David Saranga

Saranga was born in Tel Aviv and pursued academic training that combined social science with business.[1] He earned a BA in sociology and business administration from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, followed by an MBA specializing in marketing and business entrepreneurship, also from the Hebrew University.[1]

Before entering the Foreign Service, Saranga worked in the private sector, holding roles that included head of direct marketing at C.A.L., national sales director at Kidum, and managing an independent direct-marketing business.[1] By 2009, he had represented the Foreign Ministry for approximately fifteen years, and his background in sales and marketing was widely noted as shaping his unconventional approach to public diplomacy.[1]

Saranga's early Foreign Service assignments included serving as deputy ambassador to Romania, media and public affairs adviser at the Israeli Embassy in Spain, and deputy spokesperson of the Foreign Ministry.[1] His most prominent early posting was as consul for media and public affairs at the Israeli Consulate General in New York, where the U.S. Department of State recorded his date of recognition as December 5, 2005.[2]

During his four-year New York posting, Saranga and his staff built an unusually active digital presence, operating blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and YouTube channels as instruments of public diplomacy.[1] The consulate was credited with launching the first official government blog and the first Facebook page of a country's diplomatic representation; Saranga called the initiative the "Public Diplomacy Revolution 2.0."[1] When Israel launched its military operation in Gaza in late 2008, he organized a press conference conducted on Twitter — described at the time as a world first for any government — and reported that the consulate's account gained 4,000 followers within twenty-four hours.[1][3]

Saranga articulated a philosophy of public diplomacy that emphasized building goodwill in ordinary times rather than trying to win arguments during conflicts. He stated that "in war, Israel spends image credit," and argued that communicating about Israeli culture, food, and fashion alongside political topics would give Israel more "breathing room" when crises arose.[1] He also promoted the view that effective diplomacy required engaging audiences on subjects they already cared about.[1]

In 2007, while serving in New York, Saranga arranged cooperation with Maxim magazine as a public-relations effort aimed at young American men whom surveys indicated viewed Israel as largely irrelevant.[4][1] Seven Israeli models who had served in the military were photographed in bikinis at locations in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, with Saranga describing the models as a "Trojan horse" for presenting Israel as a modern country with beaches and a diverse, open society.[4] He completed his New York posting and returned to Tel Aviv in 2009.[1]

By 2014 Saranga had become Israel's head of the European Parliament Liaison Department in Brussels, where he worked on securing ratification of the Open Skies aviation agreement.[5] He said that year he would return to Israel to head the Foreign Ministry's public-diplomacy department.[5]

In October 2018, President Reuven Rivlin signed Saranga's appointment as Israel's designated ambassador to Romania, following four years in which Saranga had served as Rivlin's political adviser on foreign affairs.[6] Rivlin called him "an asset to the country's foreign service and to the complex diplomatic work that lies before us every day."[6]

Saranga served as ambassador to Romania from 2019 to 2022.[3] On International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2021, he received the Mihnea Constantinescu Award for Excellence in Diplomacy, describing it as recognition not only for himself but for Israel and his embassy team, and crediting their collective work in strengthening bilateral relations during a difficult year.[7] In January 2022 he publicly condemned the Romanian nationalist AUR party's description of the Holocaust as a "minor topic" and its opposition to teaching it as a separate school subject, arguing that objective knowledge of the Holocaust was essential to prevent future atrocities and that young people must learn about antisemitism, xenophobia, and intolerance.[8] He also praised a Romanian law intended to make Holocaust study compulsory.[8]

Also in 2022, Saranga spoke at a ceremony in Constanța marking the eightieth anniversary of the Struma disaster — the first time Romania had officially commemorated the tragedy on Romanian soil.[9] In his remarks, he discussed the persecution of Romanian Jews and recounted that the Struma's passengers had been stranded in Istanbul for ten weeks because Britain refused them entry to pre-state Israel.[9] He also told the story of Isac-Itzhak Terkatin, a 26-year-old survivor of the Iași pogrom who helped others flee Romania before boarding the ship himself.[9]

At the end of his Bucharest posting Saranga wrote a twelve-chapter book, "The Return to Romania," published in Romanian and English by the Lauder-Reut School in Bucharest.[10] The book covered the embassy's diplomatic work, including Israeli humanitarian assistance to Ukraine at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, Holocaust remembrance efforts, cultural ties, and the Zionist history of Romania's Jewish community.[10]

