On The Barak Ravid Syndrome
Recently, and perhaps belatedly, an ever-increasing number of people have taken notice of Axios’s Barak Ravid faulty ‘scoops,’ often turning out to be a gross mischaracterization of reality, especially as the Israeli correspondent reported on several potential U.S.-Iran breakthroughs in negotiations that turned out to be categorically false. As such, Ravid’s reputation is in danger, and one can only take a look at his X (formerly Twitter) profile to glance how he has been responding to such a wide-scale realization of his positionality as an ex Unit 8200 correspondent.
The Division of Labor Within the Israeli Army
Dr. Khaled Odetallah noted that in general, ‘liberal’ Ashkenazi Israeli Jews prefer intelligence positions rather than frontline fighting positions in contrast to the Mizrahim, Sephardim, and more religious Israeli Jews. This division of labor thus puts settlers in Palestine in several categories: those who fight and ‘shed blood’ for the Zionist project in Palestine, and those who engage in more hands-off intelligence work that enables genocide and immiseration in the region. The end result, for those on the receiving end of this violence, is the same – an intelligence officer gathering data is no less guilty than a frontline soldier killing Palestinians, or an airforce pilot bombing Lebanese and Iranian homes. For the settlers, however, it makes a difference: the rise of the Israeli ‘right,’ often ultra-religious, in the 1970s-1980s and contemporarily is specifically due to the fact that they ‘bleed more,’ by virtue of getting enrolled in combat positions rather than intelligence or airforce roles.
