Yitzhak Rabin

14th Dalai Lama

The 14th Dalai Lama (religious name: Tenzin Gyatso, shortened from Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, born Lhamo Dondrub, 6 July 1935) is the 14th and current Dalai Lama, as well as the longest lived incumbent. Dalai Lamas are the most influential figures in the Gelugpa lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, although the 14th has consolidated control over the other lineages in recent years. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, and is also well known for his lifelong advocacy for Tibetans inside and outside Tibet. Tibetans traditionally believe him to be the reincarnation of his predecessors and a manifestation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion.
The Dalai Lama was born in Taktser, Qinghai (also known to Tibetans as Amdo), and was selected as the rebirth of the 13th Dalai Lama two years later, although he was only formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama on 17 November 1950, at the age of 15. He inherited control over a government controlling an area roughly corresponding to the Tibet Autonomous Region just as the nascent People's Republic of China wished to assert central control over it. There is a dispute over whether the respective governments reached an agreement for a joint Chinese-Tibetan administration.

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Abba Eban
Abba Eban (Hebrew: אבא אבן‎, born Abba Solomon Meir; later adopted Aubrey Solomon Eban; 2 February 1915 – 17 November 2002) was an Israeli diplomat and politician.
In his career he was Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister, Education Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, and ambassador to the United States and to the United Nations. He was also Vice President of the United Nations General Assembly and President of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Eban moved to the United Kingdom at an early age. As a child, he recalled being sent to his grandfather's house every weekend to study the Hebrew language and Biblical literature. He lived for a period of time in Belfast.
He was educated at St Olave's Grammar School, then in Southwark, before studying Classics and Oriental languages at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he achieved a triple first. During his time at University and afterwards, Eban was highly involved in the Federation of Zionist Youth and was editor of its ideological journal, The Young Zionist.

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Aharon Abuhatzira
Aharon Abuhatzira (Hebrew: אהרן אבוחצירא‎, born 28 October 1938) is a former Israeli politician. A former mayor of Ramla, he held several ministerial portfolios in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but resigned from the cabinet after being convicted of larceny, breach of trust and fraud.
Born in the Tafilalt region of Morocco in 1938, Abuhatzira made aliyah to Israel in 1949. He was educated at the Bnei Akiva yeshiva in Kfar Haroeh, before graduating from a Teachers' Seminary in Jerusalem and receiving a BA from Bar-Ilan University. He went on to work as a high school teacher.
He was elected to Ramla city council in 1969 and in 1972 became its mayor. He was elected to the Knesset in 1977 on the National Religious Party's list, and was appointed Minister of Religions in Menachem Begin's government.
In June 1980 Israel Police began investigating claims that Abuhatzira had received 52,500 shekels from religious institutions in 1978 and 1979 for giving funds to non-existent yeshivas. Although he denied the allegations, stating that they were "provocation and a libel", in December 1980 Attorney General Yitzhak Zamir requested that the Knesset lift Abuhatzira's parliamentary immunity so that he could be charged with bribery.

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Aharon Uzan
Aharon Uzan (Hebrew: אהרן אוזן‎, born 1 November 1924, died 23 January 2007) was an Israeli politician who held several ministerial portfolios between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s.
Uzan was born in Moknine in Tunisia, and was a member of the right-wing Betar movement in his youth. He made aliyah to Israel in 1949 and joined the left-wing Mapai party. He settled in Gilat, serving as the moshav's secretary and treasurer between 1952 and 1959. In 1960 he founded the Negev Moshav Purchasing Company, and managed it until 1968. He also founded the Negev Water and Merhav transport companies.
In 1965 he was elected to the Knesset on the Alignment's list (the Alignment was an Alliance of Mapai and Ahdut HaAvoda), and was appointed Deputy Minister of Agriculture in January 1966, a role he held until he lost his seat in the 1969 elections.
Between 1970 and 1973 he was secretary of the Moshavim Movement. Despite not being a Knesset member, he returned to the cabinet in 1974 when he was appointed Minister of Communications. After Golda Meir resigned and Yitzhak Rabin formed a new government later in the year, he became Minister of Agriculture. In March 1975 he regained the Communications portfolio in addition to the Agriculture post. Following Likud's victory in the 1977 elections he lost his cabinet position.

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Aharon Yadlin
Aharon Yadlin (Hebrew: אהרן ידלין‎, born 17 April 1926) is a former Israeli educator and politician.
Yadlin was born in moshav Ben Shemen in the British Mandate of Palestine in 1926. He was active in the local scouting movement and served as its national coordinator. In 1946 he participated in the 11 points in the Negev project and was among the founders of kibbutz Be'eri. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War he joined the Palmah.
From 1950 to 1952 he was a member of the executive committee of the Histadrut. He received an MA in history, economics and sociology from the Hebrew University. After the split in HaKibbutz HaMeuhad he moved to kibbutz Hatzerim. He was one of the founders of Beit Berl where he taught sociology and served as its acting director from 1955 to 1957. From 1964 to 1972 he was chairman of Mapai's public committee for youth movements.
In 1960 he was elected to the fourth Knesset and again to the fifth in 1964, and remained an MK until 1979. He was a member of the Economic Affairs, Education and Culture, Constitution, Law and Justice, Internal Affairs, and the Foreign Affairs & Defense committees. In the ninth Knesset was chairman of the Education committee. From 1964 to 1972 he was Deputy Minister of Education, and from 1972 to 1974 was secretary general of the Labor Party. From 1974 to 1977 he served as Minister of Education. He set in motion a long school day program in development towns and poverty stricken areas.

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Alpha Blondy
Alpha Blondy (born January 1, 1953) is a reggae singer and international recording artist. Alpha Blondy was born Seydou Koné in Dimbokro, Côte d'Ivoire. He sings mainly in his native language of Dioula, in French and in English, and sometimes in Arabic or Hebrew. His lyrics convey serious political attitudes and a sense of humor.
First son of a family of 9 children, Seydou Kone was raised by his grandmother, growing up in what he described as "among elders", which later was to have a big impact on his career. In 1962, Alpha Blondy went to join his father in Odienné, where he spent ten years, attending the Sainte Elisabeth high school, and getting involved in the Ivory Coast students movement. Here he formed a band. But, this hobby affected his schooling and Alpha Blondy was expelled due to poor attendance. His parents then sent him to study English in Monrovia in the neighboring country of Liberia in 1973. He spent thirteen months there and then moved to the United States of America to improve his English.

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Alva Myrdal
Alva Myrdal (née Reimer; 31 January 1902 – 1 February 1986) was a Swedish sociologist and politician. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982. She married Gunnar Myrdal in 1924.
Born in Uppsala, she first came to public notice in the 1930s, and was one of the main driving forces in the creation of the Swedish welfare state. She coauthored with Gunnar Myrdal the book entitled Crisis in the Question of Population (Swedish: Kris i befolkningsfrågan, 1934). The basic premise of Crisis in the Question of Population is to find what social reforms are needed to allow for individual liberty (especially for women) while also promoting child-bearing, and encouraging Swedes to have children. While heralding many sweeping social reforms seen as positive for Sweden, the book also incorporated some of the zeitgeist of the 1930s, in its promotion of the idea of racism, eugenics and compulsory sterilization programs. With architect Sven Markelius she designed Stockholm's cooperative Collective House in 1937 with an eye towards developing more domestic liberty for women.

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Amir Drori
Amir Drori (Hebrew: אמיר דרורי‎; 1937–2005) was an Israeli general, founder and the first director general of the Israel Antiquities Authority.
Amir Drori was born in Tel Aviv in 1937 and graduated from the IDF's Junior Command Preparatory School in Haifa. He was drafted into the Israel Defence Forces in 1955, where he joined the Golani infantry brigade. During the 1956 Suez Crisis Drori led a demolition team and participated in fighting in Rafah and the Sinai. He was awarded the Medal of Courage for his part in the Israeli raid on the Syrian village of Tawafiq in 1960.
During the 1967 Six Day War Drori served as deputy commander of Golani's 51st Battalion and took part in fighting on the Golan Heights. During the subsequent War of Attrition he commanded Golani's 13th Battlation, participating in fighting on the Golan Heights, Beit She'an Valley, the Jordan Valley and along the Suez Canal. Between 1970 and 1972 he served as the chief operations officer of Israel's Southern Command, under Ariel Sharon.

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Amir Peretz
Amir Peretz (Hebrew: עמיר פרץ‎, Arabic: عمير بيريتز‎; born Armand Peretz on 9 March 1952) is an Israeli politician and member of the Knesset for the Labour Party. He is a former Defense Minister of Israel and former leader of the Labour Party, having left those positions in June 2007.
Peretz is the former chairman of the Histadrut trade union federation and defeated Shimon Peres in the primary elections for the Labour leadership on 9 November 2005. He led the Labour Party to a second place showing in the 2006 elections and became Defense Minister on 4 May 2006. He was defeated by Ehud Barak for the Labour leadership on 12 June 2007 and resigned from the cabinet.
Peretz was born as Armand Peretz in the town of Boujad in Morocco. His father was head of the Jewish community in Boujad and owned a petrol station.^{[citation needed]} The family emigrated to Israel when Morocco won independence in 1956. They were settled in the development town of Sderot, where Peretz lived until the age of 18. He went to high school in a nearby kibbutz.

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Amnon Lipkin-Shahak
Amnon Lipkin-Shahak (Hebrew: אמנון ליפקין-שחק‎, born 18 March 1944 in Tel Aviv) is a former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Member of the Knesset and Minister of Transportation and Tourism.
Lipkin-Shahak started his military service as a teenager in the military boarding-school in Haifa. He enlisted as a corporal in the paratrooper brigade in 1962, fulfilled various command positions and eventually became brigade commander. During his military service, he was decorated twice with the Medal of Courage for his conduct in Operation Inferno, in Karameh, Jordan 1968 as a captain, and in Operation Spring of Youth, Beirut, Lebanon 1973 as a Lt. Colonel. As deputy Chief of Staff, he was involved in the negotiations with the Palestinians under prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Lipkin-Shahak succeeded Ehud Barak as the 15th Chief of the General Staff in 1995. As Chief of staff, he continued to take part in negotiations with the Palestinians and Syrians, in which position he met his Syrian counterpart. Most of his tenure as Chief of Staff was under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai. His tenure was marked with much public friction between him and his superiors, reportedly due to political differences and personal disrespect (Lipkin-Shahak refused to nominate Mordechai, a Major General, as his deputy when he became Chief of Staff, causing Mordechai to retire from the army and join the political arena, eventually to become Lipkin-Shahak's superior.)

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Amnon Rubinstein
Amnon Rubinstein (Hebrew: אמנון רובינשטיין‎, born 5 September 1931) is an Israeli law scholar, politician, and columnist. A member of the Knesset between 1977 and 2002, he served in several ministerial positions. He is currently dean of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya and a patron of Liberal International.
Rubinstein was born in Tel Aviv during the Mandate Era. After serving as a captain in the IDF, he studied economics, international relations, and law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was called to the bar in 1963. He received a PhD in law from the London School of Economics in 1966. Between 1961 and 1975 he worked as a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, serving as faculty dean from 1968 until 1973.
Rubinstein's political career began when he founded Shinui after the Yom Kippur War. Shinui joined Yigael Yadin's Democratic Movement to form Dash. In the 1977 elections, Dash won 15 seats in the Knesset. Dash's victory came at the expense of the Alignment; for the first time in the 29 years since the founding of the modern state of Israel, the right-wing formed the government. However, Rubinstein opposed Dash's participation in Menachem Begin's Likud government coalition, and Shinui broke away from Dash. Rubinstein retained his seat in the 1981 elections, though Shinui was reduced to two seats. After winning three seats in the 1984 elections Shinui were invited into the governing coalition, and Rubinstein was appointed Minister of Communications. Rubinstein was re-elected again in 1988, but Shinui were left out of the government.

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Anwar Sadat
Anwar El Sadat (Arabic: محمد أنور السادات‎ Anwar as-Sādāt, Egyptian Arabic pronunciation: [mæˈħæmmæd ˈʔɑnwɑɾˤ essæˈdæːt]; 25 December 1918 – 6 October 1981) was the third President of Egypt, serving from 15 October 1970 until his assassination by fundamentalist army officers on 6 October 1981. In his eleven years as president he changed Egypt's direction, departing from some of the economic and political principles of Nasserism by re-instituting the multi-party system, and launching the Infitah economic policy.
He was a senior member of the Free Officers group that overthrew the Muhammad Ali Dynasty in the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, and a close confidant of President Gamal Abdul Nasser, whom he succeeded as President in 1970. As president he led Egypt in the October War of 1973 to re-acquire Egyptian territory lost to Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, making him a hero in Egypt and, for a time, the wider Arab World. Afterwards he engaged in negotiations with Israel, culminating in the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty. This won him the Nobel Peace Prize but also made him unpopular among some Arabs, resulting in a temporary suspension of Egypt's membership in the Arab League, and eventually his assassination.

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Ariel Atias
Ariel Atias (Hebrew: אריאל אטיאס‎, born 13 November 1970) is an Israeli politician who currently serves as a member of the Knesset for Shas, and as the country's Minister of Housing and Construction. He is also manager of Shas' kosher supervision organization.
Born in Tel Aviv, Atias was first elected to the Knesset on Shas' list in the 2006 elections. In May 2006 he was promoted to the position of Minister of Communications in the current government. In 2007 he tried to get a law passed that would censor violence, sex, and gambling on the internet.
He retained his seat in the 2009 elections, having been placed second on the Shas list, and was appointed Minister of Housing and Construction in the Netanyahu government. On 2 July 2009, it was reported that Atias had called for the segregation of Israel's Arab population from Jewish Israelis, saying that achieving it was "a national duty... populations that should not mix are spreading... I don't think that it is appropriate [for them] to live together".

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Ariel Sharon
Ariel Sharon (Hebrew:

אריאל שרון‎, also known by his diminutive Arik, אַריק, born Ariel Scheinermann, אריאל שיינרמן on 26 February 1928) 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.
Sharon was a commander in the Israeli Army since its inception in 1948. As a paratrooper and then officer he participated prominently in the 1948 War of Independence, becoming platoon commander of the Alexandroni Brigade and taking part in many battles, including Operation Ben Nun Alef. He was an instrumental figure in the creation of Unit 101, the Retribution operations, the 1956 Suez War, the Six-Day War of 1967, the War of Attrition and the Yom-Kippur War of 1973. As Minister of Defense, he directed the 1982 Lebanon War. During his military career, he was considered the greatest Field Commander in Israel's history, and one of the country's greatest ever military strategists. After his assault of the Sinai in the Six-Day War and his encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army in the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli public nicknamed him "The King of Israel" and "The Lion of God".

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Aryeh Deri
Aryeh Deri (Hebrew: אריה דרעי‎; born February 17, 1959 in Meknes, Morocco) is an Israeli politician, and former leader of Israel's Shas Party.
After Deri was convicted of taking $155,000 in bribes while serving as Interior Minister and given a three-year jail sentence in 2000, he was replaced by Eli Yishai. Due to good behavior, Deri was released from Maasiyahu Prison in 2002 after serving 22 months.
In 2005, he was voted the 58th-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.
In June 2011, he announced that he was planning to return to politics.

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Asher Ohana
Asher Ohana (Hebrew: אשר אוחנה‎, born 1945) is an Israeli civil servant who served as Minister of Religious Affairs between 2001 and 2003.
Born in Morocco in 1945, Ohana joined Shas in 1992, and served on Beit Shemesh's local council. Between 1997 and 1998 he was director general of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, and in 1999 became Shas' secretary general.
When Shas joined Ariel Sharon's national unity government in 2001, Ohana was appointed Minister of Religious Affairs, despite not being a member of the Knesset. He remained in the post until the formation of a new government following the 2003 elections.

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Aung San Suu Kyi
Aung San Suu Kyi MP AC (Burmese:

; MLCTS: aung hcan: cu. krany, IPA: [ʔàʊɴ sʰáɴ sṵ tɕì]; born 19 June 1945) is a Burmese opposition politician and General Secretary of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in Burma. In the 1990 general election, the NLD won 59% of the national votes and 81% (392 of 485) of the seats in Parliament. She had, however, already been detained under house arrest before the elections. She remained under house arrest in Burma for almost 15 of the 21 years from 20 July 1989 until her most recent release on 13 November 2010, becoming one of the world's most prominent (now former) political prisoners.
Suu Kyi received the Rafto Prize and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1990 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. In 1992 she was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding by the government of India and the International Simón Bolívar Prize from the government of Venezuela. In 2007, the Government of Canada made her an honorary citizen of that country; at the time, she was one of only four people ever to receive the honor. In 2011, she was awarded the Wallenberg Medal.

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Avner Shaki
Avner-Hai Shaki (Hebrew: אבנר-חי שאקי‎, 5 February 1926 - 28 May 2005) was an Israeli politician who served as a government minister in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Born in Safed during the Mandate era, Shaki studied law, gaining a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He later worked as a lecturer in universities in Canada and the United States.
On 16 July 1970 he entered the Knesset on the National Religious Party's list as a replacement for the deceased Haim-Moshe Shapira, and in September that year was appointed Deputy Minister of Education and Culture. He left the cabinet on 17 July 1972, and on 22 May 1973 he left the party to sit as an Independent, remaining an MK until the next elections.
Shaki returned to the NRP and was elected to the Knesset in 1984. Re-elected in 1988, he was appointed Minister without Portfolio responsible for Jerusalem Affairs in December that year. In 1990 he was appointed Minister of Religious Affairs, serving until the Likud-led coalition lost power following the 1992 elections. Shaki was re-elected in 1992 and 1996, but lost his seat in the 1999 elections.

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Avraham Adan
Avraham "Bren" Adan (Hebrew: אברהם "ברן" אדן‎, born October 1926) is a former Israeli general who served in the military between 1947 and 1973.
Adan was born in Kfar Gileadi, British Mandate Palestine in 1926. He joined the Palmach in 1943. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War he was a company commander in the 8th Battalion of the Negev Brigade and participated in Operation Uvda, in which the brigade captured the Jordanian outpost of Umm Rashrash, now known as Eilat, at the southernmost tip of the newly-created country. It was he who raised the Ink Flag claiming the territory for Israel, as depicted in the famous photograph of the event.
Adan joined the Armored Corps in 1949 and founded the first Sherman tank unit in the IDF. During the 1956 Suez War, Lieutenant Colonel Adan commanded the 82nd battalion of the 7th Armored Brigade in the Sinai, defeating several Egyptian forces in the region. After the war he became the operations officer of the corps, then the commander of the 7th Brigade and the Armored Corps School. During the June 1967 Six-Day War, Adan was the deputy commander of the Armored Corps and of the 31st Armored Division, fighting again in the Sinai. On March 10, 1969, he became the commander of the Armored Corps.

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Avraham Harman
Avraham Harman (Hebrew: אברהם הרמן‎, 1914 – February 23, 1992) was an Israeli diplomat and academic administrator.
Born in London in the United Kingdom, he received a law degree from Wadham College, Oxford in 1935. In 1938, he immigrated to Mandate Palestine.
Following Israeli independence in 1948, he was appointed deputy director of the Press and Information Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1949, he was appointed Israel's first consul-general in Montreal, Quebec. In 1950, he worked in the Israeli delegation to the United Nations. From 1953 to 1955, he was the consul-general in New York, New York. From 1959 to 1968, he was Israel's ambassador to the United States.
From 1968 to 1983, he was the president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As President, among other things, he was responsible for the rebuilding and expansion of the original campus of the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. After 1983, he was appointed Chancellor.
Harman was founding president of the Israel Public Council for Soviet Jewry, a post he held until his death. He received honorary degrees from Yeshiva University, Brandeis University, the Hebrew University, the Weizmann Institute, New York University, Brooklyn College, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College, Pepperdine University, University of San Francisco and University of Rochester. He was also named an honorary fellow by his alma mater, Wadham College, Oxford.

