Case Study 01 · Investigative Journalism

The Story the Defense Ministry Hoped Would Disappear

A passing tip inside an anniversary interview led to a peer-reviewed medical paper that named me by name in its acknowledgments.

The Challenge

Israel's Iron Dome was celebrated as a national triumph. But a pattern was emerging in the shadows: soldiers who had served near the system's high-powered radar were developing cancer at unusually young ages. The military denied any connection. Researchers had data, but a critical gap made it unpublishable. And the soldiers were running out of time.

What I Did

It started with an anniversary piece — ten years since Iron Dome redefined missile defense. A celebratory story. But on the margins of a conversation, someone hinted that things were not as they seemed: someone was quietly collecting data on cancer cases among soldiers who had served in the unit.

That thread led me to Moran Ditsch, founder of the Zohar Association for oncology patients' rights, herself a cancer survivor. Ditsch had noticed an anomaly in her organization's referrals: disproportionate requests from soldiers who served near Air Force radar systems. She had spent two years quietly mapping the sick, and brought her data to Prof. Eliyahu Richter and Michael Peleg — the same scientists behind the Kishon River cancer scandal.

They had disturbing findings but no control group, which meant no statistical significance. I identified the missing piece myself. The 2011 cohort: approximately 250 soldiers. At least six with cancer during or shortly after service. Cross-referenced with the National Cancer Registry by age and gender: six times the general population rate.

That calculation was the story the Ministry of Defense could not argue with.

The Outcome

The story ran as the lead front-page item in Yedioth Ahronoth's news section — rare for a magazine piece — and as the cover of 7 Days. Within a week, additional soldiers had come forward. Parents sent formal letters to the IDF Chief of Staff and the Defense Minister. MK Orna Barbivai pushed for a parliamentary inquiry. The research was subsequently published in a peer-reviewed international journal. The acknowledgments section names me by name.

Two years later, lead researcher Michael Peleg wrote publicly on LinkedIn:

Case Study 02 · Strategic Interviewing

Mr. Television Thought He Was in for Another Puff Piece. Big Mistake. Yuge

A national icon, three decades of institutional silence, and a decision tree mapped in advance

The Challenge

Chaim Yavin was the face of Israeli television for half a century — the anchor who narrated the country to itself. Decades of rumors about his conduct with women at the Israeli Broadcasting Authority had circulated privately and died quietly. The silence around him was institutional, not accidental.

The opportunity came when he agreed to be interviewed about a documentary he was hosting — and the timing mattered. MeToo was reshaping the global conversation around power and silence. That shift created a window: questions that would have been deflected a year earlier could now land differently.

What I Did

I arrived with a decision tree. Every possible direction the conversation could take was mapped in advance: if he says X, I say Y. The goal was not to ambush — it was to give him enough room to speak freely until he said it himself.

It worked. The quote came almost willingly.

The first story ignited a wave. Women who had worked at the Israeli Broadcasting Authority began contacting the newsroom. I spoke with more than thirty women — makeup artists, editors, producers, anchors — three decades of institutionalized silence.

The Outcome

The interview was published on the cover of 7 Nights and promoted in the news in the days leading to publication. Two women filed formal complaints with support centers. The public discussion prompted other media outlets to pursue their own investigations — all before MeToo had a face or a name in Israel.

The Method Behind It

The Yavin interview is the purest example of the method I practice. Before I walk into a room, I map the system. Every direction the conversation can go. Every deflection already anticipated. A decision tree built in advance so that what looks like improvisation is, in fact, architecture. Twenty-five years of investigative interviewing taught me one rule: the sentence a subject refuses to say is the sentence that will come out on its own — if the room is built right.

The decision tree I drafted before the Yavin interview. Every branch is a possible route the conversation could take. Every node is a response I had pre-written in my head. What reads as improvisation in the published interview was, on this page, already mapped.

And no less important than the narrative, or than what is said, is what is not said. Silence is the most important punctuation mark for an interviewer, and for a narrator of any kind. Silence is where the story is keeping itself. My job is to listen to that silence, and build the story from it. Most interviewers never get there.

