Analysis: Will the real Mossad please stand up? In the classic joke, two Berlin Jews are sitting side by side on a park bench in the mid-1930s. One is reading a Jewish newspaper with growing concern, the other is chortling over a Nazi Party newspaper.

The first one scolds him, "It's bad enough you're reading that anti-Semitic rag, but you're laughing also?" His friend answers, "If I read your paper, all I get is here a Jew was killed, there a synagogue was torched, in this city Jewish shops were plundered. Instead I read this paper in which the Jews have all the money and rule the world."

This joke comes to mind after reading the various reports on the Institute for Intelligence and Special Roles, more commonly known as the Mossad. From American publications we learned that the Mossad had bumped off a senior Iranian nuclear physicist, apparently right within a uranium plant in Isfahan.

In Cairo, an Egyptian student was arrested for working for the Mossad over the last five and a half years in Turkey and Canada, together with a whole ring of agents.

And here back home, Israel's largest newspaper ran a magazine feature over the weekend portraying the Mossad as an organization in decline, that hasn't delivered the goods for the last 18 years, its hierarchy split through petty rivalry and its head exercising an almost Faustian control over the prime minister.

So who are they really? The Jerusalem Post