 8200 has created a dystopian dragnet that it uses to surveil, harass, and oppress Palestinians.

Unit 8200 compiles dossiers on every Palestinian, including their medical history, amorous life and search history, so that this information can later be used for blackmail. For example, if a person is cheating on their spouse or needs urgent medical surgery, this can be used as leverage to turn civilians into informants and spies for Israel.

Unit 8200’s operatives have developed some of the world’s most downloaded apps and many of its most notorious spy programs, including Pegasus. Pegasus has been used to monitor dozens of world leaders, including France’s Emmanuel Macron, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, and Pakistan’s Imran Khan.

The Israeli government approved the sale of Pegasus to the Central Intelligence Agency as well as to some of the world’s most authoritarian governments, including Saudi Arabia, which used the software to monitor Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was murdered by Saudi agents in Turkey.

A recent investigation by MintPress News found that a large portion of the global VPN market is owned by an Israeli company run and co-founded by a Unit 8200 graduate.

In 2014, 43 reservists from Unit 8200 issued a joint statement declaring that they were no longer willing to serve in the unit because of its unethical practices, including its failure to distinguish between ordinary Palestinian citizens and terrorists. The letter also stated that their information was passed on to influential local politicians, who used it as they saw fit.

This public statement left Ravid brimming with anger at his associates. After the scandal, Ravid appeared on Israeli army radio and attacked the informants. Ravid said that resisting the occupation of Palestine was tantamount to resisting Israel itself, since the occupation was an essential “part” of Israel. “If the problem is really the occupation,” he said, “then your taxes are also a problem – they fund the soldier at the checkpoint, the education system, and 8200 is a great spin.”

Putting aside Ravid’s comments, the question is: Is it really acceptable for members of a group designed to infiltrate, monitor, and target foreign populations, that has created many of the world’s most dangerous and invasive spy technologies, and that is widely suspected of being behind sophisticated international terrorist attacks, to write Americans’ news stories on Israel and Palestine? What would the reaction be if senior figures in the U.S. media were exposed as intelligence operatives for Hezbollah, Hamas, or the Russian FSB?

News about Israel, brought to you by Israel

But Ravid is far from the only influential journalist in America with close ties to the Israeli state. Shachar Peled was an officer in Unit 8200 for three years, leading a team of analysts in surveillance, intelligence and cyber warfare. She also worked as a technology analyst for Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency. In 2017, she was hired by CNN as a producer and writer, and for three years compiled segments for Fareed Zakaria and Christiane Amanpour’s shows. Later, Google hired her as a senior media specialist.

Another Unit 8200 agent who later worked for CNN is Tal Heinrich. Heinrich spent three years as a Unit 8200 agent. Between 2014 and 2017, she worked as a field producer and in the newsroom at CNN‘s notoriously pro-Israel bureau in Jerusalem, where she was one of the key journalists who shaped America’s understanding of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza that killed more than 2,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands. Heinrich later left CNN and is now an official spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

CNN‘s penchant for hiring Israeli officials continues to this day. Tamar Michaelis, for example, currently works for the network and produces much of its Israel/Palestine content, despite previously serving as the official IDF spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces.

The New York Times, for its part, hired Anat Schwartz, a former Israeli Air Force intelligence officer with no journalistic experience. Schwartz co-authored the infamous and now discredited exposé, “Screams Without Words,” which alleged that Hamas militants systematically sexually raped Israelis on October 7. Times staffers themselves were outraged by the article’s lack of evidence and fact-checking.

Several New York Times staffers, including star columnist David Brooks, have children serving in the IDF; even when they report on the region or offer their opinions on it, the Times has never disclosed these blatant conflicts of interest to its readers. Nor has it disclosed that it bought for its bureau chief a house in Jerusalem that was stolen in 1948 from the family of Palestinian intellectual Ghada Karmi.

MintPress News interviewed Karmi last year about her latest book and Israeli attempts to silence her. Former New York Times Magazine writer and current editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg (an American), dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to volunteer as an IDF prison guard during the first Palestinian intifada (uprising). In his memoir, Goldberg reveals that while serving in the IDF, he helped cover up the mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners.