In practice, this is closer to HUMINT than to journalism — listening as a form of counter-interrogation, applied in reverse: not to extract from a hostile source, but to free a guarded one. I call the work that emerges from this method Storypower: not storytelling, which implies ornament, but the structural capacity of a narrative to do work in the world. Put more plainly: Storypower is finding the sentence a system has yet to articulate about itself — and giving it back.

Case Study 03 · Immersive Investigation

I Went In as a Journalist. Left With a Scoop

Israel's celebrity psychiatrist. Former patients with disturbing accounts. A reporter who booked the appointment under her real name — to record what happened in the room

The Challenge

Dr. Ilan Rabinovich was, by 2011, less a psychiatrist than a brand. The on-call mental-health expert for Israeli television, the former staff psychiatrist on Big Brother, host of a national radio show, regular fixture at the Tel Aviv media circuit. His waiting list ran weeks. His fee was 850 shekels a session.

The whispers were the story. Former patients — actresses, journalists, executives, the wife of a cabinet minister — described a pattern: breach of confidentiality in session, cocktails of psychiatric medication, personal life advice that crossed clinical boundaries, and diagnostic verdicts delivered in minutes. But every source refused to be named. They were afraid of him. The story existed entirely in the conditional.

What I Did

I booked an appointment at his clinic. Under my real name. With my real employer on the intake form. With a genuine medical history — a low-dose antidepressant, a period of anxiety. I was not posing as anyone. I was there as what I was: a woman under professional pressure, and a reporter whose task was to document what a first appointment with Dr. Rabinovich looked like when it was happening to her.

He opened the session with what he called "a game." He would construct a hypothetical woman, name her G., and ascribe to her a set of exaggerated traits drawn, he said, from intuition. I was to listen silently and note what resembled me.

The character he built was elaborate. She was beautiful, magnetic, insecure. She needed constant attention, ran her life as telenovela, cheated in relationships, was addicted to drama. She had ADHD, OCD, and a "histrionic personality." She checked locks multiple times. She could not tolerate criticism.

He delivered all of this in roughly six minutes. I had said almost nothing.

At the end I received a formal diagnosis — anxiety disorder with obsessive-compulsive features, panic attacks, attention deficit, histrionic personality disorder — and a prescription cocktail: 225 mg of Effexor, 5 mg of Risperdal. Risperdal is an antipsychotic prescribed, among other things, for schizophrenia. I had been in the room less than an hour.

The instruction Dr. Rabinovich handed me at the end of our appointment, drawn in his own hand. Pink frame. Yellow highlighter fill. The word "patience" underlined, punctuated with three exclamation points. The word was for me. The composition was his.

The transcript of the session became the spine of the investigation. Around it I placed the on-record testimony I had built in parallel — the actress whose marriage fell apart after he counseled an affair, the client who nearly aborted a divorce because he insisted she "have a child instead," the patient whose suicide text he never answered, the Big Brother contestants medicated off-camera, the complete pattern of Dudu Topaz's treatment in the months before his suicide in custody.

The Outcome

The investigation ran as the cover of 7 Nights on March 18, 2011, as a four-page spread with a first-person account of my session. Expert commentary came from senior psychiatrists, including the chair of the Medical Association's ethics committee and the head of Israel's Association of Psychiatrists. Both characterized what had occurred in the room as a violation of professional standards.

The story triggered Knesset health committee hearings and new national ethical guidelines for reality TV production. Producers and the psychiatrist paid 1.5–2 million NIS in compensation to three Big Brother contestants. Rabinovich's access to mainstream media was permanently reshaped. The investigation remains, fifteen years later, a referenced case in Israeli media-ethics discussion.

