Ofir Akunis, consul general of Israel in New York, is preparing to celebrate his first Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur without his children—Yoni, who just finished his service in the Israeli military and was a lone soldier when Akunis began his mission in New York in May 2024, and Roni, who just began her service as a lone soldier.

“The kids are coming from time to time,” Akunis told JNS during an interview in his office that ran nearly an hour. “Unfortunately, it will be the very first time that we will not celebrate the High Holidays together. It’s unbelievable.”

While his children are in Tel Aviv and Rishon Lezion for the holidays, Akunis plans to go around and pray with “various communities” in New York City, as he did last year.

The longtime Knesset member-turned-diplomat told JNS that it has been very emotional in his first mission, during which he has received a “warm welcome” in New York.

“These are, I have to tell you, challenging years for the State of Israel, the Israeli army and Jewish communities all around, and I’m talking about New York,” Akunis said. He noted that there was an anti-Israel demonstration outside the consulate on his first day on the job. “It’s quiet,” he said of the consulate on Sept. 17.

JNS noted that there was a gathering across the street, with an oversized, inflatable rat, protesting a local business. “From time to time, it’s not about Israel,” Akunis said. “There are other issues in the world.”

‘Israeli democracy is a lighthouse’

The first thing that strikes a visitor to the consul general’s office is that Akunis admires Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister from 1977 to 1983 and Nobel laureate.

A Begin album published by Yedioth Ahronoth sat on his desk, a photo of Begin hung on a wall, a small figure of the late prime minister was displayed (with those of other Israeli leaders) stood on a book shelf and an about half-life-sized sculpture of Begin stood in a corner.

“We can talk about it for an hour,” Akunis told JNS when asked about objects in his office that are particularly meaningful to or revelatory about him. “There are a lot of things here.”

Akunis showed JNS a caricature of him and his son from a bar mitzvah of one of his cousins, photos of his family, a Hebrew Bible (“this is our main power”) and Francine Klagsbrun’s 2017 book Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel. JNS also saw a photo of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe.

“I admire this Jew. I admire him so much,” Akunis told JNS of Begin. “And one of his predecessors,” he added of Meir. “This Israeli ‘iron lady’ was born in Ukraine, grew up in America, left America to live in a kibbutz and then to be the very first woman, 10 years before Margaret Thatcher,” to become prime minister.

“These protesters want to speak about Israeli democracy. That was 1969 that she became a prime minister,” he told JNS. Yeah. “I can find a lot of similarity between the Yom Kippur War and the horrific day of Oct. 7, unfortunately.”

JNS asked, beyond Begin having a very good first name, why Akunis admired him so much. “He was maybe one of the biggest warriors for an independent state. (David) Ben-Gurion as well, even though it was very difficult between them.”

The diplomat pointed to the Meir book. “She was also a great warrior,” he told JNS. He then turned back to Begin. “I’m not originally from the Labour Party. I’m from Herut and Likud,” he said. “But from my father’s house and his father, we admire this man, and he stayed in the opposition for 29 years.”

“He said, ‘I will be a prime minister only if the people will elect me,’ and it happened in 1977. This is the main idea of democracy,” Akunis told JNS. 

The diplomat doesn’t understand what many say today—that a democratically elected prime minister or president, with whom they disagree, isn’t their president or prime minister.

“No. No, my dear. I can say that I supported a few candidates who lost elections in Israel, but I never said that ‘the prime minister chosen by the people is not my prime minister’ as an Israeli citizen, or ‘this is not my government’ or, how did they say, ‘is dangerous to democracy.’ No,” he told JNS. “I think that Israeli democracy is a lighthouse, first of all for our neighbors. There are no democracies around us. And to the entire Western world.”

‘A test to Western democracies’

The Jewish new year, which is about to start, and the secular new year, which looms in a few months, will be a “test,” according to Akunis.

“It will be a test to the Western democracies if they will continue to reflect weakness in the presence of—unfortunately, we are talking about wild people,” he told JNS. “I’m very sorry to say it, but we can see their behavior all around. I’m talking about London, Paris, Amsterdam, Spain, Greece.”

JNS asked why Akunis thinks that Jew-hatred is so enticing today.

“It’s not only about Israel and Hamas. It’s different ideologies. Western world versus ayatollahs and proxies, such as Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas. Islamic Jihad as well,” he said. He added that anti-Israel immigrants to Europe have had “a very clear influence” on European leaders.

“The British prime minister, the French president and the Australian prime minister are politicians. They want votes,” he said. “There are more new immigrants from various Muslim countries around, by the way. Millions who left Syria in the last 15 years. By the way, nobody is saying a word against it.”

