Ronen Bergman (Hebrew: רונן ברגמן; born June 16, 1972) is an Israeli investigative journalist and author. He previously wrote for Haaretz, and as of 2010, was a senior political and military analyst for Yedioth Ahronoth.[1] He won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Israel–Hamas war.[2]
Bergman was born in 1972, and grew up in Kiryat Bialik. His mother was a teacher and his father was an accountant. He is the youngest of three children. As a boy, he was a reporter for a youth television show. His parents were both Holocaust survivors.[3]
He did his military service in the Israel Defense Forces in the intelligence unit of the Military Police Corps. After his military service, he studied law at the University of Haifa, graduated cum laude, and was admitted to the Israel Bar Association. He later studied history and international relations at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge[4] in the United Kingdom, and was awarded an M.Phil. degree in international relations and a PhD (for his dissertation on the Israeli Mossad) by the University of Cambridge.[5]
Bergman has written in the weekly HaOlam HaZeh, in Shoken network locales and in Haaretz,[5] and since 2000 he has been writing in the "7 Days" supplement of Yedioth Ahronoth, and is a part of the editorial team of the newspaper.
Bergman is an expert on intelligence, security, terrorism and the Middle East. Lecturer at various forums in Israel and the United States. During his career, he exposed a number of scandals, including nomissions at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute, Nahum Manbar's connections to the Iranian arms industry, Yasser Arafat's secret bank account, the case of the broken smallpox vaccines prepared for the Gulf War, and Teddy Kollek's connections with British intelligence.[6][7]
One of the topics that Bergman dealt with for many years is the senior Egyptian source who reported the plans for the Yom Kippur War to the head of the Mossad, Zvi Zamir, and was nicknamed "Babylon" by Bergman. Following Bergman's and other journalists' exposure, it became known that the man was Ashraf Marwan.[8][9]
In 2018, Bergman joined The New York Times as an editorial member. He was appointed the magazine's correspondent in the Middle East, and serves as a reporter for the weekly supplement of The New York Times Magazine.[10]
Bergman won several journalism awards: