Yigal Allon, 1918-1980
Allon led the Palmach and was an IDF major general who oversaw the Southern Command. He served in the Knesset from 1955 until his death. After the 1967 war, he proposed returning the West Bank…
Shlomo Avineri, 1933-2023
Avineri, a native of Poland, was one of Israel’s premier political scientists as a Hebrew University professor and wrote extensively on the history of political philosophy, including Marx, Engels, Hegel, Zionism, colonialism and the Soviet…
Arthur Balfour, 1848-1930
Balfour, an English politician and diplomat who served as the British prime minister from 1902 to 1905, was the foreign secretary in November 1917 when he sent a letter to Lord Rothschild that became known…
Aharon Barak, 1936-
Lithuania-born Barak was a 28-year Supreme Court justice who served as the president of the court from 1995 to 2006. He lifted restrictions on individual petitions to the court and strengthened the judiciary’s authority to…
Ehud Barak, 1942-
As Israel’s 10th prime minister and last from the Labor Party from 1999 to 2001, Barak ended the occupation of southern Lebanon, participated in the 2000 Camp David talks, was rebuffed by Yasser Arafat in…
Menachem Begin, 1913-1992
Born in Belarus, Begin joined the Revisionist Betar movement and escaped Nazis and Soviets to reach Palestine. He led the Irgun, then spent three decades in the political opposition, including arguing against German reparations. In…
Ralph Bunche, 1904-1971
Bunche, an American diplomat, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for brokering the armistice agreements between Israel and four Arab neighbors in 1949. He served in 1947 with the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine,…
Theodor Herzl, 1860-1904
Born in Hungary, Herzl is viewed as the father of modern political Zionism. A journalist, novelist and playwright, he embraced Zionism after reporting on Alfred Dreyfus’ trial in France. His pamphlet “Der Judenstaat” (“The Jewish…
Golda Meir, 1898-1978
Born in Ukraine and raised in Wisconsin, Meir rose in Labor Zionism with the Histadrut and engaged in diplomacy for the Jewish Agency and Israel, including trying to keep Transjordan out of the 1948 war…
Shimon Peres, 1923-2016
Peres is the only Israeli to serve as prime minister and president. Born in Belarus, he arrived in Palestine in 1934. He helped establish and arm the initial IDF in the 1940s and launched a…
Yitzhak Rabin, 1922-1995
Rabin was a two-time prime minister whose assassination shattered hopes for peace under the Oslo Accords, for which he shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat. He also signed a…
Yitzhak Shamir, 1915-2012
Belarus-born Shamir was the seventh prime minister, serving two terms between 1983 and 1992. He was a Lehi leader during the British Mandate. As a Likud prime minister, he approved Operation Solomon to airlift in…
Moshe Sharett, 1894-1965
The first foreign minister and second prime minister of Israel, Ukraine-born Sharett (originally Shertok) was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and one of the key negotiators of cease-fire agreements that ended the War…
Ariel Sharon, 1928-2014
Sharon led IDF commandos in the 1950s, was a field commander in 1967 and drove the Sinai counteroffensive in 1973. As defense minister, he launched the First Lebanon War, which resulted in an 18-year occupation,…
Ezer Weizman, 1924-2005
Weizman, the nephew of Chaim Weizmann, was Israel’s seventh president from 1993 to 2000. He was a founder of the Israeli Air Force and became its commander in 1958. As defense minister in the first…
Chaim Weizmann, 1874-1952
Weizmann, a native of Russian-controlled Poland, was the first president of Israel. In England during World War I, he used his chemistry skills to develop a synthetic process for making acetone and thus made relationships…