“But when someone is talking about a few, I don’t know, thousands to leave Gaza, this is a huge scandal,” he said. “What about the millions who left Syria? Don’t be a hypocrite. That’s what I’m saying to other international leaders. What do you want from us, right? We didn’t start the fire. They did. We didn’t invade Gaza. They invaded Israel. We didn’t rape hundreds of women.”

Other countries have been pressuring Israel, which has only been engaging in self-defense, he said.

“I can assure you that if it will be tomorrow, or next week, or one month from now or maybe more, if they release the 48 hostages and Hamas terrorists—not the Gazans—will leave Gaza, that will be the last day of the war,” Akunis said. “We don’t want this war in Gaza. We don’t want the missiles from Yemen.”

The consul general then turned to Lebanon, which he said was a peaceful, Christian state. “I heard stories about the beautiful riviera in Beirut from my late grandmother,” he told JNS. “Fashionable women, discotheques, bars.”

Akunis told JNS that he thinks that Lebanon will be the first country to join the Abraham Accords after the war ends in Gaza.

“There’s no territorial conflict with Lebanon. There was a railway between Beirut and Cairo until 1948. We can rebuild it,” he said. (He posted video footage of part of that track on social media during a recent trip to Israel.)

“I think that they can be part of the Abraham Accords. The Beirut port is so close to Haifa port. Why not a railway? Open borders?” he said. “There’s one condition, Hezbollah. They ruined that.”

Akunis told JNS that he has met with Christians who left Lebanon and who want to return to their homeland. “They want to be there in Beirut, in Tripoli, other places,” he said. “Hamas must leave Gaza. Hezbollah must leave Lebanon, especially the Dahieh and southern neighborhoods and villages of Lebanon. The Yemenis must stop launching their missiles toward Israel, and that’s it. This is a new Middle East.”

After U.N. Resolution 181 split Israel into two states—a “two-state solution,” actually, Akunis said—with 60% going to the Arabs and 40% to the Jews, Palestinian terrorists responded by attacking and launching a war.

“They refused the two-state solution,” he told JNS. “Now they’re using the French prime minister and the British prime minister to progress a new resolution in the United Nations. They don’t know that they need the Security Council. They need the council if they want to declare a Palestinian state in the General Assembly, and there’s the American veto, so they can’t.”

“It’s just jive talking,” he said.

‘Playing a double game’

Akunis told JNS that he was the first to say publicly that Qatar is “behind all of this mess” of the anti-Israel protests on U.S. college campuses and “they are paying for them.” (He said that a Fox News anchor was “shocked” when Akunis criticized Qatar in that way.)

“They bought faculties,” he said, “and they are giving them money to protest with PLO flags, Hezbollah flags and the green flags of Hamas here in Manhattan. They’re playing a double game.”

JNS asked if the Israeli consul general was worried about pro-Qatar statements from the Trump administration, including from the president himself.

“This is his right. This is his policy. But I can say my truth. This is his truth,” Akunis said. “The Qatar issue, according to Israel, is my truth, and the truth is that from 2007, they donated all the money. They sponsored all the tunnels. Who did it? The Qataris with Qatari money.”

The Israeli diplomat told JNS that he admires U.S. President Donald Trump and thinks that about 80% of Israelis do as well.

“This is the American interest. OK. I’m dealing with the Israeli interest, and I must reflect the truth, and the truth is that now they’re such hypocrites,” he said of the Qataris. “They’re hosting the negotiations to release the hostages from the tunnels that they built. This is the one sentence. This is your headline.”

Akunis told JNS that he, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials cannot remember a time when the bond between the Jewish state and the United States was so strong.

The proof, he said, is that Netanyahu will see Trump for the fourth time next week since February. “Four times in a year,” he said. He also told JNS that it was “beautiful” that Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state and national security advisor, visited Israel recently and attended the opening ceremony for a tunnel in the City of David.

“The bond is stronger than ever,” he said. “What is the main proof for my opinion? The attack against Iran.” He quoted from Psalm 126:1. “Like a dream come true,” he said. “Of course, we must be very honest. It’s different than the previous administration.” (He added that Israel is very thankful to former President Joe Biden for visiting Israel three days after Oct. 7.)

“We all thank him,” Akunis said. “Later on, we found ourselves in a debate about Rafah and other places, but OK. We are there. And in the Philadelphi corridor, why? We don’t want to be there. I want my son’s friends to be there among all these monsters?”

Akunis assured JNS that he was referring deliberately to Hamas not as “terrorists” but as “monsters.”

“I try to explain to myself what happened to those that used to be people when they—you know, it’s unbelievable. They burned whole families. They caught them and they burned them. What is that?” he said. “If I have a debate with someone, I can talk. But what was it? Monsters. Hamas monsters. That’s the reason that we will not accept the situation that they will be there after the war. That’s it.”

Radio DJ

Akunis told JNS that his family “reflects Israeli society.”

