He's an Arab, a Christian, and an Israeli Ambassador. George Deek makes the unlikely case for his country.

Photos Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Shortly after taking up his new position as Israel’s ambassador to Azerbaijan in 2018, young, personable, and articulate George Deek sat down for an introductory talk with a local government minister that left the Azeri official confused.

After the initial pleasantries, the conversation turned to the deep-rooted Azeri tradition of tolerance that has allowed a Jewish community to flourish in the country for centuries.

“Our two communities go back a long way,” ventured the minister, referring to Muslims and Jews, who have long coexisted peacefully in the South Caucasus.

“That’s very special,” replied the ambassador, “but did you know that I’m actually an Arab?”

Nonplussed, the Azeri minister attempted to reorient himself and began again. “Ah, yes, so then you and I are Muslims…” he clarified.

But the Israeli diplomat still hadn’t finished. “No, I’m actually not a Muslim,” he told the bewildered dignitary. “I’m a Christian.”

“It was just too much for him,” George Deek shares with me in a recent interview. “An Arab-Christian turning up as the Israeli ambassador to Azerbaijan — he didn’t know how to process it.”

“Who are you?” is really the story of Deek’s life. If Israeli diplomacy is all about telling Israel’s complex story to a world that thinks in black and white, the ambassador’s own hyphenated existence is the technicolor version.

A Yafo native whose family has been in the country for centuries, he’s named after a grandfather who fled during the War of Independence, then returned to Israel once the reality of Arab propaganda became clear.

Even though he’s the son of an Arab nationalist, the 37-year-old is convinced that Israel is one of the best things to have happened to the Middle East. A practicing Christian, he developed an unusual connection with the late Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks.

George Deek’s path to evangelizing for the Jewish state was anything but straightforward. His radical ideas about the need to leave Arab grievances behind were seeded by a Holocaust survivor who taught him music — and crucially, how to look ahead despite a bitter past.

“Like the smallest figure in a set of Russian nesting dolls,” he says with a characteristically neat turn-of-phrase, “we’re a minority within a minority in a country that is itself a minority.”

But Deek’s story is one often-overlooked as part of a complex, larger narrative about Israel. It’s not just external actors like Iran — across the border from his new host country, which the Mossad reportedly uses as a forward base — that threaten Israel. As the Arab-Israeli riots of this past summer show, Palestinian violence is a cauldron that can quickly boil over.

Yet that’s what makes Deek’s story so compelling. He’s part of a young Arab-Israeli generation that, on the other hand, is also fumbling its way to a new accommodation with the Jewish majority, more interested in improving the quality of their lives than fighting for a Palestinian state that they’d prefer not to live in in any case — and, as Israeli Arabs, isn’t even their personal fight.

“As Arab national identity crumbles, there’s a shift underway,” he says. “Some, like ISIS, react with fear. I see different responses happening in parallel.”

But, as the summer riots indicate, it’s not so simple. Is George Deek a test case that can actually work?

Beyond his bio — he grew up in the mixed Jewish-Christian-Muslim city of Yafo, was the only Arab in a Jewish high school, is a graduate of Radzyner Law School in Herzliya and also studied at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. on a Fulbright Fellowship — George Deek’s optimism after serving as deputy ambassador to Norway during the 2014 Gaza war is worth hearing. Posted to a progressive anti-Israel hotspot, his own success story growing up in a country his hosts will casually refer to as an “apartheid state” gave Israel the hearing it’s often denied among its detractors.

“I’m going to shock you,” he told audiences in Oslo, the city that gave its name to the failed peace process, in a speech hailed as one of the best ever delivered by an Israeli diplomat. “The existence of a Jewish state is at least as important to me — an Arab Christian — as it is to any Jewish Israeli. The simple truth is that a Middle East that has no room for a Jewish state is a Middle East that has no room for anyone who is different.”

This polished, unapologetic defender of Israel — in both personal encounters and active social media — has been making Israel’s case to hostile audiences for close to a decade in a language that resonates with them, unfazed by jeering crowds (in 2016, he calmly faced a heckling audience at the University of California by writing an appeal for dialogue on the whiteboard behind him).