Returning from Romania in 2022, Saranga took over as head of the Foreign Ministry's digital diplomacy division, succeeding Yiftah Curiel.[11] He oversaw a team of forty employees managing ministry accounts in multiple languages across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.[12] The division coordinated online activity across more than one hundred Israeli missions, with each mission amplifying headquarters material while adapting content to local languages and audiences.[11]

In January 2023, the Foreign Ministry released AI-generated videos using Saranga's likeness to address online audiences in eight languages: Mandarin, Farsi, Arabic, Hindi, Turkish, Greek, Russian, and Portuguese.[13] The clips used AI to adjust his speech and lip movements; they drew more than one million views on Twitter within two days.[13] Saranga said the technology allowed the ministry to communicate quickly and clearly with audiences in countries where Israel lacked a representative able to speak the local language.[13]

In June 2023, before the October 7 attack, Saranga described Israel as engaged in a "narrative war" and said TikTok could convey diplomatic messages to younger audiences; the ministry was recruiting staff for dedicated TikTok and Instagram departments.[14] Following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, the division redirected its resources toward diplomatic messaging. Where pre-war social-media content had been roughly 40% diplomatic and 60% softer material, it shifted to concentrate on Israel's position; within two months Twitter followers doubled and followers on other platforms tripled.[11] By late 2023, the ministry had published more than 10,000 posts and tweets and produced more than 200 videos since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.[15] Saranga acknowledged that the ministry had made three errors among those posts and that it deleted or corrected them and apologized when mistakes occurred.[16]

In 2024, Saranga identified Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn as the ministry's priority platforms, describing Twitter as especially important because journalists, foreign ambassadors, parliamentarians, and heads of state use it, and LinkedIn as having a more productive and less combative audience.[11] He also noted that the ministry's Arabic-language accounts had been operating for more than a decade, predating the Abraham Accords, as a direct channel through which Arab audiences could learn about Israel.[11] He said ministry studies conducted inside Iran showed that 80% of the population held positive sentiment toward Israel, though the cited interview provided no information about the studies' methodology, sample size, or fieldwork dates.[11]

The ministry also worked to protect the authenticity of official accounts: after discovering fake social-media profiles impersonating Israeli diplomats, Saranga's team contacted the relevant platforms and had the accounts removed.[12] He described the fake accounts as copying diplomats' real posts in order to build apparent credibility before contacting people or spreading misinformation.[12]

In 2025, the Foreign Ministry's committee for heads of overseas missions appointed Saranga as Israel's ambassador to Belgium.[17] In August 2026, he announced that he would begin serving as ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg, succeeding Idit Rosenzweig-Abu, who had held the post for nearly four years.[3]

Saranga's career has been closely associated with Israel's early adoption and subsequent institutionalization of digital public diplomacy. During his New York posting, the consulate adopted blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter and organized a press conference on Twitter that was described as the first of its kind.[1]

His later leadership connected those experiments to a ministry-wide operation coordinating online activity across more than 100 missions and producing material in multiple languages.[15] The eight-language AI videos released in 2023 further illustrated his emphasis on using emerging technology to reach audiences beyond Israel's traditional diplomatic channels.[13]

The 2007 Maxim magazine project drew significant criticism within Israel. Knesset members Colette Avital and Esterina Tartman denounced the campaign as a "pornographic campaign" and objected to using women's bodies to promote the country; some critics called for Saranga's dismissal.[1] Saranga defended the project, citing a survey he said showed readers subsequently viewed Israel as more liberal, modern, cool, and fun.[1]

In January 2026, South Africa declared Israeli chargé d'affaires Ariel Seideman persona non grata and ordered him to leave within 72 hours, with South African officials citing alleged violations of diplomatic norms including offensive use of official Israeli social-media accounts and failures to notify the foreign ministry about planned visits.[16] Israeli officials disputed that account, saying Saranga had been sent as a "visiting ambassador" whose diplomatic-passport status allowed entry without prior approval under a bilateral agreement, and that his visits involved meetings with the Xhosa king, discussions of water-related assistance, and possible medical cooperation with Sheba Medical Center.[16][18] South African officials viewed his role as an attempt to install a de facto ambassador; Israeli officials maintained that the expulsion of Seideman did not sever diplomatic relations.[16]

The claim that 80% of Iranians hold positive sentiment toward Israel is Saranga's account of Foreign Ministry research and rests on studies whose methodology, sample size, and fieldwork dates have not been publicly described.[11]