Words matter. These are the best Ronen Bergman Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Jewish leaders were intent on discovering and laying claim to their heritage in the region. They took an intense interest in archaeology, embarking on quests to bring significant items of Judaica to Palestine.
Israel has good reason to be concerned about its intelligence making its way to Moscow: Russia is a major player in the war in Syria on Israel’s northern border, where it has also become a close ally of Iran and Hezbollah, Israel’s sworn enemies.
Can a nation use the methods of terrorism? Can it harm innocent civilians in the process? What are the costs? Where is the line?
Right after the Six Day War, Arafat launched a series of guerrilla operations from East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Acting on a tip, Israeli soldiers stormed the house where he was based, minutes too late. They found his food still warm on the table.
Every intelligence operation carries risks.
When something is presented as an existential threat, it is very easy to scare the Israelis.
In addition to closed-circuit TV systems and the ability to track cellphone and computer users, advanced biometric identification systems and online coordination across borders are becoming more and more widespread.
As a reporter in Israel, I have interviewed hundreds of people in its intelligence and defense establishments and studied thousands of classified documents that revealed a hidden history, surprising even in the context of Israel’s already fierce reputation.
David Ben-Gurion established the Israeli intelligence community in June of 1948, just three weeks after the establishment of Israel and in the midst of war.
In most countries, the political class supervises the defense establishment and restrains its leaders from violating human rights or pursuing dangerous, aggressive policies.
In 2005, the last year of his life, Ahmad Abu Adass was 22 and still living with his parents in Beirut, Lebanon. He was kind and liked people, his friends later told investigators, but none of them thought he was very sophisticated.
Many casinos in the United States already use facial recognition software to identify undesirables, apparently with a fair degree of success.
In the late 1980s, the United States and Israel believed that they had good intelligence on Iraq, but they missed the extent of Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of unconventional weapons – until after he invaded Kuwait.
For a thousand years after the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, the Jewish holy scriptures – the five parts of the Torah and 19 other holy books – were copied and passed down in the various Jewish communities from generation to generation.
Israel’s decision on whether to strike or not is dictated not from the atmosphere and not from American or European promises but is based on the Iranian project. And I don’t think the Iranians would agree to anything that would satisfy Israel.
I have covered the secret war that Israeli and American intelligence have waged against Iran’s nuclear program and Iran’s assistance to jihadi movements in the Middle East, since the mid-’90s.
I’m the son of two Holocaust survivors. As a child, I heard from one of my parents’ best friends about living through Mengele’s infamous selection process at Auschwitz. He haunted my nightmares.
Israelis cannot enter Iran, so Israel, Iranian officials believe, has devoted huge resources to recruiting Iranians who leave the country on business trips and turning them into agents.
Politics, to Ariel Sharon, was like a Ferris wheel. But he didn’t make do with just staying on the wheel; he did all he could to climb to the top and stay there.
Both Israel and America should acknowledge that scraps of information cannot serve as the basis for action against Iran, and they should find new criteria for such a decision.
A country, people, and society are in a sorry state when the guardians of its democratic values and the rule of law are the officers of the armed forces who are forced to stand up to the mob and the politicians who incite it and kowtow to it.
Under international law, defendants convicted in absentia have the right to a retrial, unless the prosecutors for the authorities who do finally capture them can show that the defendants knew they were under indictment.
The problem is that the same technological tools we use to thwart terrorists can also be used against the people whose job it is to stop them.
Relying on intelligence as the chief touchstone for decisions about whether and when to attack creates a wide opening for misunderstandings, divergent interpretations, and vulnerabilities to parties with an interest in either attack or delay.
For years, I have been writing that ultimately, if nothing else stops the Iranian nuclear project, such as the sanctions or a change in the regime in Tehran, then Israel itself will take action to destroy it from the air.
As prime minister, Hariri did not directly confront Hezbollah or the Syrians, but conflict simmered nonetheless.
In Israel’s short history, army commanders and the heads of the intelligence agencies have often advocated the use of force and in many cases showed contempt for the law and human rights. Political leaders have typically been more measured.
Israel has the right to defend itself, especially against the huge numbers of Iranian long-range missiles pouring into the Gaza Strip from Iran via Sudan and Egypt.
Generally speaking, Israeli intelligence did not hunt Nazi war criminals.
The command-and-control systems, the war rooms, the methods of information gathering, and the technology of the pilotless aircraft, or drones, that now serve the Americans and their allies were all, in large part, developed in Israel.
For years, Israeli and American intelligence agencies assumed that if Iran were to gain the ability to build a bomb, it would be a result of its relationship with Russia, which was building a nuclear reactor for Iran at a site called Bushehr and had assisted the Iranians in their missile-development program.
The first to grasp how sensitive Israeli public opinion was on the issue of hostages and M.I.A.’s – and therefore what a powerful weapon abduction could be – was Ahmed Jibril, the leader of a faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Israel and the United States have been locked in a mutually necessary and beneficial intelligence-sharing relationship for more than 60 years.
Gaza itself is subject to constant aerial surveillance by drones and is rife with informers and collaborators with Israel.
Even though intense focus on Iran’s nuclear program has presumably increased the volume of intelligence gathered about it, it remains true that intelligence officers tend to rely heavily on a few trusted sources.
