Yacov Livne

Yacov Livne was born in 1967 in Moscow

Yacov Livne was born in Moscow in the Soviet Union in 1967. He immigrated to Israel with his family in 1974. He studied in the mathematics and science track at the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa.

He served in the IDF as a combat soldier in the Golani Brigade and as a commander and instructor at a basic training base. In 1992 he completed a bachelor's degree in physics at the Technion. He later earned a master's degree in international relations from the Hebrew University and a doctorate from Ariel University, with a dissertation on Israel's relations with the Soviet Union in its first decade.

He joined the Foreign Ministry cadet course in 1992 and was embassy spokesman in Moscow from 1994 to 1997. He became a political adviser at the embassy in Berlin in 1999, and in 2009 he became head of the Eurasia Department. From 2019 to 2020 he was in charge of the embassy in Moscow.

He was appointed ambassador to Poland in September 2020. A diplomatic crisis over a Polish property restitution law delayed his arrival until February 2022. He has also chaired the Foreign Ministry workers' committee and co-founded the Israeli Association for Diplomacy in 2014. He is married with a daughter and a son.