Former Unit 8200 agents also flock to virtual communication companies. A 2022 study by MintPress found that no fewer than 99 former Unit 8200 employees work for Google.

Facebook also employs dozens of former spies from the controversial entity. This includes Emi Palmor, who sits on Meta’s oversight board. This 21-member board ultimately decides the direction of Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s other properties, and decides what content is allowed and promoted and what is suppressed. Human Rights Watch has formally condemned Meta for systematically suppressing Palestinian voices on its platforms, documenting more than 1,000 cases of overt anti-Palestinian censorship in October and November 2023 alone. One example of this bias is the fact that at one point Instagram automatically inserted the word “terrorist” into the profiles of users who identified themselves as Palestinian.

Despite widespread claims by U.S. politicians that TikTok is a hotbed of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic racism, the company also employs many former Unit 8200 agents in key positions. In 2021, for example, it hired Asaf Hochman as global head of product strategy and operations. Before joining TikTok, Hochman was an Israeli spy for over five years. He now works for Meta.

Pro-Israel censorship from top to bottom

When it comes to Israel’s assault on its neighbors, the corporate media has consistently shown a pro-Israel bias. The New York Times, for example, routinely fails to name the perpetrator of the violence when it is the Israeli military and refers to the 1948 genocide of some 750,000 Palestinians as mere “migration.” An examination of the newspaper’s coverage found that words like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” appear 22 times more frequently when referring to Israeli deaths than Palestinian ones, despite the vast differences in the number of people killed on both sides.

In a story about how Israeli soldiers fired 335 bullets at a car carrying a Palestinian child and then shot at the rescue workers who came to save her, CNN printed the headline “Five-year-old Palestinian girl found dead after being trapped in car with dead relatives” – a title that could be interpreted to mean that her death was a tragic accident.

This kind of reporting doesn’t take place by accident. In fact, it comes straight from the top. A leaked New York Times memo from November revealed that management has specifically instructed its reporters not to use words like “genocide,” “slaughter” and “ethnic cleansing” when covering Israel’s actions. Times staff are not allowed to use words like “refugee camps,” “occupied territory” or even “Palestine” in their reporting, making it nearly impossible to convey some of the most basic facts to audiences.

CNN‘s staff is under similar pressure. Last October, new CEO Mark Thompson sent a memo to all staff instructing them to ensure that Hamas (not Israel) was portrayed as responsible for the violence, that they should always use the term “Hamas-controlled” when discussing the Gaza Health Ministry and the civilian death toll, and that they should not report on the Hamas viewpoint, which the senior director of news standards and practices told staff was “not newsworthy” and “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda.”

Both the Times and CNN have fired several journalists for speaking out against Israeli actions or for Palestinian liberation. In November, Jazmine Hughes was fired by the Times after signing an open letter opposing genocide in Palestine. The year before, the paper terminated Hosam Salem’s contract after a pressure campaign by the pro-Israel group Honest Reporting. And CNN anchor Marc Lamont Hill was abruptly fired in 2018 for calling for the liberation of Palestine in a speech at the United Nations.

Large organizations like Axios, CNN, and the New York Times clearly know who they are hiring. These are some of the most coveted jobs in journalism, and there are likely hundreds of applicants for each position. The fact that these organizations select Israeli spies above all others raises serious questions about their journalistic credibility and purpose.

Hiring Unit 8200 agents to produce American news should be as unthinkable as employing Hamas or Hezbollah fighters as reporters. Yet former Israeli spies are being entrusted with informing the American public about their country’s ongoing offensives against Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and Syria. What does this say about the credibility and bias of our media?

Since Israel could not continue this war without American help, the battle for American opinion is just as important as the actions on the ground. And as the propaganda war is waged, the lines between journalists and militants are blurred. The fact that many of the top journalists who provide us with news about Israel/Palestine are literally former agents of Israeli intelligence only underscores this.

Author: Alan Macleod

 

yogaesoteric
October 19, 2024

 

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