Emmanuel Navon

Emmanuel Navon was born in 1971 in Paris

Navon was born Emmanuel Mréjen in Paris in 1971, to an assimilated family. He attended a bilingual French and English school. He later earned a degree in public administration from Sciences-Po and interned at the French foreign and finance ministries.

In 1993 he immigrated to Israel alone and took the Hebrew name Navon. He completed a master's degree and a Ph.D. in international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As a student he wrote a proposal on United Nations reform for the Israeli Foreign Ministry and was a fellow at the Shalem Center.

He served in the IDF in combat engineering. He then worked as a consultant helping Israeli companies get European research funding. He led BNIC from 2003 to 2005, was a partner at the Navon-Levy Group from 2005 to 2010, and headed a department at the Jerusalem Haredi College from 2011 to 2016.

Since 2002 he has lectured at Tel Aviv University, and he has also taught at Reichman University and the National Security College. He was a senior fellow at the Kohelet Policy Forum from 2013 to 2023 and joined the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security in 2017. Since 2012 he has been a foreign affairs analyst for i24News.

From January 2023 to April 2025 he was CEO of ELNET's Israel office. In March 2026 the Israeli government appointed him ambassador to Japan.