Case Study 04 · Cultural Criticism · Editorial Direction

Ruth Sirkis: Inventing Israeli Leisure Culture — 50 Years Later

A civilizational shift to excavate. Six chefs to redirect from filter to point of view. Ten pages in the Passover supplement — a scale rarely granted, and editorial freedom even rarer

The Challenge

How do you assess the cultural impact of a cookbook fifty years after publication — when half its contents look dated, and the other half became so normalized that people forgot it was ever revolutionary? The assignment was to isolate the exact moment Ruth Sirkis changed the Israeli narrative around food, pleasure, and domesticity.

What I Did

I started with the cultural analysis: mapping Sirkis's 1975 debut not as a cookbook but as a civilizational shift — the moment Israel moved from eating to survive to eating as a lifestyle, from socialist meals to capitalist ones. I interviewed food historians, anthropologists, and cultural researchers — including a professor who had nominated Sirkis for the Israel Prize multiple times, turned down each time on the grounds that food is not culture.

Then I designed the creative project: six chefs, bloggers, and food creators, each paired with an iconic Sirkis recipe, commissioned to produce their own interpretation. Every pairing was deliberate. I ran brainstorming sessions with each participant, briefed photographers across multiple shoots, edited both the recipes and the narrative.

The Outcome

Published across ten pages in the luxury Passover supplement of 7 Days — a format and scale rarely granted in Israeli journalism. Chef Tom Aviv shared the project to his 185,000 followers as an homage to "the mother of all recipes." Food blogger Shiri Amit credited Sirkis as a trailblazer who brought the world into the Israeli kitchen before the internet existed. MasterChef finalist Itai Dagan posted a single story: "Came out incredible." All three tagged @gabibarhaim unprompted.

Left: Tom Aviv's Instagram story tagging @yedioth and @gabibarhaim — "I turned Ruth Sirkis's orange chicken into carpaccio — you can say it makes no sense, but I have mine, so I don't care." Center: his feed post to 185,000 followers featuring his dish — "giving respect to the mother of all recipes, Ruth Sirkis, the one and only." Right: Shiri Amit's story — "go dig through your mothers' cookbooks. There isn't a house in Israel that didn't have this book."

Case Study 05 · Product · Narrative · Research

Imaleh: A Parenting App That Translates Behavior Into Neurology

Three gaps in the parenting-tech market that nobody had named together. A founder's manifesto in one sentence

Four screens from the live MVP. From left: home screen with age-targeted selection; category grid including "the Iranians are mean?", "mom I didn't brush", "I hate their guts in the fridge"; the war-readiness update widget ("let everyone know we're fine except for what isn't" — safe room · shelter · stairwell · drainage ditch in Kafr Qasim); a full three-stage script for "you embarrass me · 6–8."

The Manifesto

Imaleh begins with a sentence that holds two languages at once — the one the parent arrives with, and the one the app teaches them to use instead.

אין ילד רע — יש ילד שרע לו נוירולוגית.

There is no bad child. There is a child whose nervous system is having a bad time.

The translation itself is the intervention. An app that reframes "my child is being awful" as "my child's nervous system is dysregulated" has already changed the parent's response before instructing them on anything.

The Three Gaps

I did not start Imaleh from a feature list. I started from three absences in the parenting-tech market that nobody had articulated together.

The Neurological Dictionary

Behind the scripts sits a translation system. A slammed door is not insolence. It is an emotional charge discharging through the nearest available interface. Once a parent sees it that way, the response changes without any instruction.

Method

The methodology I developed over twenty-five years as an investigative journalist is the one that built Imaleh. Map the system before you name the problem. Identify what nobody has articulated. Find the vocabulary that makes a known experience newly visible. The research base is clinical — Window of Tolerance, Co-Regulation, 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding, Deep Pressure. The UX delivery is not. It is the voice of a WhatsApp conversation between two women at the end of a long day.

Imaleh is Storypower applied to the most compressed context I could find: the parent who has ninety seconds.

Status

The MVP went live in April 2026 as a single-page HTML application. Twenty-four situation buttons. Five age brackets. Three script stages — opening, response to resistance, final line. A WhatsApp share function.