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Avraham Hirschson
Avraham Hirchson (Hebrew: אברהם הירשזון‎, born February 11, 1941) was an Israeli politician. He served as a member of the Knesset for Likud and Kadima between 1981 and 1984, and again from 1992 until 2009. He also held the posts of Minister of Communications, Minister of Finance and Minister of Tourism. He resigned following allegations of corruption, and was ultimately convicted of stealing close to 2 million shekels from the National Workers Labor Federation while he was its chairman.
Hirchson was born in Tel Mond and currently resides in Tel Aviv. From 1970 to 1992, he was secretary-general for the National Youth League (the youth branch of the National Histadrut). He has been the chairman of the National Histadrut since 1995 and chairman of the National Health Fund since 1996 (the revisionist counterparts to the larger General Histadrut and General Health Fund respectively). He helped found the March of the Living programme in 1988, but has not been involved in the organization for a number of years. During his involvement with the March of the Living the organization was accused of handling donations in a non-transparent manner.

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Avraham Poraz
Avraham Poraz (Hebrew: אברהם פורז‎, born 9 August 1945) is an Israeli lawyer and former politician.
Poraz was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1945 and immigrated to Israel in 1950. He served in the Military Police Corps of the Israel Defense Forces and later studied law in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was certified as a lawyer.
From 1983 to 1988 he was a member of the Tel Aviv Municipal Council and chairman of the City Auditing Committee. He was chairman of the Shinui Party Secretariat from 1982 to 1983 and again from 1988 to 1990. From 1984 to 1988 he was head of the project for setting up the Israeli Channel 2, the cable TV and the regional radio.
In 1988 he was elected to the Knesset for Shinui. In the following election, he was elected for Meretz, into which Shinui had merged. He served as a member of the House Committee; the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee; the Ethics Committee; the Internal Affairs and Environment Committee and the Finance Committee. He also served as Chairman of the Economics Committee. In February 2003, he was appointed Minister of the Interior by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

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Avraham Yoffe
Avraham Yoffe (Hebrew: אברהם יפה‎, born 25 October 1913, died 11 April 1983) was an Israeli general during the Six-Day War. He later entered politics, and served as a member of the Knesset for Likud between 1973 and 1977.
Born in Yavne'el during the era when the Ottoman Empire still controlled Palestine, Yoffe attended the Mikveh Yisrael agricultural school.
At the age of 16 he joined the Haganah. In June 1938, Yoffe had joined the Special Night Squads, a joint British-Jewish counter-insurgency unit established by Orde Charles Wingate. Yoffe served as a squad leader in one of the squads, acting as Lt. Michael Grove second in command.
During World War II he served as a captain in the British Artillery Corps from 1940 until 1944.
During the 1948 war he was a battalion commander in the Golani brigade. On 12 May his battalion captured Beisan during Operation Gideon.
During the Suez Crisis he commanded Brigade 9 of the IDF. Between 1957 and 1958 he headed the training department and was commander of the officers' school. In 1958 he was appointed commander of the Southern Command, and in 1962 switched to the Northern Command. After being demobilised in 1964, he was recalled to service during the Six-Day War.

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Ben-Zion Dinur
Ben-Zion Dinur (Hebrew: בן ציון דינור‎, born Ben-Zion Dinaburg on 2 January 1884, died 8 July 1973) was a Zionist activist, educator, historian and Israeli politician.
Dinaburg was born in 1884 in Khorol in the Russian Empire (now Poltava Oblast, Ukraine). He received his education in Lithuanian yeshivot. He studied under Shimon Shkop in the Telz Yeshiva, and became interested in the Haskalah through Rosh Yeshiva Eliezer Gordon's polemics. In 1898 he moved to the Slabodka yeshiva and in 1900 he traveled to Vilnius and was certified a Rabbi. He then went to Lyubavichi to witness the Chabad-Lubavitch branch of Hasidic Judaism. Between 1902 and 1911 he was engaged in Zionist activism and teaching, which at some point resulted in a brief arrest. In 1910 he married Bilhah Feingold, a teacher who had worked with him in a girls' trade school in Poltava. In 1911 he left his wife and son for two years to attend the Berlin University, where he studied under Semen Ivanovich Rostovzev and Eugen Täubler. He then spent two more years at the University of Bern, where he began his dissertation under Rostovzev, on the Jews in the Land of Israel under the Roman Empire. The break of World War I forced him to move to the University of Petrograd. However, due to the October Revolution, he did not receive his PhD. He was a lecturer at the University of Odessa from 1920 to 1921.

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Benjamin Netanyahu
Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu (Hebrew:

בִּנְיָמִין "בִּיבִּי" נְתַנְיָהוּ (help·info); born 21 October 1949) 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 Israeli prime minister born in Israel after the founding of the state. Netanyahu joined the Israeli Defense Forces during the 1967 Six-Day War, and became a team leader in the Sayeret Matkal special forces unit. He took part in many missions, including Operation Gift and Operation Isotope, during which he was shot in the shoulder. He fought on the front lines in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, taking part in special forces raids along the Suez Canal, and then leading a commando assault deep into Syrian territory. He achieved the rank of captain before being discharged. Netanyahu served as the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations from 1984 to 1988, member of the Likud Party, and was Prime Minister from June 1996 to July 1999.

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Benny Gantz
Binyamin "Benny" Gantz (Hebrew: בנימין "בני" גנץ‎, born June 9, 1959 in Kfar Ahim, Israel) is the current Chief of General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces.
Born in Kfar Ahim, Israel in 1959, Gantz was drafted into the IDF in 1977. He volunteered as a paratrooper in the Paratroopers Brigade, and in 1979 became an officer after completing officer's training school. During his career Gantz has served in a number of roles, including: Commander of the Shaldag Unit in the Israeli Air Force, Commander of the Paratrooper Brigade, Commander of the Reserves Division in the Northern Command, Commander of the Lebanon Liaison Unit, Commander of the Judea and Samaria Division in 2000, before becoming the Commander of the Israeli Northern Command in 2001, and as Israel's military attaché in the United States from 2005 until 2009 before becoming the Deputy Chief of the General Staff.
Gantz has received a number of degrees during his military service. He is a graduate of the IDF Command and Headquarters College and the National Security College. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in History from Tel Aviv University, a Master's Degree in Political Science from the University of Haifa, and an additional Master's Degree in National Resources Management from the National Defense University in the United States.

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Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III; August 19, 1946) 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. Clinton has been described as a New Democrat. Many of his policies have been attributed to a centrist Third Way philosophy of governance.
Born and raised in Arkansas, Clinton became both a student leader and a skilled musician. He is an alumnus of Georgetown University where he was Phi Beta Kappa and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to attend the University of Oxford. He is married to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has served as the United States Secretary of State since 2009 and was a Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009. Both Clintons received law degrees from Yale Law School, where they met and began dating. As Governor of Arkansas, Clinton overhauled the state's education system, and served as Chair of the National Governors Association.

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Binyamin Ben-Eliezer
Binyamin Fuad Ben-Eliezer Hebrew: בנימין פואד בן אליעזר‎, Arabic: بنيامين فؤاد بن اليعازر‎, born 12 February 1936) is an Israeli politician and former military officer of Iraqi origin. He currently serves as a member of the Knesset for the Labor Party, and has held several ministerial posts, including Minister of Industry, Trade and Labour, Minister of Defense, Deputy Prime Minister.
Born in Basra in southern Iraq, as Fuad, Son of Saleh and Farha. Ben-Eliezer made aliyah to Israel in 1950, hebraizing his First name to Binyamin. He entered the Israel Defense Forces in 1954, and became a career soldier. He served as a Commander in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, and was wounded in the War of Attrition. In 1977, he was appointed First Commanding Officer in Southern Lebanon, serving as the army liaison between the Lebanese Christian militias and Israel. He was Military Governor of Judea and Samaria (1978–81) and was Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories from 1983 until 1984. He completed his military service with the rank of Brigadier General.

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Binyamin Mintz
Binyamin Mintz (Hebrew: בנימין מינץ‎, born 12 January 1903, died 30 May 1961) was an Israeli politician who served briefly as Minister of Postal Services From July 1960 until his death.
Born in Łódź in the Russian Empire (today in Poland), Mintz studied in a hasidic Ger school and was a member of Young Agudat Israel. He made aliyah to Mandate Palestine in 1925, and worked in construction and as a printer.
In 1933 he joined Agudat Israel Workers, and was later a member of the Provisional State Council. In 1949 he was elected to the first Knesset on the list of the United Religious Front (an alliance of the four main religious parties). Re-elected in 1951, 1955 and 1959, he was appointed Minister of Postal Services by David Ben-Gurion on 17 July 1960, serving until his death the following May.
The village of Yad Binyamin, established in 1962, was named in his honour.

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Chaim Herzog
Chaim Herzog (Hebrew: חיים הרצוג‎, 17 September 1918 – 17 April 1997) served as the sixth President of Israel (1983–93), following a distinguished career in both the British Army and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Herzog was born at Cliftonpark Avenue in Belfast, the son of notable Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, who was Chief Rabbi of Ireland from 1919 to 1937 (and later, of Palestine and Israel), and Sara (née Hillman).^{[citation needed]} The family home (from 1919) was at 33 Bloomfield Avenue, Portobello in Dublin, Ireland. Herzog studied at Wesley College, Dublin and was involved with the Federation of Zionist Youth during his teenage years.
He immigrated to Palestine in 1935, and served in the Jewish paramilitary group Haganah during the Arab revolt of 1936–39.
He went on to earn a degree in law at University College London, and then qualified as a barrister at Lincoln's Inn.
He joined the British army during World War II, operating primarily in Germany as a tank commander in the Armoured Division. There, he was given his lifelong nickname of "Vivian" because the British could not pronounce the name, "Chaim". A Jewish soldier had volunteered that "Vivian" was the English equivalent of "Chaim." (Living History, p. 47) He was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps in 1943 and participated in the liberation of several concentration camps as well as identifying a captured German soldier as Heinrich Himmler. He left the Army in 1947 with the rank of Major.

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Colin Powell
Colin Luther Powell (

/ˈkoʊlɨn/; born April 5, 1937) is an American statesman and a retired four-star general in the United States Army. He was the 65th United States Secretary of State, serving under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005. He was the first African American to serve in that position. During his military career, Powell also served as National Security Advisor (1987–1989), as Commander of the U.S. Army Forces Command (1989) and as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989–1993), holding the latter position during the Gulf War. He was the first, and so far the only, African American to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Colin Luther Powell was born on April 5, 1937 in Harlem, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, to Jamaican immigrant parents Maud Arial (née McKoy) and Luther Theophilus Powell. He also has Scottish ancestry. Powell was raised in the South Bronx and attended Morris High School, a former public school in the Bronx, from which he graduated in 1954. While at school, he worked at a local baby furniture store where he picked up Yiddish from the shopkeepers and some of the customers. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in geology from the City College of New York in 1958 and was a self-admitted C average student. He was later able to earn a Master of Business Administration degree from the George Washington University in 1971, after his second tour in Vietnam.

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Corazon Aquino
Maria Corazon Sumulong Cojuangco-Aquino (January 25, 1933 – August 1, 2009) was the 11th President of the Philippines and the first woman to hold that office. She led the 1986 People Power Revolution, which toppled Ferdinand Marcos and restored democracy in the Philippines. She was named "Woman of the Year" in 1986 by Time Magazine.
A self-proclaimed "plain housewife", Aquino was married to Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr., the staunchest critic of then President Ferdinand Marcos. Senator Aquino was assassinated on August 21, 1983 upon returning to the Philippines after three years in exile in the United States. After her husband's assassination, Corazon Aquino emerged as the leader of the opposition against the Marcos administration. In late 1985, when President Marcos called for a snap election, Aquino ran for president with former senator Salvador Laurel as her vice-presidential running mate. After the elections were held on February 7, 1986, and the Batasang Pambansa proclaimed Marcos the winner in the elections, she called for massive civil disobedience protests, declaring herself as having been cheated and as the real winner in the elections. Filipinos enthusiastically heeded her call and rallied behind her. These events eventually led to the ousting of Marcos and the installation of Aquino as President of the Philippines on February 25, 1986 through the "People Power Revolution".

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Dalia Itzik
Dalia Itzik (Hebrew: דליה איציק‎), born 20 October 1952, is an Israeli politician who currently serves as a member of the Knesset for Kadima. She has previously served in several ministerial positions, and on 4 May 2006 became the first female speaker of the Knesset, and has since served as President of Israel in an interim capacity on two occasions.
Itzik was born in Jerusalem to a family of Iraqi Jews. She is married to Danny, an employee of the Israel Electric Corporation. They have three children, Ran, Uri and Adi. The family lives in Jerusalem's Ramat Sharett neighborhood.
Before being elected to the 13th Knesset in 1992, Itzik served as the deputy mayor of Jerusalem.
After being re-elected in 1996 and 1999, she was appointed Minister of the Environment in Ehud Barak's government, serving from 1999 until 2001. In 2001 she became Minister of Industry and Trade, before leaving the cabinet in 2002.
Re-elected in 2003, Itzik served as Minister of Communications in 2005. In 2006 she defected to Ariel Sharon's newly formed party, Kadima.

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Dan Halutz

Dan Halutz (help·info) (Hebrew: דן חלוץ‎) (born August 7, 1948) is an Israeli Air Force Lt. General and former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces and commander of the Israeli Air Force. Halutz was appointed as Chief of Staff on June 1, 2005. On January 17, 2007 he announced his resignation. He has a degree in economics. He was born to a Mizrahi Jewish family with origins in Iran and Iraq. He is Chairman of the Etgarim special-needs charity.
Halutz joined the Israeli Air Force (IAF) in 1966 and graduated from combat flight school in 1968. In 1969, he joined the first F-4 Phantom squadron of the IAF. During the War of Attrition, Halutz carried out 40 operational flights.
After the war, he left the IDF in order to study, but returned to active duty when the Yom Kippur War started, in 1973. During the Yom Kippur War, Halutz carried out over 43 operational flights in which he shot down 3 enemy planes in dogfights.
In 1978, he left the IDF again and served as a reserve pilot for four years. He returned to active service in 1982, when he was also trained to pilot the new F-16 jet fighter. In 1984, he commanded a Phantom squadron. In 1986, he was appointed to head the IAI Lavi jet project. After the project was canceled due to American pressure, Halutz was appointed as commander of Hatzor airbase in 1991.

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Dan Harel
Aluf Dan Harel (born 1955) is a general in the Israel Defense Forces and is currently the Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the IDF. Born in Haifa, Harel began his military career in 1974 at the Israeli Air Force flight school, but in 1976 switched to the Israeli Artillery Corps. As he advanced up the chain of command Harel participated in the 1982 Lebanon War as a battalion commander. He left the Artillery Corps in 1993 to become the Head of the Operations Department for the General Staff, but returned in 1995 as its overall commander. He then served successively as Military Assistant to the Minister of Defense in 1998, an Armored Division commander in 2000, and head of the Operations Directorate in 2001. During this time Harel attended the US Advanced Artillery Officers' Course and the IDF Brigade Commanders' Course, and also received a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Haifa.
Harel was later appointed head of the Southern Command, a position he held from 2003 to 2006. In this capacity he not only implemented counterterrorism measures, but was also the commander in charge of Israel's Gaza pull-out in the summer of 2005. The withdrawal was largely non-violent, although there was a last-stand of Israeli protesters at the community of Kfar Darom. While he did not aspire to conduct the operation, Harel carried out the assignment as a self-described "envoy of Israeli democracy". He later credited the mission's success to the nobility of the settlers and the restraint of the IDF troops, stating that now "the unity begins". Yet as rocket and mortar attacks have continued to be launched from the Gaza Strip against Israel, some Israeli papers have begun to criticize him for not planning for this predicted aftermath.

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Dan Naveh
Dan Naveh (Hebrew: דני נוה‎, born 21 June 1960) is a former member of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) for the Likud party, and a former minister in the Israeli government. Currently he is the founder and the Managing General Partner of Agate medical investments.
Dan Naveh (Manhiem) grew up in Jerusalem. In 1985 he graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with an LLB, and was certified as a lawyer in 1986. He was an adviser to Minister Moshe Arens (1986–1992), when Arens was a Minister without Portfolio (1986–1987), the Minister of Foreign Affairs (1988–1990), and Minister of Defense (1990–1992).Shortly afterwards he was appointed as the editor of foreign news in Haaretz newspaper. Naveh was Israel's Cabinet Secretary in the years 1996-1999. In those years he was the chairman of the Israeli Steering Committee for the negotiations with the Palestinians, and played a central role in the Wye River Memorandum and the Hebron Protocol. He was also the chairman of the Forum for Tracing Anti-Semitism Public positions Activity in Knesset and Government Dan Naveh was a minister for five years (2001–2006) and a Knesset (Parliament) member for eight years (he was elected for 3 terms – In 1999, 2003, 2006) as part of the Likud party. As a member of Knesset He served on the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committees, the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, and Committee on the Rights of the Child. Among other things, he also headed the Parliamentary Lobby for the Israeli MIA’s.

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Danny Ayalon
Daniel "Danny" Ayalon (Hebrew: דניאל "דני" אילון‎, born 17 December 1955) is an Israeli diplomat and politician who currently serves as Deputy Foreign Minister and as a member of the Knesset for Yisrael Beiteinu. Formerly he served as Israeli Ambassador to the United States from 2002 until 2006. He frequently writes in Israeli and international newspapers, notably in the Jerusalem Post and the Wall Street Journal.
Danny Ayalon was born in Tel Aviv in 1955 to Lily Ellon, a Polish Jew who immigrated to Israel in 1937 and Rafael Ayalon, an Algerian Jew. Ayalon was raised and educated in Tel Aviv and was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces where he rose to the rank of Captain in the Armored Corps. He received a BA in economics from Tel Aviv University and an MBA from Bowling Green University in Ohio.
Prior to his career in public service, Ayalon was a partner at Gravitas Ltd., an international consulting group, past president of private investment firm Hod Ayalon Ltd, and a finance manager for Koor Industries.

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David Ben-Gurion

David Ben-Gurion (help·info) (Hebrew: דָּוִד בֶּן-גּוּרִיּוֹן‎, Arabic: دافيد بن غوريون‎ Dafeed Bin Ghuriyyun, born David Grün; 16 October 1886 – 1 December 1973) was the main founder and the first Prime Minister of Israel.
Ben-Gurion's passion for Zionism, which began early in life, led him to become a major Zionist leader and Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization in 1946. As head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and later president of the Jewish Agency Executive, he became the de facto leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, and largely led its struggle for an independent Jewish state in Palestine. On 14 May 1948, he formally proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel, and was the first to sign the Israeli Declaration of Independence, which he had helped to write. Ben-Gurion led the provisional government of Israel during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and united the various Jewish militias into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Subsequently, he became known as "Israel's founding father".

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David Ho (scientist)
David Da-i Ho (Chinese: 何大一; born November 3, 1952) is a Taiwanese American AIDS researcher famous for pioneering the use of protease inhibitors in treating HIV-infected patients with his team. He is the scientific director and chief executive officer of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and the Irene Diamond Professor at the Rockefeller University in New York.
Born in Taichung, Taiwan, to Paul (何步基, an engineer) and Sonia Ho (江雙如). David Ho attended Taichung Municipal Guang-Fu Elementary School until sixth grade before immigrating to the United States with his mother and younger brother to unite with his father, who had already been in the US since 1957. He grew up in Los Angeles and received his bachelor of science in physics with highest honors from the California Institute of Technology (1974) and MD from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (1978). Subsequently, he did his clinical training in internal medicine and infectious diseases at UCLA School of Medicine (1978–1982) and Massachusetts General Hospital (1982–1985), respectively. He was a resident in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in 1981 when he came into contact with some of the first reported cases of what was later identified as AIDS.

wn.com/David_Ho_(scientist)

David Ivry
David Ivry (born 1934) was the Israeli Ambassador to the United States from 2000 to 2002, and the ninth commander of the Israeli Air Force (IAF). In 1999, he was appointed first director of the Israeli National Security Council.
Ivry was born in Tel Aviv in 1934. In 1952 he was recruited to the Israeli Air Force, where he served as a pilot of a P-51 Mustang. In 1956 he was sent to a special flight-instructors course in the UK, and became the commander of the flight-instruction school at Tel Nof Airbase. During the Sinai Campaign he served as an Ouragan pilot. in 1959 he ejected from his Dassault Super Mystère during an engagement with an Egyptian mig-17. In 1962, he became the commander of the first Israeli squadron of the French Dassault Mirage. In the six day war, Ivry served as a Mirage pilot and the commander of the Mystère squadron.
From October 1977 to December 1982, he served as the ninth commander of the IAF. While he was in command, the IAI bases were moved from Sinai to the Negev, the air force took part in Operation Litani and Operation Opera. He was in command of Operation Mole Cricket 19 in the early stages of the 1982 Lebanon War.

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David Libai
David Libai (Hebrew: דוד ליבאי‎, born 22 October 1934) is an Israeli jurist and former politician.
Libai was born in Tel Aviv in 1934, where he attended Ironi Alef high school. He studied law at the Hebrew University within the academic reserve program of the IDF. He received his MA from the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Law in Tel Aviv University (where he served as Dean of Students) and his PhD from University of Chicago school of law. He served as deputy chief military prosecutor and was discharged as a major.
He began his professional career in the office of Minister of Justice Pinchas Rosen, in charge of the amnesty department and as spokesman for the Ministry. In 1960 he was certified as a lawyer. He was appointed chief assistant to attorney-general Colin Gillon and chief prosecutor of the state workers' disciplinary court.
In 1964 he opened a private law office. In 1977 he became chairman of the Labour Party's constitution committee. From 1983 to 1985 he was head of the Israeli Bar. He has also been a member of the National inquiry commission on prison conditions, member of the Press Council, and chairman of the Israel-Britain Parliamentary Friendship Association. He is an associate professor at Tel Aviv University and the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center.

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David Remez
David Remez (Hebrew: דוד רמז‎, born David Drabkin in 1886, died 19 May 1951) was an Israeli politician, the country's first Minister of Transportation, and a signatory of the Israeli declaration of independence.
Remez was born in the village of Kopys in the Russian Empire (now in Belarus) in 1886 and attended high school there. He studied Law in Turkey before starting work as a teacher. He moved to Ottoman Palestine in 1913, and worked as an agricultural laborer in Ben Shemen, Be'er Tuvia, Karkur and Zikhron Ya'akov.
He became involved in politics and trade unionism soon after the Mandate Era began, serving as Director of the Public Works Office of the Histadrut from 1921 to 1929 as well as on Tel Aviv's city council from 1921 to 1925, and was a founding member of David Ben-Gurion's Mapai party. He became Secretary of the Histadrut in 1930, a position he retained until 1946, and also chaired the Jewish National Council from 1944-1949.
Having signed Israel's declaration of independence, Remez was appointed Minister of Transportation in David Ben-Gurion's provisional government on 14 May 1948, a position he retained after the formation of the first government following the first Knesset elections in 1949. When the first government collapsed in November 1950, Remez became Education Minister taking over from Zalman Shazar. He died in office in May 1951, the first Israeli minister to do so. His Knesset seat was taken by Menachem Cohen.

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David Trimble
William David Trimble, Baron Trimble, PC (born 15 October 1944, in Belfast), is a politician from Northern Ireland. He served as Leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP; 1995–2005), was the first First Minister of Northern Ireland (1998–2002), and was a Member of the British Parliament (1990–2005). He is currently a life peer for the Conservative Party. Trimble was awarded the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize, along with John Hume.
While a professor of law at Queen's University Belfast, he was elected to the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention. He served as Member of Parliament for Upper Bann from 1990 until 2005. He resigned leadership of the UUP soon afterwards. In June 2006, he became a member of the House of Lords, as The Right Honourable William David Trimble by the name, style, and title of Baron Trimble, of Lisnagarvey in the County of Antrim. In April 2007 he left the UUP to join the Conservative Party.
In June 2010, the Israeli government appointed Lord Trimble to be one of two international observers serving on an Israeli commission of inquiry looking into the events surrounding an Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara, along with Canadian former Judge Advocate General Ken Watkin. The panel concluded both Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza and the interception of the flotilla “were found to be legally pursuant to the rules of international law”.

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Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping (IPA: [tə̂ŋ ɕjɑ̀ʊpʰǐŋ] (

listen); 22 August 1904 – 19 February 1997) was a Chinese politician, statesman, and diplomat. As leader of the Communist Party of China, Deng was a reformer who led China towards a market economy. While Deng never held office as the head of state, head of government or General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (historically the highest position in Communist China), he nonetheless served as the paramount leader of the People's Republic of China from 1978 to 1992. As the core of the second generation leaders Deng shared his power with the two most powerful men after him: Li Xiannian and Chen Yun.
Born into a peasant background in Guang'an, Sichuan, China, Deng studied and worked in France in the 1920s, where he was influenced by Marxism. He joined the Communist Party of China in 1923. Upon his return to China he worked as a political commissar in rural regions and was considered a "revolutionary veteran" of the Long March. Following the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Deng worked in Tibet and other southwestern regions to consolidate Communist control. He was also instrumental in China's economic reconstruction following the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s. His economic policies were at odds with the political ideologies of Chairman Mao Zedong. As a result, he was purged twice during the Cultural Revolution but regained prominence in 1978 by outmaneuvering Mao's chosen successor, Hua Guofeng.

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Dennis Ross
Dennis B. Ross (born November 26, 1948) is an American diplomat and author. He has served as the Director of Policy Planning in the State Department under President George H. W. Bush, the special Middle East coordinator under President Bill Clinton, and was a special adviser for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia (which includes Iran) to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Ross was born in San Francisco and grew up in Marin County. His Jewish mother and Catholic stepfather raised him in a non-religious atmosphere. Ross graduated from University of California, Los Angeles in 1970 and did graduate work there, writing his doctoral dissertation on Soviet decision-making. He later became religiously Jewish after the Six Day War. In 2002 he co-founded the Kol Shalom synagogue in Rockville, Maryland.
During President Jimmy Carter's administration, Ross worked under Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon. There, he co-authored a study recommending greater U.S. intervention in "the Persian Gulf Region because of our need for Persian Gulf oil and because events in the Persian Gulf affect the Arab-Israeli conflict." During the Reagan administration, Ross served as director of Near East and South Asian affairs in the National Security Council and Deputy Director of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (1982–84).

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Desmond Tutu
Desmond Mpilo Tutu (born 7 October 1931) is a South African activist and retired Anglican bishop who rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s as an opponent of apartheid. He was the first black South African Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, and primate of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa (now the Anglican Church of Southern Africa).
Tutu has been active in the defense of human rights and uses his high profile to campaign for the oppressed. He has campaigned to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984; the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism in 1986; the Pacem in Terris Award in 1987; the Sydney Peace Prize in 1999; the Gandhi Peace Prize in 2005; and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. Tutu has also compiled several books of his speeches and sayings.
Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born in Klerksdorp, Transvaal, the second of the three children of Zacheriah Zililo Tutu and his wife, Aletta, and the only son. Tutu's family moved to Johannesburg when he was twelve. His father was a teacher and his mother was a cleaner and cook at a school for the blind. Here he met Trevor Huddleston who was a parish priest in the black slum of Sophiatown. "One day," said Tutu, "I was standing in the street with my mother when a white man in a priest's clothing walked past. As he passed us he took off his hat to my mother. I couldn't believe my eyes – a white man who greeted a black working class woman!"

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Doron Almog
Doron Almog (born 1951 as Doron Avrotzky) is a Major General (res.) in the Israel Defense Forces reserves.
Almog is also the father of a son with severe autism and mental retardation. His autistic son Eran died at age 23 in 2007. He is the founder of Aleh Negev, a village for the disabled which provides residential, medical and social services to the handicapped of southern Israel. After Eran's death, Aleh Negev's name was changed to Nachalat Eran.
Five members of the Almog family from Haifa: Ze'ev Almog, 71, his wife Ruth, 70, their son Moshe, 43, and grandsons Tomer Almog, 9, and Assaf Staier, 11 were killed in a suicide bombing of Maxim restaurant in Haifa October 4, 2003.
In 1976's Operation Entebbe, he was the first para-reconnaissance commander to land on the runway at Entebbe, marking it for incoming Israeli airplanes, then leading the capture of the airfield's control tower in the rescue operation. In 1984-1985, he participated in the clandestine airlift of 7,000 endangered Beta Israel (or "Falasha") Jews from Ethiopia to Israel in what was known as "Operation Moses". In his most recent post, as head of the IDF Southern Command from 2000-2003 he secured the border of the Gaza Strip against infiltration by Palestinian militants.^{[citation needed]}.

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Dov Yosef
Dov Yosef (Hebrew: דב יוסף‎, born Bernard Joseph on 27 May 1899, died 7 January 1980) was an Israeli politician and statesman. Yosef served in a variety of ministerial positions during the first two Knessets and was the country's second Minister of Justice, serving twice (1951–52 and 1961–66).
Yosef was born in Montreal, Canada, as Bernard Joseph. He attended McGill University, Université Laval, and the University of London, qualifying as an attorney.
Yosef immigrated to Israel in 1918 with the Canadian Jewish Legion which he helped organize. After the end of World War I, Yosef worked as an attorney in Mandatory Palestine. During Israel's War of Independence he served Military Governor of Jerusalem during the Blockade.
In 1933 Yosef joined David Ben-Gurion's Mapai party. Three years later he became legal adviser to the Political Department of the Jewish Agency. He became a member of the Jewish Agency Executive Committee and a member of the World Zionist Organisation's Political Committee.
In December 1947 the Jewish Agency appointed him head of the Jerusalem Emergency Committee and in August 1948 he became Military Governor of Jerusalem. (see Siege of Jerusalem (1948)). He was elected to the first Knesset in January 1949. He was initially appointed Minister of Rationing and Supply in the first government, a key position during the austerity period. In June 1949 he was also appointed Agriculture Minister.

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Efraim Sneh
Efraim Sneh (Hebrew: אפרים סנה‎, born 19 September 1944) is an Israeli politician, physician, and a retired Brigadier General in the Israel Defense Forces. He was a member of the Knesset for the Labor Party between 1992 and 2008 and served in several ministerial posts. He currently heads the Yisrael Hazaka party, which he established in May 2008.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1944, Sneh is the son of Moshe Sneh, who was one of the heads of the Haganah. His father was elected to the first Knesset as a representative of Mapam, before defecting to Maki, the Israeli Communist Party.
Sneh served in the Nahal infantry battalion from 1962 to 1964. He studied medicine at Tel Aviv University and specialized in internal medicine. Once he finished his studies he returned to military service as a battalion doctor, then as a brigade doctor for the Paratroopers Brigade. In the Yom Kippur War he commanded a medical unit of the brigade in the Battle of The Chinese Farm and battles west of the Suez canal. Sneh also commanded the medical unit at Operation Entebbe, served as commander of the elite Unit 669 and as commander of the security zone in south Lebanon. His last role in the IDF was as head of the civilian administration of the West Bank.

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Ehud Olmert
Ehud Olmert (Hebrew: אהוד אולמרט‎, IPA: [eˈhud ˈolmeʁt] (

listen), born 30 September 1945) is an Israeli politician and lawyer. He served as Prime Minister of Israel from 2006 to 2009 and before that as a Cabinet Minister from 1988 to 1992 and from 2003 to 2006. Between his first and second stints as a cabinet member, he served as Mayor of Jerusalem from 1993 to 2003.
In 2003 Olmert was re-elected to the Knesset (he had earlier served eight terms), and became a Cabinet Minister and Acting Prime Minister in the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. On 4 January 2006, after Sharon suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke, Olmert began exercising the powers of the office of Prime Minister. Olmert led Kadima to a victory in the March 2006 elections (just two months after Sharon had suffered his stroke), and continued on as Acting Prime Minister. On 14 April, two weeks after the election, Sharon was declared permanently incapacitated, allowing Olmert to legally become Interim Prime Minister. Less than a month later, on 4 May, Olmert and his new, post-election government were approved by the Knesset, thus Olmert officially became Prime Minister of Israel.

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Eli Suissa
Rabbi Eliyahu "Eli" Suissa (Hebrew: אליהו "אלי" סויסה‎, born 1956) is a former Israeli politician who held several ministerial portfolios during the 1990s and early 2000s.
Born in Morocco in 1956, Suissa's family made aliyah to Israel later in the same year. He studied at a yeshiva and was ordained as a rabbi.
Despite not being a member of the Knesset, he was appointed Minister of Internal Affairs in Binyamin Netanyahu's government in June 1996. On 7 August he became Minister of Religious Affairs in addition to his existing role, but served for only five days, before Netanyahu took the post himself, before giving it to Zevulon Hammer. Following Hammer's death in January 1998, Netanyahu briefly held the portfolio again, before handing it to Yitzhak Levy. In September 1998 Suissa took over as Religious Affairs Minister again; in all the portfolio changed hands six times during the 3-year government.
In the 1999 elections he was voted into the Knesset on Shas' list, and was appointed Minister of National Infrastructure. He left the cabinet when Shas withdrew from the government in July 2000, but returned when Ariel Sharon formed a new government in March 2001, this time as Minister of Jerusalem Affairs. He served until the 2003 elections, aside from a brief period between 23 May and 3 June 2002 when Shas pulled out of the coalition.

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Eliahu Ben-Elissar
Eliyahu Ben-Elissar (Hebrew: אליהו בן אלישר‎, born 2 August 1932, died 12 August 2000) was an Israeli politician and diplomat.
Born Eli Gottlieb in Radom in Poland in 1932, Ben-Elissar was the son of a distinguished family. His parents were Eliezer and Hela (née Dobrzynska) Gottlieb. Eliezer and his brother, Jacob, owned and operated Brago, a successful foundry. Eli was the youngest of three siblings. The eldest, a sister Diana, was born on 7 August 1923, and a brother, Nathan, was born on 21 November 1925.
Ten-year-old Gottlieb immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1942 with some members of a Radomer family named Graucher using a visa originally obtained for a son who had already been deported by the Nazis. Ironically, the name of the child who perished so that Eli would survive was named Natan Chaim (Hebrew for "he gave life"). Gottlieb attended the Bilu School in Tel Aviv joined the Irgun, and served in the IDF until 1965. He subsequently graduated from the University of Paris with a BA in Social Sciences and an MA in International Law and later studied for a PhD at the University of Geneva.

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Elie Wiesel
Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel KBE (

/ˈɛli vɨˈzɛl/; Hungarian: Wiesel Lázár; born September 30, 1928) is a Romanian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald concentration camps. Wiesel is also the Advisory Board chairman of the Algemeiner Journal newspaper.
When Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a "messenger to mankind," stating that through his struggle to come to terms with "his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler's death camps", as well as his "practical work in the cause of peace", Wiesel had delivered a powerful message "of peace, atonement and human dignity" to humanity.
Wiesel was born in Sighet,Transylvania (now Sighetu Marmaţiei), Maramureş, Kingdom of Romania, in the Carpathian Mountains. His mother, Sarah Feig, was the daughter of Dodye Feig, a celebrated Vizhnitz Hasid and farmer from a nearby village. He was active and trusted within the community, and in the early years of his life had spent a few months in jail for having helped Polish Jews who escaped and were hungry. It was his father, Chlomo, who instilled a strong sense of humanism in his son, encouraging him to learn Hebrew and to read literature, whereas his mother encouraged him to study the Torah. Wiesel has said his father represented reason, and his mother Sarah promoted faith. In his home, his family spoke Yiddish most of the time, but also Romanian, Hungarian and German. Wiesel had three sisters – older sisters Hilda and Beatrice, and younger sister Tzipora. Beatrice and Hilda survived the war and were reunited with Wiesel at a French orphanage. They eventually emigrated to North America, with Beatrice moving to Montreal, Canada. Tzipora, Chlomo and Sarah did not survive the Holocaust.

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Eliezer Shostak
Eliezer Shostak (Hebrew: אליעזר שוסטק‎, born 16 December 1911, died 20 August 2001) was an Israeli politician who served as Minister of Health from 1977 until 1984 and as a member of the Knesset from 1951 until 1988.
Born in Vladimirets in the Russian Empire (today in Ukraine), Shostak joined the Betar movement in 1930 and made aliyah to Mandate Palestine in 1935. He joined the Betar work battalion in Herzliya, and in 1936 was elected secretary of the National Workers Labour Federation. He became a member of the central committee of Hatzohar and sat on the movement's national executive, before leaving to join Menachem Begin's Herut movement.
He was placed ninth on Herut's list for the 1951 elections, but missed out on a seat when the party won only eight seats. However, he entered the Knesset as a replacement for Ya'akov Meridor in November 1951. He was re-elected in 1955, 1959, 1961 and 1965. During the Herut convention in 1966 he and Shmuel Tamir constituted the major opposition to Begin's leadership of the party, and the following year he and three other Herut MKs left the party to form the Free Centre. He was re-elected again in 1969, and in 1973 the Free Centre allied with Herut and the Liberal Party to form Likud, for whom he was elected to the Knesset in the elections that year. In 1975 the Free Centre split and Shostak became chairman of the Independent Centre faction.

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Elimelekh Rimalt
Rabbi Dr Elimelekh-Shimon Rimalt (Hebrew: אלימלך-שמעון רימלט‎, born 1 November 1907, died 5 November 1987) was a Zionist activist and Israeli politician. He served as Minister of Postal Services between December 1969 and August 1970.
Born in Galicia, Rimalt studied at a heder and yeshiva, as well as a Hebrew high school in Kraków. While living in Poland he was one of the founders of the Akiva Hebrew Youth Organisation. He went on to study at a rabbinical seminary in Vienna, and gained a PhD in philosophy from the University of Vienna, where he was chairman of the Zionist Students Group.
In 1939 he made aliyah to Mandate Palestine, and worked as headmaster of a school in Ramat Gan. In 1943 he was appointed director of the city's department of education, serving until 1952.
In 1951 he was elected to the Knesset on the General Zionists list, and was also a member of Ramat Gan city council, serving as deputy mayor responsible for education between 1955 and 1959. In 1952 he became chairman of the General Zionist Labour Federation, a role he held until 1965. By that time the General Zionists had merged into the Liberal Party, which had become a faction within the Gahal alliance (later Likud); Rimalt was appointed chairman of the Liberal Party's directorate in 1965, having won re-election to the Knesset in 1955, 1959, 1961 and 1965.

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Eliyahu Sasson
Eliyahu Sasson (Hebrew: אליהו ששון‎, born 2 February 1902, died 8 October 1978) was an Israeli politician and minister.
Born in Damascus in Syria, Sasson studied at an Alliance School in his hometown and the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut. He became a member of the Arab National Movement^{[citation needed]}^{[dubious – discuss]} and edited a Jewish-Arab newspaper named Al-Hayat. He made aliyah in 1927 and worked as an electrician, journalist and lecturer on Middle East affairs.
He began working in the political department of the Jewish Agency, serving as head of the Arab department between 1933 and 1948. A member of the Jewish delegation to the United Nations between 1947 and 1948 and at the ceasefire negotiations in 1949, he worked as director of the Middle East department of the Foreign Affairs Ministry between 1948 and 1950, before heading an office in Paris for contacts with Arab nations. He is reported by Benny Morris to have been a member in 1948 of one of the government's unofficial Transfer Committees, set up to facilitate the removal of Arabs from their towns and villages. He also served as the Israeli envoy to Turkey (1950–1952), an envoy and ambassador to Italy (1953–1960) and ambassador to Switzerland (1960–1961).

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Ephraim Katzir
Ephraim Katzir (Hebrew: אפרים קציר‎) (16 May 1916 – 30 May 2009) was an Israeli biophysicist and former Israeli Labor Party politician. He was the fourth President of Israel from 1973 until 1978.
Katzir was born Efraim Katchalski, son of Yehuda and Tzila Katchalski, in Kiev, in the Russian Empire. In 1925 (several publications cite 1922), he immigrated to Mandate Palestine with his family and settled in Jerusalem. In 1932, he graduated from Gymnasia Rehavia. Like his brother, Aharon, he was interested in science.He studied botany, zoology, chemistry and bacteriology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1938, he received an M.Sc, and in 1941, he received a PhD degree. In 1939, he graduated from the first Haganah officers course, and became commander of the student unit in the field forces ('Hish). He and his brother worked on development of new explosives. In May, 1948, Ephraim was appointed commander of the "Heyl Mada" (HEMED) – scientific research and development corps. His brother, Aharon Katzir, chairman of the Department of Polymer Research at Weizmann Institute, was murdered in the Lod Airport Massacre.

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Ezer Weizman

Ezer Weizman (help·info) (Hebrew: עזר ויצמן‎, 15 June 1924 - 24 April 2005) was the seventh President of Israel, first elected in 1993 and re-elected in 1998. Before the presidency, Weizman was commander of the Israeli Air Force and Minister of Defense.
Weizman was born in Tel Aviv as Ezer Weizmann on 15 June 1924. His father, Yechiel, was an agronomist. He grew up in Haifa, and attended the Hebrew Reali School.
He married Reuma Schwartz, sister of Ruth Dayan, wife of Moshe Dayan, and they had two children, Shaul and Michal. Weizman was a nephew of Israel's first president, Chaim Weizmann. He died of respiratory failure at his home in Caesarea on 24 April 2005, at the age of 80. He is not buried on Mt. Herzl, where Israeli presidents and prime ministers are usually interred, but alongside his son and daughter-in-law in Or Akiva.
Weizman was a combat pilot. He received his training in the British Army in which he enlisted in 1942 in order to fight the Nazis. He served as a truck driver in the Western Desert campaigns in Egypt and Libya. In 1943, he joined the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and attended aviation school in Rhodesia. He served with the RAF in India in early 1944. Weizman ended his service in the RAF as a sergeant pilot.

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F. W. de Klerk
Frederik Willem de Klerk (born 18 March 1936), often known as F. W. de Klerk, was the seventh and last State President of apartheid-era South Africa, serving from September 1989 to May 1994. De Klerk was also leader of the National Party (which later became the New National Party) from February 1989 to September 1997.
De Klerk is best known for engineering the end of apartheid, South Africa's racial segregation policy, and supporting the transformation of South Africa into a multi-racial democracy by entering into the negotiations that resulted in all citizens, including the country's black majority, having equal voting and other rights. He won the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize in 1991, the Prince of Asturias Award in 1992 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 along with Nelson Mandela for his role in the ending of apartheid.
He was one of the Deputy Presidents of South Africa during the presidency of Nelson Mandela until 1996, the last white person to hold the position to date. In 1997 he retired from politics.

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Gabi Ashkenazi
Gavriel "Gabi" Ashkenazi (Hebrew: גבי אשכנזי‎, born February 25, 1954), was the Chief of General Staff (Hebrew: רמטכ"ל Ramatkal) of the Israel Defence Forces from 2007 to 2011.
Ashkenazi was born and grew up in Hagor, a moshav, or cooperative agricultural community in the Sharon region of central Israel. Ashkenazi's father, a Bulgarian Jewish Holocaust survivor, and mother, a Syrian Jew, helped found the community. Ashkenazi completed high school at a military boarding school affiliated with the prestigious Gymnasia Herzliya in Tel Aviv. His roommates included Yigal Schwartz, a major figure in Israeli literature, and Yoav Toker, a Paris-based broadcast journalist.
Drafted into Israel's Golani Brigade in 1972, Ashkenazi first saw action in the Sinai Peninsula during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In July 1976 Ashkenazi was a platoon commander in the force that carried out Operation Thunderbolt, a mission to rescue hostages held in Uganda, but he did not participate in the battle at Entebbe Airport. Ashkenazi's first of many experiences in Lebanon came in 1978 during Operation Litani. Ashkenazi was wounded in the fighting and left the IDF before being asked to return as a battalion commander two years later. During the 1982 Lebanon War, Ashkenazi served as Deputy Commander of the Golani Brigade and commanded the forces which captured Beaufort Castle, and the towns of Nabatieh and Jabel Baruch. Promoted to Commander of the Golani in 1987, Ashkenazi was reportedly popular with his brigade's combat soldiers during his nearly two-year tenure in that post.

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Gad Yaacobi
Gad Yaacobi (Hebrew: גד יעקבי‎, 18 January 1935 – 27 August 2007) was an Israeli Minister, Alignment Knesset member, and Israel Ambassador to the United Nations.
Yaacobi was born in Kfar Vitkin during Mandate era, where he completed his high-school studies. His academic studies were economics and political science at the Tel Aviv University.
From 1960 to 1961 he served as an assistant to the Agriculture Minister of Israel, and from 1961 to 1966 as head of the Center for Planning and Economic Development in the Agriculture Ministry, appointed by Moshe Dayan.
In 1965 Yaacobi was among the founders of the Rafi party. When Rafi merged into the Labor Party (which formed part of the alliance known as the Alignment), he was appointed to the party's bureau. In the 1969 election, he was elected to the Knesset, and in 1972 was appointed Deputy Transportation Minister. In 1974 he was appointed Transportation Minister by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a position he held until the 1977 election. In 1984, in the joint Alignment – Likud government, Yaacobi served as Minister of Economy and Planning until 1987, when he was appointed Minister of Communications – a position he held again in the 21st Israeli government, from 1988 to 1990.

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Gadi Eizenkot
Aluf Gadi Eizenkot (born May 19, 1960) is a Major-General in the Israel Defense Forces.
After joining the IDF Eizenkot was assigned to the Golani Brigade, which he himself would eventually command from 1997-8. During that time he received a B.A. in History from Tel Aviv University and attended the US Army and Security Studies course.
In 1999 Eizenkot was selected to be the Military Secretary for the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense under then Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Since then he has commanded the 366th Division and the West Bank Division. He was promoted to head of Israeli Operations Directorate in June 2005.
After Maj. Gen. Udi Adam resigned in October 2006 amid criticism over his conduct in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, Eizenkot replaced him as head of the Northern Command.
On July 11, 2011, the position was transferred to Major-General Yair Golan, and Eizenkot went on vacation in order to serve as a research fellow in an Israeli think tank, to return as deputy chief of General Staff in place of Maj.-Gen. Yair Naveh. In 2014 Eizenkot and Naveh will compete to become the 21st Chief of General Staff.

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George H. W. Bush
George Herbert Walker Bush (born June 12, 1924) is an American politician who served as the 41st President of the United States (1989–93). He had previously served as the 43rd Vice President of the United States (1981–89), a congressman, an ambassador, a Director of Central Intelligence, and is currently the oldest surviving president.
Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts, to Senator Prescott Bush and Dorothy Walker Bush. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Bush postponed going to college, enlisted in the US Navy on his 18th birthday, and became the youngest aviator in the Navy at the time. He served until the end of the war, then attended Yale University. Graduating in 1948, he moved his family to West Texas and entered the oil business, becoming a millionaire by the age of 40.
He became involved in politics soon after founding his own oil company, serving as a member of the House of Representatives, among other positions. He ran unsuccessfully for president of the United States in 1980, but was chosen by party nominee Ronald Reagan to be the vice presidential nominee, and the two were subsequently elected. During his tenure, Bush headed administration task forces on deregulation and fighting drug abuse.

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George W. Bush
George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician and businessman who was the 43rd President of the United States from 2001 to 2009 and the 46th Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000. The eldest son of Barbara Bush and George H. W. Bush, he was born in New Haven, Connecticut. After graduating from Yale University in 1968 and Harvard Business School in 1975, Bush worked in oil businesses. He married Laura Welch in 1977 and ran unsuccessfully for the House of Representatives shortly thereafter. He later co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team before defeating Ann Richards in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. In a close and controversial election, Bush was elected President in 2000 as the Republican candidate, defeating Vice President Al Gore in the Electoral College. Bush is the second American president to have been the son of a former president. He is also the brother of Jeb Bush, former Governor of Florida.
Terrorist attacks occurred eight months into Bush's first term as president on September 11, 2001. In response, Bush announced the War on Terror, an international military campaign which included the war in Afghanistan launched in 2001 and the war in Iraq launched in 2003. In addition to national security issues, Bush promoted policies on the economy, health care, education, and social security reform. He signed into law broad tax cuts, the PATRIOT Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, and Medicare prescription drug benefits for seniors. His tenure saw national debates on immigration, Social Security, electronic surveillance, and enhanced interrogation techniques. His administration also withdrew the U.S. from a some international treaty processes, including the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

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Gideon Sa'ar
Gideon Sa'ar (Hebrew: גדעון סער‎, born 9 December 1966 as Gideon Moses Serchanski) is an Israeli politician who currently serves as a member of the Knesset for Likud, and as the country's Minister of Education.
Born in Tel Aviv as Gideon Moses Serchanski, Sa'ar studied political science at Tel Aviv University after his national service, earning a BA, before gaining an LL.B from the same institution. He worked as an aide to the Attorney General between 1995 and 1997, and then as an aide to the State Attorney until 1998.
He worked as a secretary to the cabinet in 1999 and again from 2001–2 after Likud's Ariel Sharon won a special election for Prime Minister. In the 2003 elections he won a seat in the Knesset on Likud's list, and was appointed Likud Parliamentary Group Chairman. He was opposed to Israel's unilateral disengagement plan, and attempted to pass a bill demanding a referendum on the subject.
After retaining his seat in the 2006 elections he was reappointed Group Chairman and also became a deputy Knesset speaker.

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Giora Yoseftal
Dr Giora Yoseftal (Hebrew: גיורא יוספטל‎; 9 August 1912 – 23 August 1962) was an Israeli politician who held several ministerial portfolios in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Born in Nuremberg in Germany, Yoseftal was a member of the Yiddisher Yudenbund youth movement in his teens. After high school he studied law and economics at the University of Heidelberg, Berlin, Munich and Basel, gaining a PhD in jurisprudence at the latter.
In 1932 he joined Habonim, and the following year was appoined head of the youth department of the Bavarian Jewish community. He moved to Berlin in 1934, and two years later was elected secretary general of the German branch of HeHalutz. In 1936 he married Senetta Yoseftal, later also an Israeli politician.
Yoseftal made aliyah to Mandate Palestine in 1938, and two months after arriving, he was sent to London to try and save German Jewry. He returned to Palestine in 1939, establishing a work brigade in Ra'anana, which later founded kibbutz Gal'ed in 1945.
In 1943 he joined the British Army. After the war ended, he took over the absorption section of the Jewish Agency's aliyah department. Between 1947 and 1952 he sat on the Agency's board. In 1952 he was a member of the delegations which negotiated the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany.

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Golda Meir
Golda Meir (Hebrew: גּוֹלְדָּה מֵאִיר‎‎ [ɡolˈda] or [ˈɡolda] [meˈʔiʁ]; earlier Golda Meyerson, born Golda Mabovich (Голда Мабович); May 3, 1898 – December 8, 1978) was a teacher, kibbutznik and politician who became the fourth Prime Minister of Israel.
Meir was elected Prime Minister of Israel on March 17, 1969, after serving as Minister of Labour and Foreign Minister. Israel's first and the world's third woman to hold such an office, she was described as the "Iron Lady" of Israeli politics years before the epithet became associated with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Former prime minister David Ben-Gurion used to call Meir "the best man in the government"; she was often portrayed as the "strong-willed, straight-talking, grey-bunned grandmother of the Jewish people."
In 1974, after the conclusion of the Yom Kippur War, Meir resigned as prime minister. She died in 1978.
Golda Mabovitch (Ukrainian: Ґольда Мабович) was born on May 3, 1898, in Kiev, Russian Empire, in present-day Ukraine, to Blume Neiditch (died 1951) and Moshe Mabovitch (died 1944), a carpenter. Meir wrote in her autobiography that her earliest memories were of her father boarding up the front door in response to rumors of an imminent pogrom. She had two sisters, Sheyna and Tzipke, as well as five other siblings who died in childhood. She was especially close to Sheyna.

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Haim Bar-Lev
Haim "Kidoni" Bar-Lev (Hebrew: חיים בר-לב‎, 16 November 1924 – 7 May 1994) was a military officer during Israel's pre-state and early statehood eras and later a government minister.
Born Haim Brotzlewsky in Vienna, Austria in 1924, Bar-Lev made aliyah to Mandate Palestine in 1939. From 1942 through 1948, Bar-Lev served in various Jewish military units, such as the Palmach. He became both a pilot and a parachutist, which would later serve him in developing both of these military branches in the young Israel Defense Forces.
In 1946 Bar-Lev blew up the Allenby Bridge near Jericho to prevent Arab militiamen in Trans-Jordan from entering Jewish towns west of the Jordan River. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Bar-Lev was the commander of the Eighth Battalion (Mechanized) in the Negev Brigade, which fought in the southern part of the country and the Sinai.
During the 1956 Suez Crisis he commanded the 27th Armored Brigade, which captured the Gaza Strip before turning southwest and reaching the Suez Canal. By 1964 he became of Director of Operations within the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

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Haim Gvati
Haim Gvati (Hebrew: חיים גבתי‎, born 29 January 1901, died 19 October 1990) was a Zionist activist and Israeli politician. He held several ministerial portfolios, and served as Minister of Agriculture between 1964 and 1974.
Born in Pinsk in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus), Gvati was a member of the Children of Renewal Zionist organisation in his youth. In 1920 he was teaching in a Jewish school in Sevastopol, but later moved to Vilnius (then in Poland) where he was a member of HeHalutz and Tzeiri Zion.
He made aliyah to Mandate Palestine in 1924, and was one of the founders of kibbutz Gvat in 1926, serving as its secretary for several years. He was also a member of the secretariat of HaKibbutz HaMeuhad. Following the split in the kibbutz movement, he moved to Yifat.
Between 1945 and 1949 he was a member of HaMerkaz HaHakla'i. In 1950 he was appointed director general of the Agriculture Ministry, serving until 1958. He was also on the board of Mekorot, the national water company.
Despite not being a member of the Knesset, in 1964 he was appointed Minister of Agriculture by Levi Eshkol. He was elected to the Knesset on the Alignment's list in the 1965 elections and retained his ministerial post, even after he resigned his Knesset seat in January 1966. Despite resigning his seat, he was re-elected in 1969 and continued to serve as Minister of Agriculture. Between December 1969 and July 1970 he also served as Minister of Health, and from 1970 until March 1974 served as Minister of Development.

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Haim Herzog
Chaim Herzog (Hebrew: חיים הרצוג‎, 17 September 1918 – 17 April 1997) served as the sixth President of Israel (1983–93), following a distinguished career in both the British Army and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Herzog was born at Cliftonpark Avenue in Belfast, the son of notable Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, who was Chief Rabbi of Ireland from 1919 to 1937 (and later, of Palestine and Israel), and Sara (née Hillman).^{[citation needed]} The family home (from 1919) was at 33 Bloomfield Avenue, Portobello in Dublin, Ireland. Herzog studied at Wesley College, Dublin and was involved with the Federation of Zionist Youth during his teenage years.
He immigrated to Palestine in 1935, and served in the Jewish paramilitary group Haganah during the Arab revolt of 1936–39.
He went on to earn a degree in law at University College London, and then qualified as a barrister at Lincoln's Inn.
He joined the British army during World War II, operating primarily in Germany as a tank commander in the Armoured Division. There, he was given his lifelong nickname of "Vivian" because the British could not pronounce the name, "Chaim". A Jewish soldier had volunteered that "Vivian" was the English equivalent of "Chaim." (Living History, p. 47) He was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps in 1943 and participated in the liberation of several concentration camps as well as identifying a captured German soldier as Heinrich Himmler. He left the Army in 1947 with the rank of Major.

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Haim Ramon
Haim Ramon (Hebrew: חיים רמון‎, born 10 April 1950) is an Israeli politician who served as a member of the Knesset between 1983 and 2009, and as both Vice Prime Minister and Minister in the Prime Minister's Office with responsibility for state policy.
Born in Jaffa in 1950, Ramon served in the Israeli Air Force, rising to the rank of Captain, before studying law at Tel Aviv University, earning a BA. He joined the Labor Party (then part of the Alignment alliance as soon as he left the military, and was secretary of its youth wing from 1978 until 1989. He entered the Knesset in May 1983, replacing Daniel Rosolio, and, except for a period between January 2006 and the March 2006 elections, remained a member until 2009. He has been a member of various committees, and chaired the finance committee from 1988 to 1992.
Ramon was appointed Minister of Health in the government of Yitzhak Rabin in 1992 where his major achievement was the promotion of the new National Health Insurance Law (see also: Universal health care in Israel). In February 1994 he resigned his position, over the failure of the Labor Party to support the proposed Health Law, which also required breaking the linkage between the Histadrut Labor Federation and the Clalit Health Fund. In a dramatic speech at a party gathering he compared the party members to beached whales and resigned his position. However, Ramon kept advocating for the law even after his resignation and it was finally passed by the Knesset in the summer of 1994.

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Haim Yosef Zadok
{{Infobox member of the Knesset | image= Haim Yosef Zadok.jpg | birth_date = 2 October 1913 | birth_place = Rava-Ruska, Austria-Hungary | Year of Aliyah = 1935 | death_date = 15 August 2002 (aged 88) | death_place = Germany | Knesset(s) = 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 | Party = Alignment (1969-1978) | Former parties = Mapai (1955-1965)
Labor Alignment (1965-1968)
Labor Party (1968-1969) | Gov't roles = Minister of Trade and Industry
Minister of Development
Minister of Justice
[[Religious Servick (Hebrew: חיים יוסף צדוק‎, born Haim Wilkenfeld on 2 October 1913, died 15 August 2002) was an Israeli jurist and politician.
Zadok was born in 1913 in Rava-Ruska in Eastern Galicia in Austria-Hungary (now Ukraine). He studied philosophy and Jewish studies at the University of Warsaw. He was a member of the Gordonia youth movement in Poland and in the "Poale Zion Federation" Party.
In 1935 he immigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine and joined the Hagana and the Jewish Settlement Police. He studied law at the Hebrew University and was certified as a lawyer. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, he joined the IDF as a lawyer in the office of the Chief Military Prosecutor. In 1949 he joined the legislative department of the Ministry of Justice as a deputy of the Attorney-General, a position he held until 1952.

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Haim-Moshe Shapira
Haim-Moshe Shapira (Hebrew: חיים משה שפירא‎, 26 March 1902 – 16 July 1970) was a key Israeli politician in the early days of the state's existence. A signatory of Israel's declaration of independence, he served continuously as a minister from the country's foundation in 1948 until his death in 1970 apart from a brief spell in the late 1950s.
Born to Zalman Shapira and Rosa Krupnik in the Russian Empire in Grodno in what is today Belarus. Shapira was educated in Cheder and a Yeshiva, where he organised a youth group called Bnei Zion (lit. Sons of Zion). He worked in the Education and Culture department of the National Jewish Council in Kaunas (now in Lithuania), and in 1919 set up the Young Mizrachi, which became a leading player in the religious zionist youth movement in Lithuania. In 1922 he started work as a teacher at an ultra-orthodox school in Vilnius, and also served on the board of the Mizrahi group in the city. Between 1923 and 1924 he was active in the Young Mizrahi group in Warsaw, before attending a Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin between 1924 and 1925.

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Henry Kissinger
Heinz Alfred "Henry" Kissinger (

/ˈkɪsɪndʒər/; born May 27, 1923) is a German-born American writer, political scientist, diplomat, and businessman. A recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, he served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently as Secretary of State in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. After his term, his opinion was still sought by many subsequent presidents and many world leaders.
A proponent of Realpolitik, Kissinger played a dominant role in United States foreign policy between 1969 and 1977. During this period, he pioneered the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, orchestrated the opening of relations with the People's Republic of China, and negotiated the Paris Peace Accords, ending American involvement in the Vietnam War. Various American policies of that era, including the bombing of Cambodia, remain controversial to many.
Kissinger is still a controversial figure today. He is the founder and chairman of Kissinger Associates, an international consulting firm.

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Hosni Mubarak
Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak (Arabic: محمد حسني السيد مبارك‎, Egyptian Arabic pronunciation: [mæˈħæmːæd ˈħosni ˈsæjjed moˈbɑːɾˤɑk], Muḥammad Ḥusnī Sayyid Mubārak; born 4 May 1928) is a former Egyptian politician and military commander. He served as the fourth President of Egypt from 1981 to 2011.
Mubarak was appointed Vice President of Egypt in 1975, and assumed the presidency on 14 October 1981, following the assassination of President Anwar El Sadat. His almost thirty-year presidency made him Egypt's longest-serving ruler since Muhammad Ali Pasha. Before he entered politics, Mubarak was a career officer in the Egyptian Air Force, serving as its commander from 1972 to 1975 and rising to the rank of air chief marshal.
Mubarak was ousted after 18 days of demonstrations during the 2011 Egyptian revolution when, on 11 February, Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that Mubarak had resigned as president and transferred authority to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. On 13 April, a prosecutor^[which?] ordered Mubarak and both his sons to be detained for 15 days of questioning about allegations of corruption and abuse of power. He was then ordered to stand trial on charges of premeditated murder of peaceful protestors during the revolution. These trials officially began on 3 August 2011. Egypt’s military prosecutors then also proclaimed that they are investigating Mubarak's role in the assassination of his predecessor Anwar Sadat.

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Hussein of Jordan
Hussein bin Talal (Arabic: حسين بن طلال‎, Ḥusayn bin Ṭalāl; 14 November 1935 – 7 February 1999) was King of Jordan from the abdication of his father, King Talal, in 1952, until his death. Hussein's rule extended through the Cold War and four decades of Arab-Israeli conflict. He recognized Israel in 1994, becoming the second Arab head of state to do so.
Hussein claimed to be a descendant of the Islamic prophet Muhammad through his relations with the ancient Hashemite family.
Hussein was born in Amman on 14 November 1935 to Talal bin Abdullah and Princess Zein al-Sharaf bint Jamil. After completing his elementary education in Amman, he was educated at Victoria College in Alexandria. He proceeded to Harrow School in England, where he befriended his cousin Faisal II of Iraq. He pursued further study at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.
On 20 July 1951, Prince Hussein traveled to Jerusalem to perform Friday prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque with his grandfather, King Abdullah I, where an assassin opened fire on Abdullah and his grandson. Abdullah was killed, but the 15-year-old Hussein survived the assassination attempt, and according to the Jordanian government, pursued the gunman. The Jordanian government claims that the gunman turned his weapon on the young prince, who was saved when the bullet was deflected by a medal on his uniform which had been given to him by his grandfather.

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Idi Amin
Idi Amin Dada (c. 1924 – 16 August 2003) was the military dictator and third President of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. Amin joined the British colonial regiment, the King's African Rifles in 1946. Eventually he held the rank of Major General in the post-colonial Ugandan Army and became its Commander before seizing power in the military coup of January 1971, deposing Milton Obote. He later promoted himself to Field Marshal while he was the head of state. While serving in the British Regiment he toured Kenya.
Amin's rule was characterised by gross human rights abuse, political repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, nepotism, corruption, and gross economic mismanagement. The number of people killed as a result of his regime is estimated by international observers and human rights groups to range from 100,000 to 500,000. During his years in power, Amin shifted in allegiance from being a pro-Western ruler enjoying considerable Israeli support to being backed by Libya's Muammar al-Gaddafi, the Soviet Union and East Germany.

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Isaac Herzog
Yitzhak "Buji" Herzog (Hebrew: יצחק "בוז'י" הרצוג‎, born 22 September 1960) is an Israeli politician and lawyer. He is currently a member of the Knesset on behalf of the Labor Party, and has previous served as Minister of Welfare & Social Services, Minister of the Diaspora, Society, and the Fight Against Antisemitism, Minister of Housing and Building and Minister of Tourism.
Herzog is the son of Israeli President Chaim Herzog and Aura Herzog, and the grandson of Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog. He was born in Tel Aviv and studied law at Tel Aviv University and Cornell University. Herzog is married with three children, and is nicknamed Buji.
Although he did not win a seat in the 1999 elections, Herzog served as government secretary in Ehud Barak's cabinet until 2001 when Barak was defeated by Ariel Sharon in a special election for Prime Minister. In 1999, he was also investigated in the 'Amutot Barak' scandal (a scandal involving allegations that the party funding law was violated), but maintained his silence. The Attorney General, therefore, decided to close the case against him due to lack of evidence. From 2000 until 2003, he served as chairman of the Israel Anti-Drug Authority.

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Israel Rokach
Israel Rokach, Honorary CBE (Hebrew: ישראל רוקח‎) (December 31, 1886 – September 13, 1959) was an Israeli politician, Knesset member, and mayor of Tel Aviv from November 15, 1936 to April 13, 1953.
Israel Rokach was born in 1886 in Neve Tzedek, then part of Jaffa. His father, Shimon, a journalist, was one of the founders of the neighborhood. His grandfather, Israel Beck, revived the Hebrew printing industry in Palestine. Rokach attended a cheder and then an Alliance Israélite Universelle school. He traveled to Switzerland, where he continued his education at a high school in Lausanne and then studied electrical engineering at the Zürich polytechnic.
In 1920 Rokach moved to the United Kingdom, where he worked as an electrical engineer. In 1922 he returned to Jaffa, where he opened a store for electrical supplies. In 1933, Rokach married Esther Epstein. He called their daughter Iri (Hebrew: עירי‎), meaning "My City". She became known also as Livia Rokach, the authoress of "Israel's Sacred Terrorism", a study based on Moshe Sharett's personal diary and other documents.

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Israeli Jews
Israeli Jews, also known as Jewish Israelis, can refer to:
Israeli Jews are found mostly in Israel and Western world countries, as well as many other countries worldwide, not necessarily only in Jewish communities. Israeli Jews mostly speak Hebrew and most practice Judaism in some form. Israel, the Jewish state, currently has almost half the world's Jews.
The Jewish community in Israel is composed from all Jewish ethnic divisions, including Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Beta Israel and some converts. The Israeli Jewish community manifests a wide range of Jewish cultural traditions, as well as encompassing the full spectrum of religious observance, from the Haredi communities to the Hilonim Jewish communities who live a secular lifestyle.
Despite the ongoing debate over the question of who is a Jew among Israeli Jews, the Jewish status of a person, which is considered a matter of "nationality" by the Israeli authorities, is registered and controlled by the Israeli Ministry of the Interior, which requires a person to meet the halakhic definition to be registered as a "Jew". Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics estimated the Israeli Jewish population was 5,901,000 in December 2011 (75.3% of the total population). Depending on religious definitions and varying population data, Israel is home to the largest or second largest (after the United States) Jewish community in the world.

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Itamar Rabinovich
Itamar Rabinovich (Hebrew: איתמר רבינוביץ‎, born 1942 in Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine, now Israel) was the Israel ambassador to the United States from 1993 to 1996. He was then the President of Tel Aviv University. He is currently a visiting professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Previously he was Israel's Chief Negotiator with Syria (1992-1995) and a Professor at Large at Cornell University (1997-2002).
Rabinovich received B.A. degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an M.A. from Tel Aviv University and a Ph.D. from UCLA. He received Commandeur de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques from France.

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Jeff Bezos
Jeffrey Preston "Jeff" Bezos (/beɪzəs/, born January 12, 1964) is an American entrepreneur who played a key role in the growth of e-commerce as the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, Inc., an online merchant of books and later of a wide variety of products. Under his guidance, Amazon.com became the largest retailer on the World Wide Web and the model for Internet sales.
Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen and Ted Jorgensen. His maternal ancestors were settlers who lived in Texas, and over the generations acquired a 25,000 acre (101 km² or 39 miles²) ranch in Cotulla. Bezos' maternal grandfather was a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque. He retired early to the ranch, where Bezos spent many summers as a youth, working with him. At an early age, Bezos displayed a striking mechanical aptitude – as a toddler, he tried dismantling his crib with a screwdriver.
Bezos was born to a teenage mother in Albuquerque. Her marriage to his father lasted little more than a year. When Jeff was five, she remarried, this time to Miguel Bezos. Miguel was born in Cuba, immigrated to the United States alone when he was fifteen years old, worked his way through the University of Albuquerque, married, and legally adopted Jeff. After the marriage, the family moved to Houston, Texas, and Miguel became an engineer for Exxon. The young Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary School in Houston from fourth to sixth grade. As a child, he spent summers at his grandfather's ranch in southern Texas, "laying pipe, vaccinating cattle and fixing windmills."

wn.com/Jeff_Bezos

Jimmy Carter
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. (born October 1, 1924) is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States (1977–1981) and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office. Before he became President, Carter served as a U.S. Naval officer, was a peanut farmer, served two terms as a Georgia State Senator and one as Governor of Georgia (1971–1975).
During Carter's term as President, two new cabinet-level departments were created: the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. He established a national energy policy that included conservation, price control, and new technology. In foreign affairs, Carter pursued the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal Treaties, the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II), and returned the Panama Canal Zone to Panama. Throughout his career, Carter strongly emphasized human rights. He took office during a period of international stagflation, which persisted throughout his term. The end of his presidential tenure was marked by the 1979–1981 Iran hostage crisis, the 1979 energy crisis, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (at the end of 1979), 1980 Summer Olympics boycott by the United States of the Moscow Olympics and the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.

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Jody Williams
Jody Williams (born 1950) is an American political activist known around the world for her work in banning antipersonnel landmines, her defense of human rights – and especially those of women, and her efforts to promote new understandings of security in today’s world.
She served as the founding coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) from early 1992 until February 1998. Prior to that work, she spent eleven years on various projects related to the wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
In an unprecedented cooperative effort with governments, UN bodies and the International Committee of the Red Cross, she served as a chief strategist and spokesperson for the ICBL, which she developed from two non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with a staff of one – herself – to an international powerhouse of 1,300 NGOs in ninety countries.
From its small beginning and official launch in 1992, Williams and the ICBL dramatically achieved the campaign’s goal of an international treaty banning antipersonnel landmines during a diplomatic conference held in Oslo in September 1997. Three weeks later, she and the ICBL were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At that time, she became the tenth woman – and third American woman – in its almost hundred-year history to receive the Prize.

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Joshua Matza
Joshua Matza (Hebrew: יהושע מצא‎, born 8 August 1931) is a former Israeli political figure and former president and CEO of State of Israel Bonds, a global enterprise that generates more than $1 billion in annual sales. Israel utilizes the funds for economic development projects.
Matza was recommended for the post in 2002 by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and then-Finance Minister Silvan Shalom. Matza served 18 years in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, as a member of the Likud party. He was a cabinet minister in the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, holding the portfolio of minister of health. Matza also served 20 years on the Jerusalem City Council, 10 of which were in the capacity of deputy mayor.
The Matza family first arrived in Palestine from Yanina in Greece, and settled in the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem's walled Old City. Matza was born in the city at a time when it was under the British mandate. Influenced by his family's attitude, Matza joined the Jewish underground group Lehi at age 14. During the night he posted anti-British flyers, and participated in paramilitary activities and helped hide weapons, sometimes in synagogues behind the arks where Torah scrolls were kept. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Jerusalem was the scene of intense fighting, and Matza participated in an operation that enabled Lehi fighters to blast their way into the Old City. The operation entailed planting a bomb outside the New Gate of the Old City walls. However, the plan was aborted when the bomb failed to detonate.

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José Ramos-Horta
José Manuel Ramos-Horta GCL (Portuguese pronunciation: [ʒuˈzɛ ˈʁɐmuz ˈoɾtɐ]; born 26 December 1949) was the President of East Timor from 20 May 2007 to 20 May 2012, the second since independence from Indonesia. He is a co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize and a former prime minister, having served from 2006 until his inauguration as president after winning the 2007 East Timorese presidential election. As a founder and former member of the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (FRETILIN), Ramos-Horta served as the exiled spokesman for the East Timorese resistance during the years of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor (1975 to 1999). While he has continued to work with FRETILIN, Ramos-Horta resigned from the party in 1988, becoming an independent politician.
After East Timor achieved independence in 2002, Ramos-Horta was appointed as the country's first foreign minister. He served in this position until his resignation on 25 June 2006, amidst political turmoil. On 26 June, following the resignation of prime minister Mari Alkatiri, Ramos-Horta was appointed acting prime minister by then president, Xanana Gusmão. Two weeks later, on 10 July 2006, he was officially sworn in as the second prime minister of East Timor. On 11 February 2008, Ramos-Horta was injured when he was shot during an assassination attempt.

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Józef Rotblat
Sir Joseph Rotblat,KCMG, CBE, FRS (born Józef Rotblat on 4 November 1908, died 31 August 2005), was a Polish-born, British-naturalised physicist.
His work on nuclear fallout was a major contribution to the agreement of the Partial Test Ban Treaty. A signatory of the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, he was secretary general of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs from its founding until 1973. In conjunction with the Pugwash Conferences, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for their efforts towards nuclear disarmament.
Józef Rotblat was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, on November 4, 1908, as one of seven children (two not surviving childbirth). His father Zygmunt built up and ran a nationwide horse-drawn carriage business, owned land and bred horses. Józef's early years were spent in what was a prosperous household but circumstances changed at the outbreak of World War I. Borders were closed and horses requisitioned, leading to the failure of the business and poverty of their family.

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Ken Starr
Kenneth Winston "Ken" Starr (born July 21, 1946) is an American lawyer and educational administrator who has also been a federal judge. He is best known for his investigation of figures during the Clinton administration.
Starr served as a federal Court of Appeals judge and also at another time as Solicitor General. He received the most publicity for his tenure as Independent Counsel while Bill Clinton was U.S. president. Starr was initially appointed to investigate the suicide death of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster and the Whitewater real estate investments of Bill Clinton. The three-judge panel charged with administering the Independent Counsel Act later expanded the inquiry into numerous areas including an extramarital affair that Bill Clinton had with Monica Lewinsky. After several years of investigation Starr filed the Starr Report which alleged that Bill Clinton had lied about existence of the affair during a sworn deposition. The allegation opened the door for the impeachment of Bill Clinton and the five-year suspension of Clinton's law license.

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Kim Dae-jung
Kim Dae-jung (3 December 1925 – 18 August 2009) was 15th President of the Republic of Korea from 1998 to 2003, and the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize recipient. He came to be called the "Nelson Mandela of Asia" for his long-standing opposition to authoritarian rule.
Kim was thought to have been born on 6 January 1924, but it is reported that he later changed this to 3 December 1925 to avoid conscription during the time when Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. Kim was born in Sinan in what was then the Jeolla province; the city is now in Jeollanam-do. Kim graduated from Mokpo Commercial High School in 1943 at the top of the class. After working as a clerk for a Japanese-owned shipping company during the Japanese occupation of Korea, he became its owner and became very rich. Kim escaped Communist capture during the Korean War.
Kim first entered politics in 1954 during the administration of Korea's first president, Syngman Rhee. Although he was elected as a representative for the National Assembly in 1961, a military coup led by Park Chung-hee, who later assumed dictatorial powers, voided the elections. He was able to win a seat in the House in the subsequent elections in 1963 and 1967 and went on to become an eminent opposition leader. As such, he was the natural opposition candidate for the country's presidential election in 1971. He nearly defeated Park, despite several handicaps on his candidacy which were imposed by the ruling regime.

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Leah Rabin
Leah Rabin (Hebrew: לאה רבין‎ née Schloßberg April 8, 1928 – November 12, 2000) was the widow of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995.
Born in Königsberg, East Prussia, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia), in 1933 Leah emigrated with her family to Mandate Palestine where she met her future husband, Yitzhak Rabin, at school. They married in 1948, the year of Israel's independence.
Yitzhak became Prime Minister in 1974 following Golda Meir's resignation, but in 1977 a US Dollar bank account (illegal at that time in Israel) held by Leah was exposed by Haaretz journalist Dan Margalit. As a result, her husband decided to take responsibility, resigned from office. This came to be known as the Dollar Account affair.
Leah supported the peace efforts of her husband in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and worked further for a solution after his assassination. She wrote a book about her memories of her husband, which was released in 1997, under the name Rabin: Our Life, His Legacy.

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Lech Wałęsa
Lech Wałęsa (commonly rendered Walesa) (Polish: [ˈlɛx vaˈwɛ̃sa] (

listen), English: /ˌlɛk vəˈwɛnsə/ or /wɔːˈlɛnsə/; born 29 September 1943) is a Polish politician, trade-union organizer, and human-rights activist. A charismatic leader, he co-founded Solidarity (Solidarność), the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, and served as President of Poland between 1990 and 1995.
Wałęsa was an electrician by trade, with no higher education. Soon after beginning work at the Gdańsk (then, "Lenin") Shipyards, he became a trade-union activist. For this he was persecuted by the Polish communist government, placed under surveillance, fired in 1976, and arrested several times. In August 1980 he was instrumental in negotiations that led to the ground-breaking Gdańsk Agreement between striking workers and the government, and he became a co-founder of the Solidarity trade-union movement. Arrested again after martial law was imposed and Solidarity was outlawed, upon release he continued his activism and was prominent in the establishment of the 1989 Round Table Agreement that led to semi-free parliamentary elections in June 1989 and to a Solidarity-led government.

wn.com/Lech_Wałęsa

Mairead Maguire
Mairead Maguire (born 27 January 1944), also known as Mairead Corrigan Maguire and formerly as Mairéad Corrigan, is a Northern Irishpeace activist. She co-founded, with Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown, the Community of Peace People, an organisation dedicated to encouraging a peaceful resolution of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Maguire and Williams were awarded the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize. Maguire has also won several other awards.
In recent years, she has criticized the Israeli government's policy towards Gaza, in particular to the naval blockade. In June 2010, Maguire went on board the MV Rachel Corrie as part of a flotilla that unsuccessfully attempted to breach the blockade.
Maguire was born into a Roman Catholic community in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the second of seven children – five sisters and two brothers. Her parents were Andrew and Margaret Corrigan. She attended St. Vincent's Primary School, a private Catholic school, until the age of 14, at which time her family could no longer pay for her schooling. After working for a time as a babysitter at a Catholic community center, she was able to save enough money to enroll in a year of business classes at Miss Gordon's Commercial College, which led her at the age of 16 to a job as an accounting clerk with a local factory. She volunteered regularly with the Legion of Mary, spending her evenings and weekends working with children and visiting interns at Long Kesh prison. When she was 21 she began working as a secretary for the Guinness brewery, where she remained employed until December 1976.

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Matan Vilnai
Matan Vilnai (Hebrew: מתן וילנאי‎, born 20 May 1944) is an Israeli politician and a former Major General in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). A member of the Independence party, he was appointed ambassador to China in 2012 after earlier having served as Minister for Home Front Defense.
Vilnai was born in Jerusalem in 1944. His father was Prof. Zev Vilnay, a pioneer in the sphere of Israeli geography and Land of Israel studies, from whom he inherited a love of nature and hiking. He was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces in 1966, serving in the Paratroopers Brigade and the elite reconnaissance unit Sayeret Matkal. He was deputy commander [1] of the assault force in Operation Thunderbolt, also known as the Entebbe Raid, to free Jewish and Israeli passengers taken hostage by Palestinian and German terrorists after their Air France plane was hijacked to Entebbe, Uganda. Vilanai led the assault team into the airport building, while another team secured the outside. As a major general, Vilnai was the head of the Manpower Directorate, as well as the Deputy Chief of Staff.

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Meir Amit
Meir Amit (Hebrew: מאיר עמית‎, 17 March 1921 – 17 July 2009) was an Israeli politician and general. He served as Director of the Mossad from 1963 to 1968 before entering politics and holding two ministerial positions.
Amit was born in Tiberias as Meir Slutsky during the Mandate era, cousin of the Russian poet, Boris Slutsky. At a young age, he joined kibbutz Alonim in the lower Galilee and enlisted in the Haganah. He fought for the Haganah during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He remained in the military and rose through the ranks to become a major general. During his military career he came to be regarded as a protege of Moshe Dayan. In the late 1950s Amit studied at Columbia Business School in New York, earning a business degree. After returning to Israel, Amit entered the Israeli intelligence community, first as a Major General at the head of IDF Intelligence in 1961, and then as Mossad Director in 1963. He was the only figure in Israel's history to hold the position of Mossad chief and head of military intelligence at the same time.

