2023-07-31 20:59:43
Enigma. A film by Israeli Hilla Medalia and Australian Amos Roberts, which premiered at the Jerusalem Film Festival earlier this month, sheds light on the story of disgraced Mossad agent ‘Prisoner X’.
The question of the true story behind the downfall of Prisoner X, Australian-Israeli Mossad agent Ben Zygier, rocked Israel for much of 2013, but few concrete answers were ever forthcoming, according to timesofisrael.com.
After news broke that Zygier had been secretly imprisoned and then killed himself while behind bars in 2010, rumors and conflicting reports regarding his activities reverberated around the world. Did he release a Hezbollah double agent? A leak of information to Australia? Or Dubai? Did he commit suicide or was he murdered in prison?
In interviews with friends, journalists, his lawyer and through the recreated testimony of an unnamed Mossad agent, ‘Prisoner X’ explores how Zygier went from an idealistic young Zionist growing up in Melbourne to a young father of two. children accused of treason and led to suicide in solitary confinement, adds the same source.
The film tells a dynamic and gripping story for those unfamiliar with the plot, but provides few new details or theories regarding Zygier’s life and death.
+Zygier committed suicide and was not killed+
Sometimes frustrating but naturally vague, the documentary is also often quietly devastating, tracing the life of a young man with so much promise, which ended in so much tragedy.
Among the many theories, the film seems to reach certain conclusions, including that Zygier committed suicide and was not killed; that whatever crime he was charged with was probably due to error rather than intentional betrayal; and that Israeli authorities abused and abandoned a mentally unstable Zygier, leading to his entirely preventable death.
“I can tell you – without going into details of course – that Ben was very far from the limit that I set for myself of who I would not represent,” Zygier’s attorney, Moshe Mazur, said in the film. “He was not a traitor. »
+ Zygier’s “betrayal” was a smokescreen +
Several people interviewed in the documentary suggest that Zygier’s betrayal theories were a smokescreen for his real activities, which were allegedly carried out in Iran.
Most seemed to agree that Zygier worked undercover for a company in Italy that had connections to Iran and that his downfall was linked to his time at Monash University in Melbourne, where he revealed the wrong information to the wrong people.
Yet stories have repeatedly circulated that Zygier unmasked informants in Lebanon or foiled an operation to recover the bodies of three Israeli soldiers who had been missing for decades.
“What doesn’t quite add up is that the people who were exposed as Mossad informants – nothing really bad happened to them,” said Australian journalist Jason Koutsoukis, who was the one of the first to be informed of Zygier’s double life.
+ “A murky story, which has no strategic interest for Israel” +
Australian journalist Rafael Epstein, who knew Zygier as a child and wrote a book regarding the case in 2014, suggested that the narrative that emerged was regarding “a murky story, which is of no strategic interest to Israel. This provides a simple reason why Ben should be in jail. It just didn’t ring true,” he said.
Adding that: “This is a good story for the Mossad because it also does not reveal anything regarding one of the most important areas of espionage in Israel, which is Iran”.
None of Zygier’s family members appeared in the documentary: neither his parents, nor his sister, nor his wife, nor his children, who are now teenagers.
Australian journalist Trevor Bormann said he was filming a report from the Melbourne cemetery where Zygier is buried when he met his parents.
“I approached them, they were shocked to see me,” Bormann recounts in the film. “And Ben’s mother said something like, ‘All you’re going to do is put me in this empty plot next to my son.’
+ “The truth is worse because they didn’t care regarding him. » +
Ultimately, more than a tale of espionage gone wrong, ‘Prisoner X’ tells the story of the state using and abandoning a young idealist, throwing him behind bars without telling anyone and burying him. history by his side.
Without an Australian expose published in 2013, Israelis would probably never have heard of Zygier and how he killed himself in 2010 in a cell specially designed for Yigal Amir, the assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
“When you see the whole picture, it is perhaps the most pointless death you can think of under these circumstances,” lawyer Mazur said, adding that the State of Israel should have protected Zygier “also when he was abroad, and also when he was here, under their supervision.
Rumors that the Mossad killed Zygier were far from true, journalist Epstein said. “The truth is worse because they didn’t care regarding him,” the Israeli newspaper added.
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