Daniel Seaman is the Deputy Director General for Information at the Israeli Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs. He formerly served as the Director of the Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

 Government Press Office (GPO), part of the Office of the Prime Minister in Jerusalem responsible for the foreign media contingent in Israel. He is one of the foremost experts on the foreign press coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, having headed the Information and Foreign Press Departments of the GPO during the 1990s. He also served as the Foreign Press Liaison for the Israel Defense Forces

Israel Defense Forces

The Israel Defense Forces , commonly known in Israel by the Hebrew acronym Tzahal , are the military forces of the State of Israel. They consist of the ground forces, air force and navy. It is the sole military wing of the Israeli security forces, and has no civilian jurisdiction within Israel...

 Spokesperson's unit as an officer. Seaman, who resides in Jerusalem, is married and has three children.

Biography

Seaman was born on a US Air Force base in Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 in 1961. His family emigrated from the United States to Israel in 1971 and settled in the port city of Ashkelon

Ashkelon

Ashkelon is a coastal city in the South District of Israel on the Mediterranean coast, south of Tel Aviv, and north of the border with the Gaza Strip. The ancient seaport of Ashkelon dates back to the Neolithic Age...

.

He enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces serving in an elite paratroop unit in 1979 and is a veteran of the 1982 Lebanon War.

Seaman completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science, with honors, at the City University of New York's Hunter College

Hunter College

Hunter College, established in 1870, is a public university and one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Hunter grants undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees in more than one hundred fields of study, and is recognized...

, while serving at the Consulate General of Israel in New York between 1983 and 1989.

He has served as an advisor and spokesperson to the Governments of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon

Ariel Sharon

Ariel Sharon is an Israeli statesman and retired general, who served as Israel’s 11th Prime Minister. He has been in a permanent vegetative state since suffering a stroke on 4 January 2006....

, Prime Minister Ehud Barak

Ehud Barak

Ehud Barak is an Israeli politician who served as Prime Minister from 1999 until 2001. He was leader of the Labor Party until January 2011 and holds the posts of Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister in Binyamin Netanyahu's government....

, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu

Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu is the current Prime Minister of Israel. He serves also as the Chairman of the Likud Party, as a Knesset member, as the Health Minister of Israel, as the Pensioner Affairs Minister of Israel and as the Economic Strategy Minister of Israel.Netanyahu is the first and, to...

, Prime Minister Shimon Peres

Shimon Peres

GCMG is the ninth President of the State of Israel. Peres served twice as the eighth Prime Minister of Israel and once as Interim Prime Minister, and has been a member of 12 cabinets in a political career spanning over 66 years...

, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin

Yitzhak Rabin

' was an Israeli politician, statesman and general. He was the fifth Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms in office, 1974–77 and 1992 until his assassination in 1995....

 and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir

Yitzhak Shamir

' is a former Israeli politician, the seventh Prime Minister of Israel, in 1983–84 and 1986–92.-Biography:Icchak Jeziernicky was born in Ruzhany , Russian Empire . He studied at a Hebrew High School in Białystok, Poland. As a youth he joined Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement...

.

Seaman was directly responsible for coordinating the press coverage of several heads of states visits to Israel including US President Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton

William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...

, British Prime Minister (PM) Tony Blair

Tony Blair

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...

, Canadian PM Jean Chrétien

Jean Chrétien

Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien , known commonly as Jean Chrétien is a former Canadian politician who was the 20th Prime Minister of Canada. He served in the position for over ten years, from November 4, 1993 to December 12, 2003....

, Australian PM John Howard

John Howard

John Winston Howard AC, SSI, was the 25th Prime Minister of Australia, from 11 March 1996 to 3 December 2007. He was the second-longest serving Australian Prime Minister after Sir Robert Menzies....

, Jordan's King Hussein and Chinese Chairman Jiang Zemin

Jiang Zemin

Jiang Zemin is a former Chinese politician, who served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1989 to 2002, as President of the People's Republic of China from 1993 to 2003, and as Chairman of the Central Military Commission from 1989 to 2005...

. He was a member of the Israeli press delegation to the Aqaba Peace Talks.

Seaman received the Israel Outstanding Civil Service Award in 2000 for coordinating the international press coverage of Pope John Paul II

Pope John Paul II

Blessed Pope John Paul II , born Karol Józef Wojtyła , reigned as Pope of the Catholic Church and Sovereign of Vatican City from 16 October 1978 until his death on 2 April 2005, at of age. His was the second-longest documented pontificate, which lasted ; only Pope Pius IX ...

's visit to the Holy Land

Holy Land

The Holy Land is a term which in Judaism refers to the Kingdom of Israel as defined in the Tanakh. For Jews, the Land's identifiction of being Holy is defined in Judaism by its differentiation from other lands by virtue of the practice of Judaism often possible only in the Land of Israel...

in March 2000. Seaman was appointed as head of the GPO in December 2000 and worked with thousands of foreign media who covered news events in Israel until 2010. He had worked for the GPO for several years and was the first civil servant promoted to Directorship of the GPO after a period of 30 years. During his tenure as GPO Director he implemented several measures which improved working conditions for foreign journalists in Israel.

He took a leave of absence from his post in November 2008 and announced his candidacy in the Likud party primaries for the 18th Knesset, but withdrew his candidacy.

Seaman lectures on Israeli and Middle-Eastern affairs and appeared on dozens of international news media outlets.

Media coverage

Seaman is mentioned extensively in Stephanie Gutmann's book - "The Other War - Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy". Chapter 10 - "His Own Private Jihad" is specifically about his efforts to curb Palestinian influence on the media coverage.

• "Opposing the Digital Pogrom" - Jerusalem Post, March 4, 2010.
• Op-ed on media manipulation in the Middle East Israeli news site Y-Net.

Upon conclusion of his term as GPO Director he gave an extensive interview to the editor of the Jerusalem Post: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/Article.aspx?id=194079