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Meir Sheetrit
Meir Sheetrit (Hebrew: מאיר שטרית‎, born 10 October 1948) is a Moroccan-born Israeli politician. He is currently a member of the Knesset for Kadima. He has served as Minister of the Interior, Minister of Housing & Construction, Minister of Finance, Minister of Justice, Minister of Transportation and Minister of Education, Culture & Sport.
Sheetrit was born in Ksar es Souk (now Er Rachidia), Morocco. His family immigrated to Israel in 1957. He earned a BA and an MA in Public Policy from Bar-Ilan University.
Sheetrit began his political career in 1974 as mayor of the city of Yavne, a position he held until 1987.
He was first elected to the Knesset in 1981 on the Likud list. He was re-elected in 1984, but lost his seat in 1988. That year he was elected treasurer of the Jewish Agency and served in this position until 1992, when he returned to the Knesset. In 1998 he was appointed Minister of Finance, serving until the fall of Benjamin Netanyahu's first government in 1999. He returned to the cabinet in 2001 as Minister of Justice. After being re-elected in 2003, he was appointed Minister in the Ministry of Finance, where he worked closely with then Minister of Finance Netanyahu who was spearheading a sweeping privatization reform. He was appointed Minister of Transportation in 2004, and later served as Minister of Education, Culture and Sport until 2006.

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Menachem Begin

Menachem Begin (help·info) (Hebrew: מְנַחֵם בֵּגִין‎‎, Polish: Mieczysław Biegun, Arabic: مناحيم بيغن‎ Munahayyim Beeghin, Russian: Менахем Вольфович Бегин Menakhem Vol'fovich Begin, 16 August 1913 – 9 March 1992) was a politician, founder of Likud and the sixth Prime Minister of the State of Israel. Before independence, he was the leader of the Zionist militant group Irgun, the Revisionist breakaway from the larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. He proclaimed a revolt, on 1 February 1944, against the British mandatory government, which was opposed by the Jewish Agency. As head of the Irgun, he targeted the British in Palestine.
Begin was elected to the first Knesset, as head of Herut, the party he founded, and was at first on the political fringe, embodying the opposition to the Mapai-led government and Israeli establishment. He remained in opposition in the eight consecutive elections (except for a national unity government around the Six-Day War), but became more acceptable to the political center. His 1977 electoral victory and premiership ended three decades of Labour Party political dominance. He probably served as Opposition Leader longer than anyone in the history of modern democratic politics.

wn.com/Menachem_Begin

Michael Hasani
Rabbi Ya'akov-Michael Hasani (Hebrew: יעקב-מיכאל חזני‎, born Ya'akov Kantrovich on 27 June 1913, died 2 July 1975) was an Israeli politician who served as Minister of Welfare during two spells in the early 1970s.
Born in Będzin in Poland (Russian Empire), Hasani studied at a yeshiva and was certified as a rabbi. He made aliyah in 1932 and was involved in the Haganah.
In 1951 he was elected to the Knesset on the Hapoel HaMizrachi list. He was re-elected in 1955, 1959 (by which time the party had merged into the National Religious Party), 1961, 1965 and 1969. In December 1969 he became Deputy Minister of Education and Culture, serving until 1 September 1970, when he was appointed Minister of Welfare. He remained minister after the 1973 elections, in which he retained his seat, but left the cabinet on 4 April 1974. He returned as Minister of Welfare in October that year, serving until his death in July 1975.

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Michael Oren
Michael B. Oren (Hebrew: מיכאל אורן; born Michael Scott Bornstein; 1955) is an American-born Israeli historian, author, and the Israeli ambassador to the United States. He has written books, articles, and essays on Middle Eastern history, and is the author of the best-selling Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present and Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which won the Los Angeles Times History Book of the Year Award. He was a Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and a contributing editor to The New Republic and the Shalem Center's quarterly journal, Azure.
Oren was born Michael Scott Bornstein in upstate New York, the son of Marilyn (née Goldstein), a marriage and family therapist, and Lester Milton Bornstein, a hospital director. His father was an officer in the U.S. Army who took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944 and fought in the Korean War. Oren grew up in West Orange, New Jersey in a Conservative Jewish household. As the only Jewish boy in a heavily Catholic neighborhood, he says he experienced antisemitism on a daily basis. In his youth, he was an activist in Zionist and Jewish youth groups such as USY and a gold medal winning athlete in the Maccabiah Games. At age 15, he made his first trip to Israel with youth movement Habonim Dror, working on Kibbutz Gan Shmuel.

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Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (Russian: Михаи́л Серге́евич Горбачёв, tr. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachyov; IPA: [mʲɪxɐˈil sʲɪrˈɡʲejəvʲɪtɕ ɡərbɐˈtɕof] (

listen); born 2 March 1931) is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the Soviet Union, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991. He was the only general secretary in the history of the Soviet Union to have been born during the Communist rule.
Gorbachev was born in Stavropol Krai into a peasant Ukrainian–Russian family, and in his teens operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. While he was at the university, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and soon became very active within it. In 1970, he was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom, First Secretary to the Supreme Soviet in 1974, and appointed a member of the Politburo in 1979. Within three years of the deaths of Soviet Leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo in 1985. Before he reached the post, he had occasionally been mentioned in western newspapers as a likely next leader and a man of the younger generation at the top level.

wn.com/Mikhail_Gorbachev

Mizrahi Jew
Mizrahi Jews or Mizrahim (Hebrew: מזרחים‎), also referred to as Adot HaMizrach (עֲדוֹת-הַמִּזְרָח) (Communities of the East; Mizrahi Hebrew: ʿAdot(h) Ha(m)Mizraḥ) are Jews descended from the Jewish communities of the Middle East, North Africa and the Caucasus. The term Mizrahi is used in Israel in the language of politics, media and some social scientists for Jews from mostly Arab-ruled geographies and adjacent, primarily Muslim-majority countries. This includes Jews from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Azerbaijan, Iran/Persia, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kurdish areas, Northern and Eastern Sudan, as well as Ethiopia, and within and nearby Israel. Sometimes, Sephardi Jews such as Jews from Morocco, Algeria, or Turkey are erroneously grouped into the Mizrahi category for some historical reasons.
Despite their heterogeneous origins, Mizrahi Jews generally practice rites identical or similar to traditional Sephardic Judaism, although with some differences among the minhagim of the particular communities. This has resulted in a conflation of terms, particularly in Israel, and in religious usage, where "Sephardi" is used in a broad sense to include Mizrahi Jews as well as Sephardim proper. Indeed, from the point of view of the official Israeli rabbinate, the Mizrahi rabbis in Israel are under the jurisdiction of the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel who, in most cases, is a Mizrahi Jew. Today they make up more than half of Israel's Jewish population, but before the mass immigration of 1,000,000 mostly Ashkenazi immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s they made up over 70% of Israel's Jewish population.

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Mordechai Bentov
Mordechai Bentov (Hebrew: מרדכי בנטוב‎, born Mordechai Gutgeld on 28 March 1900, died 18 January 1985) was an Israeli journalist and politician, and was one of the signatories of the Israeli declaration of independence.
Born in Grodzisk Mazowiecki (then part of the Russian Empire, today Poland, Bentov studied law for two years at the University of Warsaw and was one of the founding members and leaders of Hashomer Hatzair in Poland. He immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1920, and continued studying law in Jerusalem.
He was amongst the founders of Kibbutz Artzi, and was a member of Mishmar HaEmek kibbutz. By this time he had risen to the leadership of Hashomer Hatzair, and was one of its representatives in the Histadrut and the World Zionist Organization. He was also one of the Jewish Agency delegation to the United Nations in 1947.
On 14 May 1948 Bentov was one of the 37 people to sign Israel's declaration of independence, and was appointed Minister of Labour and Construction in the provisional government. In 1949 he was elected to the first Knesset as a member of Mapam. He was re-elected in 1951 and 1955, after which he was appointed Minister of Development, a post he held until 1961.

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Mordechai Maklef
Mordechai (Motke) Maklef (or Makleff) (Hebrew: מרדכי (מותקה) מקלף‎; 1920–1978) was the third Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and later, director-general of many important public companies in the Israeli economy.
Makleff was born in the village of Motza, near Jerusalem in the British Mandate of Palestine in 1920. His parents were among the founders of this first modern village outside Jerusalem, located along the road to Jaffa. During the 1929 Palestine riots, inhabitants of the neighboring Arab village of Qalunya attacked the Makleff home, which was located along the perimeter of Motza, and killed the entire family, except the young Mordechai, who managed to escape the massacre by jumping from a second story window. The murderers included a shepherd employed by the family and the local policeman, who was the only person in the area to own a gun. The murder shocked the Jewish settlers of Palestine, and was one of the most remembered rioting events. With his immediate family now dead, Mordechai Makleff was raised by relatives in Jerusalem and Haifa.

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Mordechai Namir
Mordechai Namir (Hebrew: מרדכי נמיר‎, born Mordechai Nemirovsky on 23 February 1897, died 22 February 1975) was an Israeli politician, who served as the mayor of Tel Aviv, a Knesset member and government minister, as well as being one of the heads of the Labour Zionist movement.
Namir was born in Bratolinbovka in Ukraine, (then Russian Empire) and studied at a heder before graduating from the Odessa University, where he studied law and economics. In 1924 he was arrested by the Soviet authorities for his work for Zionism, and upon his release made aliyah. In Mandate Palestine, he worked for the Davar newspaper.
Namir became the secretary of the Ahdut HaAvoda party in 1926, a position he held until 1930. From 1929 to 1935 he also served as the director of the statistics department in the Histadrut. From 1935 he was a member of Tel Aviv's city council and from 1936, secretary of the workers' union in the city. Additionally, he was a member of the Haganah command in the city and later in all of Mandate Palestine.

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Mordechai Nurock
Rabbi Dr Mordechai Nurock (Hebrew: מרדכי נורוק‎, born Markus Nurock on 7 November 1879, died 8 November 1962) was a Jewish politician and minister who served in both the parliaments of Latvia and Israel. He was also Israel's first Minister of Postal Services (a post today known as the Minister of Communications), though he only held the post for just under two months.
Born in Tukums in the Russian Empire (today in Latvia), Nurock attended universities in Russia, Germany and Switzerland, gaining a PhD in philosophy. He was also ordained as a rabbi, and replaced his father as rabbi of Jelgava in 1913 before moving to Russia in 1915.
A Zionist, he was a delegate at the sixth Zionist Congress in 1903 and helped Jewish refugees during World War I. He also joined the All-Russian Jewish Committee and established a religious Jewish group known as "Tradition and Freedom".
In 1921 he returned to Latvia, by now an independent state. The following year he was elected to the Saeima, and became the leader of the minorities' bloc. He retained his seat until the parliament was dissolved in 1934.

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Mordechai Tzipori
Mordechai Tzipori (Hebrew: מרדכי צפורי‎, born Mordechai Hankovich-Hendin on 15 September 1924) is a former Israeli politician who served as Minister of Communications from 1981 until 1984.
Born in Petah Tikva during the Mandate era, Tzipori attended a religious school in his hometown. In 1939 he joined the Irgun, and in 1945 was arrested by the British Authorities and exiled to Eritrea, Kenya and Sudan. Also he managed to escape from the detention camp in Eritrea, he was caught and imprisoned until 1948.
He became a professional soldier and served in the IDF from 1948 until 1976. During his stint in the army, he studied at the College for Command and Staff, graduating in 1959, as well as the University of Tel Aviv.
Between 1962 and 1965 he was an Armoured Battalion commander, becoming commander of the Armor School in 1968 and deputy commander of the Armor Corps in 1971. In 1973 he was appointed Commander of Command and Staff, becoming Deputy Head of Operations in the General Staff in 1974. He was demobilised in 1976 with the rank of Lieutenant General.

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Moshe Arens
Moshe Arens (Hebrew: משה ארנס‎, born 27 December 1925) is an Israeli aeronautical engineer, researcher and former diplomat and politician. A member of the Knesset between 1973 and 1992 and again from 1999 until 2003, he served as Minister of Defense three times and once as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Arens has also served as the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and was professor at the Technion in Haifa.
Born in Kaunas, Lithuania, Arens immigrated to the United States with his family in 1939 and became an American citizen. As a youth, Arens became a leader in the Betar youth movement. He studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and aeronautical engineering at the California Institute of Technology. During World War II, Arens served in the United States Army Corps of Engineers. After Israeli independence in 1948, Arens made aliyah and joined the Irgun. He later became a founding member of the Herut party which grew out of it.
Between 1957 and 1962 Arens worked as a Professor for aeronautics at the Technion. From 1962 until 1971 he was a Deputy Director General at Israel Aircraft Industries, and won the Israel Defense Prize in 1971. After the Yom Kippur War he entered politics and was elected to the Knesset as a member of Likud in the 1973 elections. After being re-elected in 1977, he became chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

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Moshe Baram
Moshe Baram (Hebrew: משה ברעם‎, 17 March 1911 – 5 December 1986) was an Israeli politician who served as a member of the Knesset between 1969 and 1977, and also as Minister of Labour and Minister of Welfare.
Baram was born in Zdolbuniv in the Russian Empire (today in Ukraine) in 1911, attending school in Kovno (now Kaunas in Lithuania). In his youth, he joined the HeHalutz Movement and "Freiheit-Dror", which was affiliated with the Poale Zion party.
In 1931 he made aliyah to Mandate Palestine. After arriving in the country, he worked in the construction industry and joined the Haganah. In 1934 he began working for the Jewish Agency, and in 1938 became a member of the Secretariat of the Jerusalem Branch of Mapai, and in 1943 was made the Secretary. He also served as a delegate to the Assembly of Representatives between 1944 and 1949. In 1948 Baram was elected Secretary of the Jerusalem Workers Council, and served as a Member of the Jerusalem City Council from 1955 until 1959.
In 1959 he was elected to the Knesset on Mapai's list. In 1965 Mapai became part of the Alignment, with Baram remaining a Knesset Member until 1977. In 1974, towards the end of his political career, Baram was made Minister of Labour, also taking over the Welfare Ministry portfolio shortly before the 1977 elections. The elections saw the Alignment's parliamentary representation halved, and Baram lost his seat. However, his son, Uzi Baram did win a seat on the Alignment's list, and went on to become Minister of Tourism and Minister of Internal Affairs before retiring in 2001.

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Moshe Carmel
Moshe Carmel (Hebrew: משה כרמל‎, 17 January 1911 – 14 August 2003) was an Israeli soldier and politician who served as Minister of Transportation for eight years.
Born in Mińsk Mazowiecki in the Russian Empire (today in Poland), Carmel emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1924 when he was 13 years old. He was a founding member of kibbutz Na'an, and was active in the HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed youth movement. Between 1939 and 1941 he was imprisoned by the British authorities. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli war, he was commander of the Carmeli Brigade, which was especially known for Operation Hiram.
He was elected to the third Knesset in 1955 as a member of Ahdut HaAvoda and was appointed Minister of Transportation. On 28 September 1956 he flew to Paris with Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres and Golda Meir where they had meetings with French Foreign Minister Christian Pineau. The purpose of the meetings was 'to clarify ... the possibilities of joint action against Egypt'.
On 29 October 1957 he suffered a broken arm after a 'Mills grenade' was thrown into the debating chamber of the Knesset. David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir were also injured. The attack was carried out by Moshe Dwek, whose motives were attributed to a dispute with the Jewish Agency, though he was also described as 'mentally unbalanced'. He retained his seat in the 1959 and 1961 elections, and was reappointed Minister of Transportation towards the end of the fifth Knesset in 1965. When Ahdut HaAvoda merged with Mapai to form the Alignment, Carmel joined the new party and retained his ministerial post in the sixth Knesset.

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Moshe Dayan
Moshe Dayan (Hebrew: משה דיין‎; 20 May 1915 – 16 October 1981) was an Israeli military leader and politician. The fourth Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (1953–58), he became a fighting symbol to the world of the new State of Israel. He went on to become Defense Minister and later Foreign Minister of Israel.
Moshe Dayan was born on Kibbutz Degania Alef near the shores of Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) in pre-Mandate Palestine. His parents were Shmuel and Devorah, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine.
He was the second child to be born on the kibbutz. He was named Moshe after Moshe Barsky, the first member of the kibbutz to be killed in an Arab attack. Soon after, his parents moved to Nahalal, the first moshav (settlement) to be established. Moshe attended the Agricultural School there.
At the age of 14, he joined the newly formed Jewish militia known as the Haganah. In 1938 he joined the Palestine Supernumerary Police and became a motorized patrol ("MAN") commander. One of his military heroes was the British pro-Zionist officer Orde Wingate, under whom he served in several Special Night Squads operations.

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Moshe Kahlon
Moshe Kahlon (Hebrew: משה כחלון‎, born 19 November 1960) is an Israeli politician who currently serves as a member of the Knesset for Likud and as Minister of Communications and Minister of Welfare & Social Services.
Kahlon was born in the Givat Olga neighbourhood of Hadera, the son of Libyan immigrants and one of seven children. He served in the Israel Defense Forces from 1978 to 1986, in the Ordnance Corps. After completing his army service he started a business of importing appliances for cars. He later studied political science and general studies at the University of Haifa, receiving a BA before going on to gain an LL.B from Netanya Academic College.
Kahlon was first elected to the Knesset in the 2003 elections, and was appointed Deputy Speaker of the Knesset. In the run up to the 2006 elections, he surprisingly won third place on Likud's list in the party's primaries. He retained his seat again in the 2009 elections after being placed sixth on the Likud list, and was appointed Minister of Communications on 31 March.

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Moshe Kaplinsky
Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky (Hebrew: משה קפלינסקי; born January 20, 1957), is the CEO of Better Place Israel. Most recently, he was Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces. He was previously head of the Israel Defense Force's Central Command, whose area of responsibility includes the West Bank. As Deputy Chief of the General Staff he was second in command of the Israel Defense Forces.
In August 2002, he took over as chief of the Central Command from Major General Yitzhak Eitan. As head of Central Command, Kaplinski was an ex officio member of the IDF general staff; he oversaw, among other things, area commanders for the northern and southern parts of the West Bank (referred to as Samaria and Judea, respectively).
Kaplinski is a veteran of the Golani Brigade. His previous positions include:
Kaplinski has a BA in economics and business management from Bar-Ilan University and an MBA from Tel Aviv University. He is a graduate of the US Army's Advanced Infantry Officers Course (Fort Benning, Georgia).

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Moshe Katsav
Moshe Katsav (Hebrew: משה קצב‎, born Musa Qasab (Persian: موسی قصاب)) is an Israeli politician. He served as the eighth President of Israel, a leading Likud member of the Israeli Knesset, and a minister in its cabinet.
The end of his presidency was marked by controversy, stemming from allegations of rape of one female subordinate and sexual harassment of others. Katsav resigned the presidency in 2007 as part of a plea bargain. Katsav later rejected the deal with prosecutors and vowed he would prove his innocence in court. In an unprecedented case, on 30 December 2010, Katsav was convicted of two counts of rape,obstruction of justice and other charges. On 22 March 2011, in a landmark ruling, Katsav was sentenced to seven years in prison. Katsav appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court of Israel. On 10 November 2011, the Supreme Court affirmed Katsav's conviction and punishment, rejecting possibly exculpatory evidence.
On 7 December 2011, Katsav arrived at Maasiyahu Prison in Ramla to begin serving his seven-year sentence.

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Moshe Shahal
Moshe Shahal (Hebrew: משה שחל‎, born 20 May 1934) is a former Israeli politician.
Born in Baghdad in Iraq, Shahal made aliyah in 1950. He studied economics and Political Science at the University of Haifa, before graduating with a law degree from Tel Aviv University.
He began his political career when elected to the Haifa Labor Council in 1964, a position he retained until 1971. Between 1964 and 1969, he was also a member of Haifa City Council. For the 1969 Knesset elections he was placed 57th on the Alignment's list, but missed out when the alliance won only 56 seats. Nevertheless, Shahal entered the Knesset on 1 September 1971 as a replacement for the deceased Mordechai Ofer.
He was re-elected in 1974, 1977, 1981, and between 1981 and 1984, served as a Deputy Speaker of the Knesset. After a fourth re-election in 1984, he was appointed Minister of Energy & Infrastructure. He was re-appointed to the post following the 1988 elections, serving until the Alignment pulled out of the coalition government in 1990.