His father’s parents came from Saloniki, in Greece. “They called in Yerushalayim de Balkan,” Jerusalem of the Balkans, he said. His paternal grandparents came to Tel Aviv in 1934 and built the new port. “Because the Arabs closed Jaffa port to immigration and to export and import,” he said.

Akunis’s father was born in Tel Aviv in 1946 and met the diplomat’s mother, a Polish native, in 1970 in Tel Aviv. “She served in the army and used to take his bus to the base from a small city near Tel Aviv,” Akunis said.

His maternal grandmother, who was born in Warsaw, fought against the Nazis with the Red Army. “It was a different time,” Akunis told JNS. His mother’s family came to a small city near the Israeli border with Lebanon, Nehariah.

“They suffered from the PLO Katyusha for 40 years, and she refused to use the shelter,” he said. “What was her quote? If I survived the Nazis, I will survive the PLO.”

He added that his late grandmother “loved me very much, but she wasn’t for my party.”

“She knew Menachem Begin, but she preferred the other side,” he said. “So this is the Israeli story. Various ideologies, various food. By the way, I’m from the Polish food and I’m from the Sephardi food.”

“As you can see, I’m very thin,” he added.

As a kid, Akunis wanted to be a radio DJ. He used to write about British and American music for a youth magazine. “I was one of the first to play the ethnic music in Israel and what we call music from the East and not only from the West, and to mix between the Police from the United Kingdom and I don’t know Margalit Tzan’ani from Yemen,” he said.

“From Springsteen to Madonna, from Michael Jackson to INXS,” he said. “And about Rocky movies and American movies. A lot of them influenced me—Rambo and Schwarzenegger.”

The “turning point” for him was during his army service, when he was asked to explain the Oslo agreements to Israeli Defense Forces units.

“I was against them, but I said, ‘I will do it, because these are the rules,’” he told JNS, of the Oslo treaties. “I’m a soldier in the Israeli army, and this is the government now.”

He always said, “This is the policy, and the Knesset will decide.” He also said, “There’s another opinion. I never said it’s my opinion.” Only his commanders knew his personal politics, he told JNS.

That experience “actually turned me from the music and culture and the press to the political field, he told JNS. He started to work with the then-opposition leader, Netanyahu, as a media advisor assistant in 1996.

He liked politics right away. “If you want to lead people, you need to be in political life. You can’t do it from journalism. You can’t just talk about it or post something on your Instagram or Facebook or tweet something rude against the opponent. You need to do something, and in the Likud Party, it’s much more difficult, because there are primaries every time before the general election, so you need to test yourselves twice. First in the primaries, then in the general elections.”

He served for 15 years, including as minister of science and technology. He showed JNS a chart that he said reflected how he brought the ministry its highest budget. “I’m very proud, because I decided that I want to work for the next generation. Not for the current high-tech companies that already run their businesses. I want to be sure that the Israeli kids on the periphery—by the way, Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Druze, all of them, I gave them thousands of computers.” (Akunis led Israel’s “computer for every child” initiative.)

“I wanted to give them the opportunity to be part of the Israeli society and not that they will continue the poorness of their families,” he said.

JNS asked if Akunis’s thinking about the next Israeli generation coincided with him becoming a father. “That’s a good question. I think so,” he said. “Maybe if I served as a minister at the age of 26, I would have other thoughts.”

In his current role, he doesn’t address domestic Israeli issues, and he shares the Jewish state’s views publicly, not his own. “I’m an ex-politician,” he said.

‘No soul’

These days, the aspiring radio DJ-turned diplomat listens to music of the 1980s and 1990s—Guns and Roses, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel.

“Pink Floyd?” JNS asked. “Without Roger Waters,” he said.

Akunis told JNS that famous artists who have signed anti-Israel petitions are misguided. “You can’t blame the IDF soldiers,” he said. “You can criticize the government. It’s OK. It’s part of democracy, but you can’t blame our kids. My son’s friends, others, neighbors. Why do you say that they’re baby killers? I will say they’re baby healers.”

“We want to heal Gaza. We want the children of Gaza to live in skyscrapers like Manhattan, like Abu Dhabi, like Dubai, like in Tel Aviv,” he said. “What’s the difference between the shore of Tel Aviv and the shore of Gaza? There’s none except Hamas.”

Looking ahead, he is optimistic. “We are changing the Middle East, and we are turning the Middle East into a new Middle East,” he said, anticipating a time when the Houthis and Hamas are eliminated and Israel’s borders with Lebanon and Syria open.

“I’m very optimistic about the Israeli economy and about Israeli society and about Israel’s future,” he said. He also quoted the traditional Rosh Hashanah statement: “A year begins with its blessing. A year ends with its curses.”

“We are an ancient nation with a great future,” he added.

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