Danny Danon

Origins and early life

Danny Danon was born in Ramat Gan on 8 May 1971 to Joseph and Yoheved Danon, attended Blich High School and grew up in the Betar youth movement.

Work and career

His father had come to Israel from Egypt and was badly wounded in the Jordan Valley in 1969, which left him deaf; in his memoir Danon tells of the poverty his father's family endured on reaching the Jewish homeland and of the challenges Sephardic Jews faced as immigrants. After serving as an officer in the Education Corps, he studied international affairs at Florida International University and public policy at the Hebrew University, and the Jewish Agency sent him to Miami as an emissary.

He went on to chair the World Betar movement, led the Likud faction in the World Zionist Organization from 2004 to 2009, and in June 2006 was elected chairman of World Likud. Elected to the Knesset in 2009, he was deputy speaker and chaired the committees on the rights of the child and on immigration, absorption and the Diaspora, then served as deputy defence minister from 2013 and as science minister in 2015. Among the laws he promoted was one that sets a minimum weight for models in Israeli advertising and requires a notice when their images have been digitally altered.

Appointed ambassador to the United Nations in August 2015, he became in June 2016 the first Israeli elected to chair its Legal Committee, and he writes that Judaism came to the organisation in new ways, from kosher food in the cafeteria to the recognition of Jewish holidays. He returned to the Knesset after the 2022 election and in August 2024 went back to New York for a second term as Israel's ambassador to the United Nations.

He is the author of The Will to Prevail and of In the Lion's Den: Israel and the World, published in 2022, and the Jerusalem Post listed him in 2023 among its fifty most influential Jews.