Regev’s return: the Israeli government’s official spokesman

With his pin striped suits and brisk businesslike manner, Mark Regev betrays little of the roots which led him to leave his native Australia to live and work in an Israeli kibbutz and then fail to complete a university doctorate.

He is the official spokesman of the Israeli government and appears almost daily on television and in the pages of national newspapers. His role is to defend often damaging claims, including the deaths of more than 1,000 civilians – many of whom are children – in the current conflict.

Yet his path towards becoming one of the most strident defenders of the Israeli government, which is accused by the UN of committing war crimes in Gaza, was “accidental”, he said.

He was born to Martin and Freda Freiberg in 1960, in Melbourne, where he studied Political Science and History. His father was a Holocaust survivor. As a young man, he joined joined the socialist Jewish youth movement Habonim Dror, which counts the film director Mike Leigh and the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen among its alumni.

Kibbutz

In 1982, he emigrated to Israel, aged 22. He decided to change his family name because it sounded German, which “bothered me at the time…It didn’t seem right.” He worked at the Tel Katzir Kibbutz in the disputed Golan Heights region of Syria that Israel occupied, as a teacher in a local high school. Reports have suggested he was nicknamed Cyril.

“When you look back at and analyse what has happened to me since then, much of it is accidental,” he told the Jewish Chronicle in 2008. “I spent a year unsuccessfully doing a doctorate at Tel Aviv University. I never finished it. Had I been a better academic I might never have joined the foreign service. Had my wife been in love with the kibbutz we might never have left and I might still been teaching at high school.”

Read more: Channel 4 News reports on Gaza

Since replying to a newspaper job advert to join the civil service in 1990, he rose quickly through the ranks of the diplomatic corps, serving at embassies in Beijing, Hong Kong and Washington before being appointed foreign ministry spokesman and then the prime minister’s spokesman.

His number is distributed to hundreds of journalists in Israel and among the international press, and he is nearly always available for interviews. He himself has tweeted 17 televised interviews in the past week; he has appeared on Channel 4 News five times in the past month and regularly speaks to wire services which transmit his words around the world. “I want all of [the journalists] to know that Regev is available,” he told the Jewish Chronicle.

‘Bad news’

He always answers his phone, according to correspondents. “He revels in the attention,” one foreign correspondent told Channel 4 News.

Yet the more he appears on television, in his own words, the worse the situation is, “for example during the Lebanon War in 2006 I was on TV the whole time… usually when you see me, it’s bad news.”

Why do it? “If I didn’t have faith in my client — and ultimately my client is the state of Israel — then I couldn’t do my job,” he has been quoted as saying.

Through it all, he has developed a reputation for wearing a mask which fails to slip, except when it came to being interviewed by Channel 4 News’ chief correspondent Alex Thomson in 2009 (below, 8min 57 sec), followed by Jon Snow a few weeks later.

Put Mark Regev into Google, and autopredict comes up with the word “liar” – suggesting that that is one of the most searched for terms in relation to him. Others have described him as an apologist and a mouthpiece for Israel – what would he say to such claims?

We called him, but when it came to answering some questions about himself for this profile, Mr Regev was not keen to talk. “I’m not sure that I want to make myself the issue,” he said, offering an apology. “Especially not in the middle of a crisis.”