Israeli Celebrity Diplomats: Fame in Contemporary Israeli-European Affairs

Celebrity diplomacy is relatively a new phenomenon in Israeli foreign policy in Europe. Israel’s wining Eurovision singers, Dana International (1998) and Netta (2018), along with top model Bar Refaeli and Wonder Woman – Gal Gadot – serve as just the most visible of how new Israeli celebrities are performing an expanded range of diplomatic activities on behalf of the State of Israel in Europe and are being recognized on European and international stages. This new Israeli foreign policy instrument requires some conceptual clarification, as well as an extended analytical treatment. This paper teases out the Israeli motivations and modes of operation of this emergent cohort of Israeli diplomats in Europe, while finding out exactly who these new Israeli celebrity diplomats in Europe are. Dana International and Bar Refaeli, for example, cover two distinctive streams of Israeli diplomacy in Europe that merit close attention. The Israeli celebrity diplomats featured in this paper perform their roles in Israeli-European affairs through completely different means than Israeli and European officials and diplomats. The paper argues that this is largely a public phenomenon, defined by an activism on the Israeli-European stage that is cast as the stylistic opposite from the insulated and service world of mainstream Israeli-European diplomacy. An element of spectacle informs their activities. Their mode of operation is populist in style and their platform of choice include interviews in a wide cross-section of new and old European media and mass performances via staged events all across the continent.