The Israeli Reporter Getting the Scoop on Trump’s High-Stakes Diplomacy

On Tuesday, following the release of American Israeli hostage Edan Alexander from captivity in Gaza, Axios’s Barak Ravid broke the news that back-channel talks between a Hamas official and Donald Trump ally Bishara Bahbah had enabled the return of the IDF soldier to Israeli territory. This crucial reporting explained how the Trump administration bypassed the Israeli government to negotiate the release, with Israeli officials telling Ravid that they found out about the ongoing discussions from their own intelligence organization, rather than directly from the White House.

Few are better positioned to cover the tensions between the Trump administration and the Israeli government than Ravid, an Israeli journalist who moved to Washington, DC, to tackle the 2024 election. “Covering foreign policy and national security in Washington, as somebody who came from another country, it’s like going to Disneyland,” Ravid tells me. “I’m a sick person, but it’s just so much fun.”

When Ravid, 44, moved from Tel Aviv to Washington, he intended to cover the presidential election from a foreign policy and national security perspective, but “you know how you make plans, and the world has other plans?” he asked when I recently met him at Axios’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters. The first few months in the US, Ravid spent time building his sources within the Republican Party. “And then October 7 happened,” he said.

Ravid recalls Axios cofounder Mike Allen suggesting he focus all his energy on covering the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Reflecting on this “tragic year and a half,” Ravid believes he was “able to give something that a lot of people in Washington couldn’t.” Indeed, Ravid delievered scoop after scoop on the conflict, often adding context to the growing rift between the US and Israeli governments over the handling of the aftermath. It was also helpful, he says, reporting from a distance. “I had family that was affected. I had friends who were affected, people who I knew were murdered,” he tells me of the Hamas attack on Israeli soil. “I don’t know if I would have been able to do the same kind of work if I was on the ground at that time. The distance allowed me to do the work in a more sober way, in a less emotional way.”

Beyond the ongoing conflict in Gaza, Ravid broke news this week on the Trump administration’s written proposal of a nuclear deal with Iran, and he has distinguished himself in reporting on the Russia-Ukraine war, revealing details of Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which included Elon Musk, in the days following the election. “That story felt like some sort of watershed moment where I can say, ‘Okay, I can also do this,’” Ravid tells me. “I’m not a one-trick pony.”

Zelenskyy himself even took notice, singling out the reporter at the Munich Security Conference in February. “I never saw your face. I always heard about Axios, that you’re always after my phone calls with some leaders. You know what’s going on,” Zelenskyy said. “Where do you get your information?” he jokingly asked. “I’ll tell you after,” Ravid responded.

“That was a nice moment,” Ravid says when I asked about his work being validated by someone of that stature, adding that it was the first time he had met Zelenskyy in person. “He’s a fascinating politician to cover. He’s very accessible in many ways,” Ravid adds. “There are a lot of similarities to covering Zelenskyy and covering Trump, because they’re very accessible. They’re very media-savvy.”

Ravid’s path to journalism was unconventional, at least when compared to his American counterparts. As an Israeli citizen, he was required to serve in the IDF for a minimum of 32 months. Ravid extended his service to six years, serving as an officer for the 8200 unit, which is the Israeli army’s main information- and intelligence-gathering unit. Just five days before his discharge, his commander offered him a job as chief of staff to then prime minister Ariel Sharon’s military secretary, Yoav Gallant—who was later Israel’s defense minister until being fired by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2024. Gallant wanted Ravid to follow him to the Southern Command six months later. Ravid declined, saying, “Thank you, but no thanks. I’m going to take a year off and do other things.”

Instead, he called a friend at Maariv, then Israel’s second-largest paper, which was building out its digital division. A week after leaving the army, Ravid was working as a junior news desk editor. “Almost nobody goes to journalism school in Israel,” he says. “It’s like many other things in Israel that are very informal and to the point of chaos.” During that time Ravid also attended Tel Aviv University, where it took him five years to earn a bachelor’s degree in Middle East history, “because it was much more fun to work in journalism and not go to university,” he tells me.

Ravid’s first reporting job came in 2006, covering newly elected prime minister Ehud Olmert. His first day on the job coincided with Olmert’s first in office. Months later, Israel went to war with Lebanon. “It was really like baptism by fire,” Ravid recalls. He later became a diplomatic correspondent at Haaretz, one of the few Israeli newspapers publishing in English, which allowed Ravid to build a loyal English readership.

