April 26

Sushi Dinner: 8:15PM

Speaker: 8:30

George Deek, Advisor

International Law Department, Office of the Legal Adviser

Ministry of Foreign Affairs

George Deek is an diplomat, working at the International Law department at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He served as the Deputy Chief of Mission at the Embassy of Israel in Norway between July 2012 and January 2015, where he also served as Chargé d’Affaires between February and September 2014. Previously he served as Israel’s Deputy Chief of Mission in Nigeria (2009-2012).

George Deek is an Arab-Christian Israeli that hails from the city of Jaffa, where his family has lived for over 400 years. He graduated with two degrees, LL.B. in Law and B.A. in Government, at the Interdisciplinary Center of Herzliya (IDC). After having worked as a lawyer in a private firm in Tel-Aviv, he joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2008.

Mr. Deek was involved from a young age in the promotion of mutual understanding and co-existence between Jews and Arabs in Israel. Among the rest, he was the co-editor of the first local newspaper of Jaffa “YaffoSheli/ Yafati” (“My Jaffa” in Hebrew and Arabic); He led various Arab-Jewish delegations and programs to the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom; He was the manager of the “Arab-Jewish” debate forum of Israel’s leading news website Ynet; And he lead the youth movement of the Arab-Christian community in Israel, while also managing the musical school of the community, where over 120 children and youth of the ages 7-25 years received education and music lessons for free.

His speech in Oslo on September 2014, in which he weaves his family’s journey during the war of 1948 into the wider fabric of the Middle East conflict, has been considered by many as one of the “best speeches of an Israeli Diplomat ever held”.