A Druze professor was appointed Israel’s chief diplomat in New Zealand.

Naim Araidi, who teaches Hebrew literature at Haifa University and Bar-Ilan University, will take up his post later this year, the daily paper Yediot Achronot reported.

“After years of representing the State of Israel unofficially, it would be a great privilege for me to do so in an official capacity and show Israel’s beautiful side, as well as the coexistence that despite all the hardships can only be maintained in a true democracy,” the newspaper reported Araidi, 62, as saying.

A native of Kfar Marrar in the Galilee, Araidi won the Prime Minister’s Award for Hebrew Literature in 2008. His poems have been published in more than a dozen languages. 

Araidi is not Israel’s first Druze ambassador; Walid Mansour was posted to Vietnam and Reda Mansour served in Ecuador. Reda Mansour also was deputy consul general in San Francisco in the mid-1990s. — jta