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Moshe Sharett
Moshe Sharett (Hebrew: משה שרת‎, born Moshe Shertok (Hebrew: משה שרתוק) on 15 October 1894, died 7 July 1965) was the second Prime Minister of Israel (1953–55), serving for a little under two years between David Ben-Gurion's two terms.^{[citation needed]}
Born in Kherson in the Russian Empire (today in Ukraine), Sharett emigrated to Ottoman-controlled Palestine in 1906. In 1910 his family moved to Jaffa, and they became one of the founding families of Tel Aviv.
He graduated from the first class of the Herzliya Hebrew High School, even studying music at the Shulamit Conservatory. He then went off to Istanbul to study law at the university in Constantinople (now Istanbul University), the same university that Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and David Ben-Gurion studied at. However, his time there was cut short due to the outbreak of World War I. He subsequently served as a first lieutenant in the Turkish army, as an interpreter.
After the war, he worked as an Arab affairs and land purchase agent for the Assembly of Representatives of the Yishuv. He also became a member of Ahdut Ha'Avoda, and later of Mapai.

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Moshe Ya'alon
Moshe "Bogie" Ya'alon (born Moshe Smilansky on 24 June 1950) is an Israeli politician and former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces. He currently serves as a member of the Knesset for Likud, as well as the country's Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs.
Ya'alon was born as Moshe Smilansky and grew up in Kiryat Haim, a working class suburb of Haifa. He was active in the Labor Zionist youth movement "HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed" and joined a Nahal group named Ya'alon, a name he later adopted. His military service between 1968 and 1971 was in the nahal, and he later became a member of kibutz Grofit in the Arabah region near Eilat.
Following the Yom Kippur War in 1973, where Ya'alon served as a reservist, he rejoined the IDF and served in the Paratroopers Brigades and Sayeret Matkal.
Ya'alon was appointed a head of Military Intelligence in 1995 and commanding officer of Israel's Central Command, responsible for the West Bank, in 1998. He was in this position when the Second Intifada was launched in September 2000.

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Mother Teresa
Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta (Albanian: Nënë Tereza) as she is known to the Catholic Church, or Mother Teresa as she is commonly known, was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (pronounced [aɡˈnɛs ˈɡɔndʒa bɔjaˈdʒiu]). Although born on the 26 August 1910, she considered 27 August, the day she was baptized, to be her "true birthday". “By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus.” Mother Teresa died on 5 September 1997 and is not yet a Catholic Saint. In late 2003, the leaders of the church completed the process of beatification, the third step toward possible sainthood. A second miracle credited to Mother Teresa is required before she can be recognized as a saint by the Catholic church.
Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic religious congregation, which in 2012 consisted of over 4,500 sisters and is active in 133 countries. Members of the order must adhere to the vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, and the fourth vow, to give "Wholehearted and Free service to the poorest of the poor". The Missionaries of Charity at the time of her death had 610 missions in 123 countries including hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup kitchens, children's and family counselling programmes, orphanages and schools.

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Nancy Reagan
Nancy Davis Reagan (born Anne Frances Robbins; July 6, 1921) is the widow of former United States President Ronald Reagan and was First Lady of the United States from 1981 to 1989.
Nancy was born in New York City; her parents divorced soon after her birth and she grew up in Maryland, living with an aunt and uncle while her mother pursued acting jobs. As Nancy Davis, she was an actress in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, starring in films such as Donovan's Brain, Night into Morning, and Hellcats of the Navy. In 1952 she married Ronald Reagan, who was then president of the Screen Actors Guild, and they had two children. Nancy was the First Lady of California when her husband was Governor from 1967 to 1975. In that capacity, she began work with the Foster Grandparents Program.
Nancy Reagan became First Lady of the United States in January 1981 following her husband's election. She was criticized early in his first term largely due to her decision to replace the White House china, despite it being paid for by private donations. Nancy restored a Kennedy-esque glamor to the White House following years of lax formality, and her interest in high-end fashion garnered much attention, as well as criticism. She championed recreational drug prevention causes by founding the "Just Say No" drug awareness campaign, which was considered her major initiative as first lady. Always protective of her husband, more controversy ensued when it was revealed in 1988 that she had consulted an astrologer to assist in planning the president's schedule after the 1981 assassination attempt on her husband. She had a strong influence on her husband and played a role in a few of his personnel and diplomatic decisions.

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Natan Sharansky
Natan Sharansky (born 20 January 1948) (Hebrew: נתן שרנסקי‎, (Ukrainian: Натан Щаранський, Russian: Натан Щаранский) is a former Soviet refusenik and prisoner, Israeli politician, human rights activist and author.
Anatoly Borisovich Shcharansky (Ukrainian: Анатолій Борисович Щаранський, Russian: Анатолий Борисович Щаранский) (later Natan Sharansky) was born in Stalino, Soviet Union on 20 January 1948 to a Jewish family. He graduated with a degree in applied mathematics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. As a child, he was a chess prodigy. He performed in simultaneous and blindfold displays, usually against adults. At the age of 15, he won the championship in his native Donetsk. When incarcerated in solitary confinement, he claims to have maintained his sanity by playing chess against himself in his mind. Sharansky beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a simultaneous exhibition in Israel in 1996.
Natan Sharansky is married to Avital Sharansky and has two daughters, Rachel and Hannah. In the Soviet Union, his marriage application to Avital was denied by the authorities. They were married in a Moscow synagogue in a ceremony not recognized by the government, as USSR only recognized civil marriage and not church marriage.

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Nissim Dahan
Nissim Dahan (Hebrew: נסים דהן‎, born 7 May 1954) is a former Israeli politician who served as Minister of Health from 2001 until 2003.
Born in Morocco, Dahan's family made aliyah in 1955. He worked in the Ministry of Religious Affairs, becoming director of its organisations and institutions department. He was also a member of the Jerusalem Development Authority for 3 years.
In 1996 he was elected to the Knesset on Shas' list. He was re-elected in 1999, and was appointed Deputy Minister of Finance in Ehud Barak's government. He left the cabinet when Shas pulled out of the coalition in July 2000, but returned as Minister of Health when Ariel Sharon formed a new government following the 2001 election for Prime Minister. He briefly left the portfolio on 23 May 2002 when Shas pulled out of the government again, but returned on 3 June.
He retained his seat in the 2003 elections and was appointed Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, but Shas were left out of the government and he lost his ministerial portfolio. He lost his Knesset seat in the 2006 elections.

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Ophir Pines-Paz
Ophir Pines-Paz (Hebrew: אופיר פינס-פז‎, born 11 July 1961) is an Israeli former politician who served as Minister of Internal Affairs, Minister of Science, Culture & Sport and as a member of the Knesset for the Labor Party from 1996 until 2010.
Born to a Dutch father in Rishon LeZion, Pines-Paz graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and holds a M.A. in Public Policy from Tel Aviv University. He served as a Staff Sergeant in the Israel Defense Forces from 1979 to 1982. He is currently married with two children, and lives in Ra'anana, Israel. He is a member of the Masorti (Conservative synagogue) congregation in Ramot, Jerusalem.
Pines-Paz was first elected to the Knesset in 1996. He retained his seat in the 1999 elections, and served as chairman of the parliamentary ruling coalition and as the chairman of the One Israel faction between 1999 and 2001. From 2001 to 2003 he served as the General Secretary of Labor Party.
He was re-elected again in 2003, and in 2005 was appointed Internal Affairs Minister, serving in the cabinet until Labor pulled out of the government. After being re-elected in 2006 he was appointed Minister of Science, Culture, and Sport in Ehud Olmert's government. However, he resigned from the cabinet in November 2006] in protest against the nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu being added to the coalition; and was the only Labor Party minister to vote against the party coming into the government, stating in an interview:

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Ora Namir
Ora Namir (Hebrew: אורה נמיר‎, born 1 September 1930) is an Israeli former politician and diplomat who served as a member of the Knesset from 1974 until 1996, as well as holding the posts of Minister of the Environment and Minister of Labour and Social Welfare during the 1990s. She later became the country's ambassador to China and Mongolia.
Namir was born in Hadera during the Mandate era. She served as an officer in the IDF during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, before studying classics and English literature at Hunter College in New York City.
She served as secretary of Mapai's parliamentary group and the coalition administration during the second Knesset (1951–55), before becoming secretary to the Israeli delegation at the United Nations. Between 1967 and 1974 she was secretary-general of the Na'amat organisation's Tel Aviv branch.
In 1973 Namir was elected to the Knesset on the Alignment's list, and served as chairwoman of the Prime Minister's Committee for the Examination of the Status of Women in Israel from 1975 until 1978.

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Palestinian people
The Palestinian people, (Arabic: الشعب الفلسطيني‎, ash-sha‘b al-Filasṭīnī) also referred to as Palestinians (Arabic: الفلسطينيون‎, al-Filasṭīniyyūn), are descendants of the peoples who have lived in Palestine over the centuries. Today, Palestinians are largely culturally and linguistically Arab. Despite various wars and exoduses, roughly one half of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in the area encompassing the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Israel. In this combined area, as of 2004, Palestinians constituted 49% of all inhabitants, encompassing the entire population of the Gaza Strip (1.6 million), the majority of the population of the West Bank (approximately 2.3 million versus close to 500,000 Jewish Israeli citizens which includes about 200,000 in East Jerusalem), and 16.5% of the population of Israel proper as Arab citizens of Israel.
Throughout the aforementioned combined area, many are Palestinian refugees or internally displaced Palestinians, including more than a million in the Gaza Strip, three-quarters of a million in the West Bank,, and about a quarter of a million in Israel proper. Of the Palestinian population who live abroad, making up what is known as the Palestinian diaspora, more than half of these are stateless refugees lacking citizenship in any country. About 2.6 million of the diaspora population live in neighboring Jordan where they make up approximately half the population, 1.5 million live between Syria and Lebanon, a quarter of a million in Saudi Arabia, with Chile's half a million representing the largest concentration outside the Arab world.

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Paul Keating
Paul John Keating (born 18 January 1944) is a former Australian politician who served as the 24th Prime Minister of Australia from 1991 to 1996.
Keating was first elected to the House of Representatives at the 1969 election as the Labor member for Blaxland in New South Wales. He came to prominence as the reformist Treasurer of the government of Bob Hawke, which came to power at the 1983 election. In 1991, Keating defeated Hawke for the Labor leadership in a partyroom ballot and became prime minister. He went on to lead Labor to a record fifth consecutive victory at the 1993 election against the Liberal-National coalition led by John Hewson. Many had considered this election unwinnable for Labor due to poor polls for the 10-year-incumbent federal Labor government, and the effects of the early 1990s recession on Australia. Keating Labor lost the subsequent 1996 election to the Liberal/National Coalition led by John Howard.
Keating grew up in Bankstown, a working-class suburb of Sydney. He was one of four children of Matthew Keating, a boilermaker and trade-union representative of Irish Catholic descent, and his wife, Minnie. Keating was educated at Catholic schools; he was the first practising Catholic Labor prime minister since James Scullin left office in 1932. Leaving De La Salle College Bankstown (now LaSalle Catholic College) at 15, Keating decided not to pursue higher education, and worked as a clerk at the Electricity Commission of New South Wales and then as a trade union research assistant. He joined the Labor Party as soon as he was eligible. In 1966, he became president of the ALP’s Youth Council. In the 1960s Keating managed ‘The Ramrods’ rock band.

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Peretz Naftali
Peretz Naftali (Hebrew: פרץ נפתלי‎, born Fritz Naftali, 19 March 1888 – 30 April 1961) was a Zionist activist and Israeli politician who served in several ministerial portfolios in the 1950s.
Born in Berlin in Germany, Naftali joined the Social Democratic Party in 1911. He served in the German Army between 1911 and 1912, after which he started to work as a journalist on economic affairs, returning to the army for a spell in 1917–18 to fight in World War I. In 1921 he became editor of the economics department of the Frankfurter Zeitung, a post he held until 1926, when he became head of the eonomic research department of a trade union. In 1921 he also published a book, How to read the Economic Section of the Newspaper, which was a bestseller.
In 1925 he had joined the Zionism movement, and in 1931 was a delegate to the Zionist Congress. He made aliyah in 1933, initially working as a lecturer at the Technion, before becoming director general of Bank Hapoalim in 1938, a post he held until 1949. Between 1941 and 1948 he served as a member of the Assembly of Representatives.

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Peter Ueberroth
Peter Victor Ueberroth (/ˈjuːbərɒθ/; born September 2, 1937) is an American executive. He served as the sixth Commissioner of Major League Baseball from 1984 to 1989. He was recently the chairman of the United States Olympic Committee; he was replaced by Larry Probst in October 2008.
Although Ueberroth was born in Evanston, Illinois, he grew up in northern California. While attending Fremont High School, Ueberroth excelled in football, baseball, and swimming. After graduating from high school, Ueberroth attended San Jose State University on an athletic scholarship. While attending San Jose State he joined Delta Upsilon. He competed in the 1956 United States Olympic water polo trials but failed to make the team. Ueberroth ultimately graduated from San Jose State in 1959 with a degree in business.
After college, Ueberroth became a vice president and shareholder in Trans International Airlines (he was 22 years old at the time). Ueberroth worked at Trans International until 1963, when he founded his own travel company, which would become First Travel Corporation. By the time he sold First Travel in 1980, it was the second largest travel business in North America.

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Pinhas Lavon
Pinhas Lavon (Hebrew: פנחס לבון‎, 12 July 1904 – 24 January 1976) was an Israeli politician, minister and labor leader, best known for the Lavon Affair.
Lavon was born as Pinhas Lubianiker in Kopychyntsi in what was previously Galicia in Austria-Hungary (now in Ukraine). He studied law at the University of Lviv, where he organized Histadrut organizations in the region. He made aliyah and moved to Mandate Palestine in 1929.
Lavon was elected to the first Knesset in 1949, and served briefly as the leader of the Histadrut in 1949–50. He was appointed Minister of Agriculture in David Ben-Gurion's second government.
He retained his seat in the 1951 elections, and in 1952 was appointed Minister without Portfolio. Following Ben-Gurion's resignation, he was appointed Minister of Defense in 1954. However, he resigned from the cabinet after he was accused of authorizing an Israeli false flag terrorist bombing operation in Egypt, which came to be known as the Lavon Affair.
Nevertheless, he remained an MK following elections in 1955 and 1959 and returned to the leadership of the Histadrut from 1956 to 1961. Lavon was later "absolved" of any involvement in the Egyptian bombings. He retired from public life in 1964 after a long-standing discord with Ben-Gurion and died in Tel Aviv in 1976.

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Pope John Paul II
Blessed Pope John Paul II (Latin: Ioannes Paulus PP. II, Italian: Giovanni Paolo II, Polish: Jan Paweł II), born Karol Józef Wojtyła (Polish: [ˈkarɔl ˈjuzɛf vɔjˈtɨwa]; 18 May 1920, Wadowice, Republic of Poland – 2 April 2005, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City), reigned as Pope of the Catholic Church from 1978 until his death in 2005. He was the second-longest serving Pope in history and the first non-Italian since 1523.
John Paul II was acclaimed as one of the most influential leaders of the 20th century. He was instrumental in ending communism in his native Poland and eventually all of Europe. John Paul II significantly improved the Catholic Church's relations with Judaism, Islam, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Anglican Communion. Though criticised by progressives for upholding the Church's teachings against artificial contraception and the ordination of women, and by traditionalists for his support of the Church's Second Vatican Council and its reform, he was also widely praised for his firm, orthodox Catholic stances.

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Ra'anan Cohen
Dr Ra'anan Cohen (Hebrew: רענן כהן‎, born 28 February 1941) is a former Israeli politician who served as a government minister during the early 2000s.
Born in Baghdad in Iraq, Cohen made aliyah in 1951. During his youth he was a counsellor in the HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed youth movement, and was secretary of the Labor Party youth guard in Bnei Brak until 1970. He took Middle Eastern studies at Tel Aviv University, gaining a BA, MA and PhD in the subject. He served as chairman of Labor Party's Arab and Druze branch between 1975 and 1986. Between 1986 and 1992 he chaired the party's elections branch.
In 1988 he was elected to the Knesset on the Alignment's list. He was re-elected in 1992 (by which time the Alignment had merged into the Labor Party), and 1996. In December 1997 he was elected secretary-general of the party, winning 76% of the vote. He retained his seat in the 1999 elections (on the One Israel list), and in August 2000 was appointed Minister of Labor and Social Welfare in Ehud Barak's government following Shas' departure from the coalition government.

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Rafael Eitan
Rafael "Raful" Eitan (Hebrew: רפאל "רפול" איתן‎, born 11 January 1929 – 23 November 2004) was an Israeli general, former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces and later a politician, a Knesset member government minister. Born in Afula during the Mandate era, Eitan was raised in Tel Adashim, where he spent most of his life.
In 2005, he was voted the 24th-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.
Rafael Eitan was born in Afula, a city in the North District of Israel, in 1929. His father, Eliyahu, was one of the founders of the Jewish defense organization Hashomer. Rafael was raised in the settlement of Tel Adashim. Zvi Nishri (Orloff), a pioneer in modern physical education in Israel, was his uncle.
His father gave Rafael and his brothers and sisters a strict education.
Rafael married Miriam and together they had five children. They later divorced and he married Ofra Meirson.
Eitan was a junior officer in the Palmach, the Haganah's elite strike force and took part in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He fought in Jerusalem and received a head wound in the battle for the San Simon Monastery in April 1948. Later he served with the 10th Infantry Battalion in the Lachish-Negev region.

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Rafael Pinhasi
Rafael Pinhasi (Hebrew: רפאל פנחסי‎, born 1940) is a former Israeli who served as Minister of Communications between 1990 and 1992.
Born in Kabul in Afghanistan, Pinhasi's family made aliyah in 1950. He was amongst the founders of Shas, and served as deputy mayor of Bnei Brak.
In 1984 he was elected to the Knesset on Shas' list and in December 1985 was appointed Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Welfare. He retained his seat in the 1988 elections, and became a Deputy Speaker of the Knesset. In January 1990 he was appointed Deputy Internal Affairs Minister, and in June that year became Minister of Communications, serving until the 1992 elections.
He retained his seat in the election, and was appointed Deputy Minister of Finance in August, holding the post until he became Deputy Minister of Religious Affairs. He was forced to resign from the cabinet by the High Court of Justice in September 1993 after being convicted for making false declarations, a crime deemed to be of "moral turpitude".

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Reuven Rivlin
Reuven "Rubi" Rivlin (ראובן ריבלין [ʁeʔuˈven ʁivˈlin] (

listen); born 9 September 1939) is an Israeli lawyer and politician currently serving as speaker of the Knesset. He belongs to the conservative Likud party. A former Chairman of the Knesset, in 2007 he ran in the election for President as the Likud candidate. He withdrew after the first round of voting when it became clear that Kadima MK Shimon Peres had sufficiently broad support to inevitably win in a run-off.
Born in Jerusalem, he received an LL.B. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and worked as a lawyer. He is a descendant of the students of the Vilna Gaon and a member of the Rivlin family.
He was first elected to the 12th Knesset in 1988, and served as Likud chairman from 1988 to 1993. He lost his seat in the 1992 elections, but returned to the Knesset following the 1996 elections. Re-elected in 1999, he was appointed Minister of Communications in March 2001, serving until February 2003, when he was elected Knesset Speaker following the 2003 elections. During his term as speaker, he was criticized for breaking the tradition of political neutrality of the post; he was one of Ariel Sharon's harshest critics regarding the disengagement plan, and had a public confrontation with Aharon Barak, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, concerning the court's authority to declare legislation illegal.

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Rigoberta Menchú
Rigoberta Menchú Tum (born 9 January 1959, Laj Chimel, El Quiché, Guatemala) is an indigenous Guatemalan, of the K'iche' ethnic group. Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the plight of Guatemala's indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), and to promoting indigenous rights in the country. She received the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize and Prince of Asturias Award in 1998. She is the subject of the testimonial biography I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983) and the author of the autobiographical work, Crossing Borders.
Menchú is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. She has also become a figure in indigenous political parties and ran for President of Guatemala in 2007.
Menchú received a primary-school education as a student at several Catholic boarding schools. After leaving school, she worked as an activist campaigning against human rights violations committed by the Guatemalan armed forces during the country's civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996.
Her mother, Vicente Menchú was a member of the guerrilla movement Guerrilla Army of the Poor and died in 1980 during the Burning of the Spanish Embassy. In 1981, Rigoberta Menchú escaped to Mexico. In 1982, she narrated a book about her life to Venezuelan author and anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos, "Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia" (My Name is Rigoberta Menchu and this is how my Conscience was Born), which was translated into five other languages including English and French. The book made her an international icon at the time of the ongoing conflict in Guatemala.

