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…
Winston Churchill, 1874-1965
Churchill visited Palestine in March 1921 as the British secretary of state for the colonies and declared that a Jewish national home would be a “blessing to the whole world.” In July 1922, after the…
Clark Clifford, 1906-1998
As a special presidential counsel, Clifford opposed the pro-Arab State Department and urged President Harry Truman to maintain support for the U.N. partition of Palestine and to lift the arms embargo on Jewish forces heading…
Blanche “Baffy” Dugdale, 1880-1948
A close adviser to Chaim Weizmann on his relations with British officials, Dugdale was a strong, non-Jewish advocate for Zionism. A niece of Arthur Balfour’s, she wrote a biography of him and a book on…
David Lloyd George, 1863-1945
Lloyd George was the British prime minister from 1916 to 1922. His government issued the Balfour Declaration and took control of Palestine during World War I, negotiated for the inclusion of the declaration’s language at…
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…
Harry Truman, 1884-1972
The 33rd U.S. president, Truman had the United States vote for the U.N. partition plan for Palestine in November 1947 and made the United States the first country to recognize the State of Israel in…
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…
