In a totally ludicrous hit Netflix show, the trope of the magic Mossad agent returns

By Mira Fox
March 12, 2025

In the new Netflix political drama Zero Day, Robert De Niro — a.k.a. former president George Mullen — calls up a dry cleaner; he needs an immediate pick-up. Except the dry cleaner who comes to meet the former president in his backyard isn’t carrying a suit; his name is Natan, and he has intel from Mossad about a massive cyberattack against the U.S.

The attack shut down transportation and communications across the country for one single minute. That’s enough to cause trains and planes to crash, people to die — seemingly from walking onto train tracks while staring at their suddenly blank cell phones. The current president is stymied. So the government calls De Niro back in to calm the nation and run a commission with the power to disappear anyone vaguely suspicious in the name of finding the mysterious hackers.

There’s a lot of other goofy stuff going on in Zero Day, namely its unsubtle parallels to recent U.S. politics. Mullen for example, seems to be having some cognitive issues, and the impotent current president is a Black woman. There’s a very leftwing congresswoman named Alexandra and a tech billionaire with undue influence in politics. There’s even a right-wing talk news show that likes to platform extremists, a sort of Tucker Carlson/Joe Rogan mashup, with a dash of Alex Jones. Plus, its plot is so labyrinthine as to be nearly unintelligible and the dialogue is leaden.

Still, amazingly, Natan’s appearance, smoking a cigarette and sharing intel about a hacking collective in an accent veering from Israel to Brooklyn, is one of the goofiest moments.

There was a period in American media in which a magic Mossad agent popped up in nearly every political thriller or show. I’m not talking about shows like The Spy, which took on the true story of Eli Cohen, or Our Boys, which also is a fictionalization of a real event. I don’t even mean Fauda, which is, of course, an Israeli show where Mossad is an actual, fleshed-out part of its plot.

Instead, in many American police procedurals or political thrillers, Mossad agents are a go-to plot device to spare the writers from having to actually explain some new discovery or key point — the magic Mossad agent can simply offer it up. While the agents are only-maybe-trustworthy, they also have magical abilities to know everything and fight like trained ninjas. They’re good to have on your side, even if their motivations and loyalties are murky.

NCIS, one of television’s longest-running procedurals, featured a full eight seasons of Ziva David, a Mossad agent and daughter of the Mossad head who was, for some reason, attached to the Navy’s police investigations unit. Ziva is a beautiful woman who can fend off attackers without thinking and also has access to secrets about terrorists attacking the U.S. — that she only sometimes shares.

In Homeland, Tova Rivkin has a brief arc as a Mossad operative offering information about an Iranian nuclear program. Dan Bender in 24 pops up to foil a plot against the pope. Yossi, in The Americans, immediately clocks the KGB agents, thanks to his Mossad spy training. There’s even a Muslim Mossad agent, Samar Navabi, in The Blacklist.

Similarly, Natan and his cigarette appear in Zero Day leaning against Mullen’s barbecue to share “intel gathered by Mossad” with his old pal the former president. Later, Natan calls Mullen to tell him something so important that we, the audience, don’t even hear what it is. Then he fades into obscurity because things have gotten just so dangerous after a brief final tete-a-tete in a graveyard.

But Natan is the first time I can think of in years that the magic Mossad trope popped up in a hit, mainstream TV show. Israel’s alliance with the U.S. used to be a foregone conclusion, making a barely-developed Mossad agent character an easy way to introduce a clear ally in political or military thrillers. And for a generation of Americans, the popular culture stereotype of Israrelis was either scrappy underdogs winning wars against the Arab neighbors who outnumbered them, or supermodels like Bar Rafaeli.

Even before Oct. 7, though, approval of Israel was beginning to fall. The 2021 Gaza conflagration resulted in widespread uproar on social media, and the pro-Palestinian movement’s popular appeal grew cultural cachet. The idea that Israeli intelligence is unassailable and that its agents are skilled beyond belief no longer feels like the dominant stereotype. Instead, the dominant image, at least on left-leaning social media, is Israeli soldiers boasting about destroying Palestinian homes or parading about in underwear. And Oct. 7’s intelligence failure was so massive that Hamas was able to invade kibbutzim — not a ringing endorsement of Israel’s capabilities in the spy arena.

Since it was released, Zero Day has been in Netflix’s top 10 list in the U.S. Perhaps its return to the magic Mossad trope is a sign that Israel is becoming less controversial, or at least that it still carries a cultural idea of expertise and military dominance.

On the other hand though, Zero Day is one of the most out of touch TV shows I’ve ever seen. Spoiler alert: The leftist congresswoman (Alexandra, if you forgot) was behind the hack because she thought it would unite both sides of the political aisle. No one minds that Mullen’s fascistic commission used its unbridled power to torture and disappear citizens — it was run by the good guys! And his cognitive issues turn out not to be dementia, as everyone in the media and his political opponents allege, but instead symptoms from a secret superweapon. An 81-year-old De Niro once again saves the country, uniting both Congress and everyday citizens through a speech about American patriotism, liberty and truth. Heroic music plays, even though his speech is trite and wooden.

The entire show is crafted as though it’s an inspirational Aaron Sorkin creation about law and order and American democracy, complete with triumphant music and long close-ups of De Niro’s face in which he is supposed to look presidential and wise but mostly looks old. But what it actually offers is a muddy liberal fantasy of what would happen if Biden and Harris had stayed in office.

If a beloved Mossad agent is also part of this hallucination, well, that doesn’t say much about American opinions on Israel. Natan, like everything else about Zero Day, is a relic of a bygone vision of U.S. politics.

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