Born in the Palestine Mandate (modern day Israel) on 20 July 1944—the date of the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler, a fact described as symbolic by Ulrich W. Sahm of haGalil[1]—he served as a lieutenant in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the 1967 Six-Day War, in which he was wounded.
After some years working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in embassies in Manila and Hong Kong, he was adviser to the president from 1987 to 1993.
After this he took on diplomat roles involving the Middle East and North America, before he was appointed Israeli ambassador to Germany in 2007, replacing Shimon Stein.
[3] When in 2007 German media reported that an Israeli organisation, Nativ, was encouraging German Jews to relocate to Israel, Ben-Zeev said the aim was only to give them a sense of Israeli culture: "The main purpose of Nativ is to bring to those communities a sense of the Jewish culture, the Israeli culture and to help with education.
[6] Regarding comments made by Thilo Sarrazin, a former senator of finance of Berlin, that "All Jews share a certain gene; Basques have certain genes that differentiate them from others", Ben-Zeev said he was more interested in the reaction to Sarrazin that the comments themselves.