Michael Bar-Zohar

Michael Bar-Zohar was born in 1938 in Sofia

Bar-Zohar was born Michel Yulzari in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1938. His mother was an opera singer and his father a dentist. During the persecution of Bulgarian Jews in the Holocaust, the family was expelled from Sofia to a small mountain village.

The family immigrated to Israel in 1948 and first lived in Jaffa, where he changed his surname to Bar-Zohar. He attended High School Heh in Tel Aviv and studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He later earned a doctorate in history in Paris with a thesis on Israel and France.

He served in the Air Force and then moved to the Intelligence Corps. As a reservist he fought in several wars, including the Six-Day War with the paratroopers.

He wrote for Davar and was a Paris correspondent for LaMerhav. He was a founder of Rafi, became Defense Ministry spokesman in 1967, and lectured at the University of Haifa from 1970 to 1973. He was elected to the Knesset in 1981 and again in 1988, and chaired the Education and Culture Committee.

His books include biographies of David Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres and works on Israeli security. In 2013 Ronen Bergman sued him and Nissim Mishal over their Mossad book, and they filed a libel suit against Bergman. He published his autobiography in 2022.