In 2017, Ravid moved to Israeli TV news, but soon worried he was losing his English audience. A friend connected him to reporter Jonathan Swan, who was then at Axios but has since moved to The New York Times. After a phone call, Swan suggested that Ravid try writing for Axios, “no strings attached.” Ravid recalls his first visit to the Arlington office: “Mike [Allen] and Jim [VandeHei] were sitting in the same office, and it was really, really small. And we just started working together, almost unofficially. The rest was history.”

When Ravid left TV in 2020, Axios proposed a Tel Aviv newsletter for him to anchor. Ravid was able to create “a community” through the newsletter, making personal and government contacts which helped facilitate his move to Washington, with his family, in the summer of 2023. Though new to covering a US presidential election, Ravid had experience in Trumpworld; he interviewed the president and members of his inner circle, like Jared Kushner, for a 2021 book, Trump’s Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East.

Given his experience, Ravid has been especially well-positioned to cover two major global events—the Israel-Hamas war and Trump’s second administration—and their intersection. He’s also faced increased scrutiny over his past, with pro-Palestinian demonstrators disrupting Ravid’s November talk at Columbia University’s Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life by walking out as the conversation got underway. The Columbia University Apartheid Divest organization criticized the university for inviting Ravid, accusing the journalist of being a “henchman of genocide.” (At the time of the protests, more than 10,000 Palestinians had been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza, according to Hamas. As of publishing, Hamas reports that more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed.)

When I ask about the incident, Ravid jokes that as an Israeli, his threshold is particularly high for protest disruptions. “In Israel, it’s almost impolite to protest so politely,” he said. “It didn’t bother me,” Ravid tells me. “To be honest, if they were a bit more loud, it would be much better for my traffic on my Twitter account. So if anybody reads this and wants to help, they should come and shout next time at one of my speaking engagements.”

Ravid’s experience serving in the IDF has opened him up to bad faith attacks on his background, including accusations that he’s an Israeli spy, as he was still active in the army reserves up until March 2023. Ravid dismisses the idea that he had military intelligence while in the reserves, saying that once he became a journalist his reservist duties were moved to a unit “that is the equivalent of FEMA” and deals with preparation for natural disasters.

Additionally, Ravid stepped away from reserve duty well before October 7, during the wave of protests against judicial reform following Netanyahu’s reelection. When the prime minister first attempted to dismiss his defense minister (and then reversed his decision)—after Gallant warned that his policies were endangering national security—Ravid informed his commander and publicly declared he was suspending his reserve service, joining hundreds of thousands of other Israelis in protest. “We all know that Gallant was completely accurate in his warning, and we all know that Netanyahu did not adhere to that warning,” Ravid says. “I feel it was completely the right thing to do in order to try and ring every possible alarm bell. It wasn’t enough, unfortunately, but I think it was a moment when any person with a conscience cannot just sit idly by and do nothing.”

As far as his reporting goes, Ravid couldn’t care less about those questioning his neutrality, holding accuracy and fairness as his top priorities and rejecting the premise that journalists can even be objective. “People who have a pulse are not objective,” he argues. “Journalists don’t need to be objective; they need to be fair and they need to be accurate. That’s it.”

While brushing off protesters, Ravid expressed deep concern for protecting sources, doing everything he can to “make sure that they will not be hurt because they chose to talk to me.” That’s proving increasingly complicated, he notes, considering many forms of communication are compromised. “I think a lot about how to maintain contact with sources in the most secure way,” Ravid tells me, adding that he often opts to meet people face-to-face to exchange information, “for the real stuff.” In some cases while speaking with a source, the reporter will tell them, “No, let’s stop everything. Let’s meet. See you in an hour,” arguing it’s the “best way to go these days.”

His worries aren’t without reason. A few months after moving to the US, the FBI knocked on his front door, showing him their official badges “like in the movies I saw as a kid,” he recalls. “They said, ‘Don’t worry, you didn’t do anything wrong. You’re the victim.’” The officers told Ravid they had reason to believe that he was the target of a state actor. As far as Ravid is aware, the hack was unsuccessful because he didn’t fall for a phishing email.

Ravid was surprised at being informed he’s a “high-value target,” likely because of his consistent contact with government sources. Since that moment, Ravid is “always under the assumption that there are a lot of entities and intelligence organizations and governments around the world that would really want to know who I’m talking to and what I’m doing.”

“I’m always under the impression that I am being followed,” he says.