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Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan (

/ˈrɒnəld ˈwɪlsən ˈreɪɡən/; February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was the 40th President of the United States, serving from 1981 to 1989. Prior to that, he was the 33rd Governor of California from 1967 to 1975 and a radio, film and television actor.
Born in Tampico, Illinois and raised in Dixon, Reagan was educated at Eureka College, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and sociology. After his graduation, Reagan moved first to Iowa to work as a radio broadcaster and then in to Los Angeles in 1937 where he began a career as an actor, first in films and later television. Some of his most notable films include Knute Rockne, All American, Kings Row, and Bedtime for Bonzo. Reagan served as president of the Screen Actors Guild, and later as a spokesman for General Electric (GE); his start in politics occurred during his work for GE. Originally a member of the Democratic Party, his positions began shifting rightward in the late 1950s, and he switched to the Republican Party in 1962. After delivering a rousing speech in support of Barry Goldwater's presidential candidacy in 1964, he was persuaded to seek the California governorship, winning two years later and again in 1970. He was defeated in his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 as well as 1976, but won both the nomination and general election in 1980, defeating incumbent Jimmy Carter.

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Roni Bar-On
Roni Bar-On (Hebrew: רוני בר-און‎, born 2 June 1948) is an Israeli politician and lawyer. He currently serves as a member of the Knesset for Kadima and is a former Minister of Finance.
Bar-On was born in Tel Aviv shortly after Israeli independence in 1948. After his national service in which he rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, he studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Whilst working as a lawyer he became a Justice in the Military Court of Appeals in the West Bank.
In 1997 he was appointed Attorney General, but resigned as a consequence of heavy criticism related to the 'Bar-On Hebron' scandal, which involved allegations against officials that they recommended Bar-On to the position in order to aid organized crime.
Prior to his political career, Bar-On served, among others, as Chairman of the Council for the Organisation of Sport Gambling (1998–2001), member of the Central Committee of the Israel Bar (1995–2003) and the Jerusalem Regional Committee of the Israeli Bar, as well as a member of the Council for the Administrative Courts, the Advisory Commission to the Government Companies Authority and the Public Defenders Commission. In addition, he served as Chairman of Beitar Jerusalem's committee, and also on the committee of the Israel Football Association.

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Roni Milo
Roni Milo (Hebrew: רוני מילוא‎, born 26 November 1949 as Ron Milikovsky) is an Israeli politician, lawyer and journalist, and a former Knesset member who held several ministerial positions. He was also mayor of Tel Aviv from 1993 to 1998.
Milo started his political activity during his student days, when he was Chairman of the Israeli Student Union. After graduating from Tel Aviv University with a law degree, he moved into politics with the Herut faction of Likud, and was Chairman of the party's Information Department. Elected to the ninth Knesset in 1977 as a Likud MK, Milo was the country's first ever Minister of the Environment in Yitzhak Shamir's government in 1988, before becoming Minister of Labor and Social Welfare in 1990, though he switched to Minister of Police in a cabinet reshuffle later in the year. He also became Chairman of the World Likud Organisation, and was editor of the Yoman HaShavua (lit. Diary of the Week) weekly publication.
In 1993 Milo was elected Mayor of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and resigned from the Knesset on 30 December 1993 to concentrate on his mayoral duties.

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Ruhollah Khomeini
Sayyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini (روح‌اللّه مصطفوی موسوی خمینی, Persian pronunciation: [ruːholˈlɑːhe muːsæˈviːje xomeiˈniː], 22 or 24 September 1902 – 3 June 1989) was an Iranian religious leader and politician, and leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution which saw the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. Following the revolution, Khomeini became the country's Supreme Leader — a position created in the constitution as the highest ranking political and religious authority of the nation – until his death.
Khomeini was a marja ("source of emulation") in Twelver Shi'a Islam, author of more than forty books, but is primarily known for his political activities. He spent more than 15 years in exile for his opposition to the last Shah. In his writings and preachings he expanded the Shi'a Usuli theory of velayat-e faqih, the "guardianship of the jurisconsult (clerical authority)" to include theocratic political rule by the Islamic jurists. This principle (though not known to the wider public before the revolution) was installed in the new Iranian constitution after being put to a referendum.

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Sallai Meridor
Sallai Meridor (Hebrew: סלי מרידור‎ b. 1955) is an Israeli politician. He was the Israeli Ambassador to the United States between 2005–2009, appointed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Prior to this, Meridor served as the Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel and the World Zionist Organization from 1999–2005, Treasurer of the Jewish Agency and WZO and as the Head of the Settlement Division of the WZO. Meridor also serves as the international chairman for the Jerusalem Foundation.

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Shaul Mofaz
Lt. General (Res.) Shaul Mofaz (born Shahram Mofazzakar) (Hebrew: שאול מופז‎, born 4 November 1948) is an Israeli politician who serves as the Deputy Prime Minister and a Minister without portfolio.
He joined the Israel Defense Forces in 1966 and served in the Paratroopers Brigade. He fought in the Six-Day War, Yom Kippur War, 1982 Lebanon War, and Operation Entebbe with the paratroopers and Sayeret Matkal, an elite special forces unit.
Mofaz became the 16th IDF's Chief of the General Staff, and served as Israel's Minister of Defense, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Transportation and Road Safety. He is the current Chairman of the Kadima Party, which is the largest party by seats in the current Knesset.
His birth name is Shahram Mofazzakar. He was born in Tehran (although his parents came from Isfahan), Mofaz immigrated to Israel with his parents in 1957. Upon graduating from high school he joined the Israel Defense Forces in 1966 and served in the Paratroopers Brigade. He participated in the Six-Day War, Yom Kippur War, 1982 Lebanon War, and Operation Entebbe with the paratroopers and Sayeret Matkal, an elite special forces unit.

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Shimon Peres

Shimon Peres (help·info) GCMG (Hebrew: שמעון פרס‎, born Szymon Perski; 2 August 1923) is the ninth and current President of the State of Israel. Peres served twice as the 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. Peres was elected to the Knesset in November 1959 and, except for a three-month-long hiatus in early 2006, served continuously until 2007, when he became President.
He held several diplomatic and military positions during and directly after Israel's War of Independence. His first high-level government position was as Deputy Director-General of Defense in 1952, and Director-General in 1953 through 1959. During his career, he has represented five political parties in the Knesset: Mapai, Rafi, the Alignment, Labor and Kadima, and has led Alignment and Labour. Peres won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize together with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat for the peace talks that he participated in as Israeli Foreign Minister, producing the Oslo Accords.

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Shimon Sheetrit
Prof. Shimon Shetreet (Hebrew: שמעון שטרית‎, born 1 March 1946) is a former Israeli politician who held several ministerial portfolios between 1992 and 1996.
Born in Erfoud in Morocco, Shetreet's family made aliyah to Israel in 1949. He studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, gaining an LLB and LLM. He then went on to the University of Chicago, where he gained an LLD.
In 1988 he was elected to the Knesset on the Alignment's list. After being re-elected in 1992 (by which time the Alignment had become the Labor Party), Shetreet was appointed Minister of Economics and Planning and Minister of Science and Technology. He lost the latter portfolio in June 1993 when it was given to Shulamit Aloni, but also became Minister of Religious Affairs in February 1992. When Shimon Peres formed a new government following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, he remained Minster of Religious Affairs, but lost the Economics and Planning portfolio.
In the 1996 elections Shetreet lost his seat and his place in the cabinet.

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Shlomo Benizri
Shlomo Benizri (Hebrew: שלמה בניזרי‎, born 7 February 1961) is an Israeli politician and member of the Shas party. He represented Shas in the Knesset between 1992 and 2008, serving as Deputy Health Minister, Minister of Health, and Labor and Social Welfare Minister during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Convicted for accepting bribes, breach of trust, conspiring to commit a crime and obstruction of justice, he is currently serving a 4-year prison sentence.
Born in Haifa, Benizri attended the Nesher Comprehensive High School, before being ordained as a rabbi at the ”Or Hachaim” Talmudic College in Jerusalem. He later was head of a Talmudic college and worked as a lecturer on Judaism.
He was first elected to the Knesset in 1992 on Shas' list, and served as the party's parliamentary group chairman during his first term. He was re-elected in 1996, and was appointed Deputy Minister of Health in Binyamin Netanyahu's government. He was re-elected again in 1999 after being placed fifth on the Shas list, and was appointed Minister of Health in Ehud Barak's government, serving in the cabinet until Shas left the government on 11 July 2000.

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Shlomo Hillel
Shlomo Hillel (Hebrew: שלמה הלל‎, born 23 April 1923) is an Iraqi-born Israeli diplomat and politician who served as Speaker of the Knesset, Minister of Police and Minister of Internal Affairs. He was also an ambassador to several countries in Africa.
Born in Baghdad in Iraq, Hillel immigrated to Mandate Palestine with his family in 1934 at the age of eleven. After graduating from the Herzliya Hebrew High School in Tel Aviv, he underwent agricultural training in kibbutz Degania Alef, and later Pardes Hana. Hillel was secretary of a Hebrew Scouts group which later established Kibbutz Ma'agan Michael. In 1945, Hillel and his colleagues worked at a Haganah munitions factory disguised as a laundry facility in the basement of the Ayalon Institute in Rehovot. He studied political science, economics and public administration at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He marred Temima, with whom he has two children, a son and a daughter, and currently lives in Ramat Denya in Jerusalem.
In 1946, Hillel flew to Baghdad on an Iraqi passport and remained there for one year. He visited Baghdad again in 1950 to negotiate the mass immigration of the Jews of Iraq, 120,000 of whom were airlifted to Israel in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah between 1950 and 1952. On these trips, he disguised himself as either a Frenchman or an Englishman. The airlift was made possible through the cooperation of Iran, which was a close ally of Israel at the time.

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Shulamit Aloni
Shulamit Aloni (Hebrew: שולמית אלוני‎, born 29 November 1928) is an Israeli politician and left-wing activist. She is a prominent member of the Israeli peace camp, founded the Ratz party and was leader of the Meretz party and served as Minister of Education from 1992 to 1993.
Born Shulamit Adler in Tel Aviv, her mother was a seamstress and her father was a carpenter, both descended from Polish Jewish rabbinical families. She was sent to boarding school during World War II while her parents served in the British Army. As a youth she was a member of the Hashomer Hatzair socialist Zionist youth movement and the Palmach. During the 1948 Israeli War of Independence she was involved in military struggles for the Old City of Jerusalem and was captured by Jordanian forces.
Following the establishment of the state of Israel, Aloni worked with child refugees and helped establish a school for immigrant children. She was a teacher while studying law. In 1952 she married Reuven Aloni and moved to Kfar Shmaryahu.

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Tal Russo
Aluf Tal Russo (born 1959) is a general in the Israel Defense Forces and currently the commander of the IDF Southern Command (since October 21, 2010).
Russo was born in kibbutz Hulata in northern Israel and drafted into the IDF in 1978. He served in an elite unit until 1981 when he left as a unit commander, but Russo quickly returned in 1982 and commanded a company of special forces during the 1982 Lebanon War. That same year he received his officer's ranks, and then continued to advance up the chain of command, spending much of his early career in special forces.
During the 2006 Lebanon War Russo served as the Assistant of the Head of the Operations Directorate in special missions. In October 2006 Chief of Staff Dan Halutz recommended Russo to replace Operations Directorate head Gadi Eizenkot, who had been promoted to head of Northern Command. Russo's promotion was subsequently approved by Defense Minister Amir Peretz.
In October 2010, Russo was appointed as commander of the Southern Command.

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Ted Turner
Robert Edward "Ted" Turner III (born November 19, 1938) is an American media mogul and philanthropist. As a businessman, he is known as founder of the cable news network CNN, the first dedicated 24-hour cable news channel. In addition, he founded WTBS, which pioneered the superstation concept in cable television. As a philanthropist, he is known for his $1 billion gift to support UN causes, which created the United Nations Foundation, a public charity to broaden support for the UN. Turner serves as Chairman of the United Nations Foundation board of directors.
Turner's media empire began with his father's billboard business, which he took over at 24 after his father's suicide. The business, Turner Outdoor Advertising, was worth $1 million when Turner took it over in 1963. Purchase of an Atlanta UHF station in 1970 began the Turner Broadcasting System. Cable News Network revolutionized news media, covering the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 and the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Turner turned the Atlanta Braves baseball team into a nationally popular franchise and launched the charitable Goodwill Games. He helped reinvent interest in professional wrestling when he owned one of the most popular wrestling companies of the middle to late 1990s known as World Championship Wrestling (WCW). The Monday night show that it put on was the highest rated on cable and helped boost Turner's channels of TNT and WTBS.

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Tzachi Hanegbi
Tzachi Hanegbi (Hebrew: צחי הנגבי‎, born 26 February 1957) is a prominent Israeli lawmaker and security expert. Hanegbi was the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee at the Knesset. Among the top cabinet positions he previously held are Minister of Justice, Minister of Internal Security and Minister of Intelligence and Nuclear Affairs. Hanegbi was also the minister in charge of Israel's strategic and security relations with the United States, and the minister in the Prime Minister's office supervising Israel's intelligence agencies – Mossad and Shin Bet – and overseeing Israel's Atomic Energy Agency.
Yitzhak (Tzachi) Hanegbi was born in Jerusalem in 1957. His mother is Geula Cohen, a prominent member of the 1940s underground group Lehi and later MK for Likud and Tehiya. His father, Immanuel Hanegbi, was the Operations Officer for the Lehi. After his military service in the paratroopers corps, Hanegbi studied international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As president of the Hebrew University Student Union in 1980, he received a six-month suspended sentence for quarrelling with Arab terrorists.^{[citation needed]} Despite this incident, he became president of the National Union of Israeli Students later that year, holding that title until 1982. After his undergraduate studies, he went on to study law, obtaining an LL.B.

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Udi Adam
Aluf Ehud "Udi" Adam (Hebrew: אהוד "אודי" אדם‎) (born January 22, 1958) was a General in the Israel Defense Forces and the former head of the Israeli Northern Command. Adam has received a B.A. in Psychology and Sociology from Bar Ilan University and later studied at the School for War Studies in Paris, where he received a M.A. in Strategic Studies. His father was General Yekutiel Adam, former Deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, who was killed during the Lebanon War on June 10, 1982.
Adam's military career began in 1976 when he joined the Israeli Armor Corps. Before becoming the Aluf in charge of the Northern Command in 2005, he was the Director of the Israeli Technological and Logistics Directorate. As head of the Northern Command, Adam led and coordinated Israeli forces against Hezbollah during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. On August 8, 2006, IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Moshe Kaplinsky was surprisingly appointed to the Northern Command as a special representative of the Chief of Staff in response to criticism by the government over the Command's handling of the conflict. Adam announced his resignation on September 13, amid continuing criticism of the war's conduct.

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Uri Milstein
Uri Milstein (Hebrew: אורי מילשטיין‎; born 1940) is an Israeli military historian and poet.
Uri Milstein was born in Tel Aviv to Avraham Milstein, a volunteer in the British army in World War II, and Sarah Milstein, a kindergarten teacher. He studied at Hayil school in Tel Aviv's Yad Eliyahu neighborhood, Hadassim youth village and a high school in Tel Aviv. In 1958, he was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces and served in the 890th Airborne Battalion of the Paratroopers Brigade as a soldier, squad commander and combat medic. Before being discharged, deputy commander of the brigade, Rafael Eitan, appointed him as the historian of the paratroopers. He served as a medic in the Six Day War, the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War, and did his reserve duty in the history department of the Israeli Air Force.
Milstein is married to the actress Shifra (Ben David) Milstein, with whom he has two daughters. His daughter Dalit is the co-founder and director of Notzar Theater.
After completing his service in the IDF in 1960, he studied economics, philosophy and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He wrote his PhD on religion and legislation in Israel. After the Six-Day War, he published War of the Paratroops, and at the beginning of 1973 he published a military history of the early days of Israeli statehood, In Blood And Fire Yehuda. In the 1980s, he taught military history at the IDF Command and Staff College. In 1989, Milstein published the first volume of his series on the War of Independence, in which he alleged flawed functioning of commanders who were considered heroes in Israel. In 1993, he published Crisis and Its Conclusion, criticizing the functioning of the IDF in the Yom Kippur War.

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Uri Sagi
Uri Sagie (Hebrew: אורי שגיא‎; born 1943) was an Israeli general (retired) who held several prominent posts including command of the Golani Brigade, of Israel's Northern Command, and the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate.
Uri Sagie was born in Kfar Bialik to a family who had been living in Israel for several generations. He was a commander of a platoon in Battalion 51 during the Six Day War. He climbed the ranks of the IDF and became commander of the Golani Brigade. During the 1982 Lebanon War he was in charge Operations Command within the IDF's General Staff. In 1983 he was promoted to the rank of Aluf and given charge of the Northern Command. In 1986 till 1991 he was in command of GOC Army Headquarters, and in 1991-1995 he was in charge of the Military Intelligence Directorate. He resigned from the IDF in 1995 due to a conflict between him and the Chief of General Staff.
In 1996 he joined the Israeli Labor Party, but during the primaries that year failed to secure a place in the party's list for the upcoming elections. In December 1999, then, Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak put him in charge of negotiations with Syria for a peace treaty. The negotiations failed as Syria refused to enter direct negotiations until Israel withdrew from the Golan Heights as a pre-condition. In 2000-2003 Uri Sagi was the CEO of Mekorot, Israel's national water company.

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Uzi Baram
Uzi Baram (Hebrew: עוזי ברעם‎, born 6 April 1937) is an Israeli former politician, who served as a member of the Knesset between 1977 and 2001, and was Minister of Tourism and Minister of Internal Affairs in the 1990s.
Uzi Baram was born in Jerusalem during the Mandate era. His father, Moshe Baram served as Minister of Labour and Minister of Welfare, and was a Knesset member for Mapai and the Alignment. His mother, Grazia, was born in Aleppo, Syria. Baram grew up in Jerusalem's Nahalat Ahim neighborhood. Baram earned a BA in political science and sociology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During his studies, he was chairman of the Students Union.
Baram was elected to the Knesset in 1977 on the Alignment list, an election in which his father lost his seat. Re-elected in 1981, 1984, 1988 and 1992 (by which time the Alignment had become the Labor Party, he was appointed Minister of Tourism in Yitzhak Rabin's government in July 1992. In February 1995 he also became Minister of Internal Affairs, serving until June that year when David Libai was appointed to the post. When Shimon Peres formed a new government following Rabin's assassination, he remained Minister of Tourism.

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Uzi Dayan
Uzi Dayan (Hebrew: עוזי דיין‎) (born 1948) is an Aluf (res.) in the Israel Defense Forces and an Israeli politician. He is the nephew of General Moshe Dayan.
Nephew of Moshe Dayan, Grandson of Shmuel Dayan and cousin of Assi Dayan, Yael Dayan and Yehonatan Geffen.his own father, Zorik, was killed in the Battle of Ramat Yohanan in April of the year he was born. His mother Mimi remarried in March 1950 after having met Moshe Rabinovitch in Rome the previous summer, and they would go on to have two children of their own, Dan (b. 1951) and Michal (b. 1956). Dayan was raised in HaYogev, joined the army, and spent 15 years in the Sayeret Matkal. He eventually commanded the unit, served as head of Central Command, Deputy Chief of Staff, and headed the Israeli National Security Council (2003-2005) before forming the Tafnit party to run in the 2006 legislative elections. He and his party later joined Likud in mid-2008.
Dayan was an undergraduate at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he studied under Robert Aumann and received a B.Sc. in mathematics and physics. He subsequently studied at Stanford University, earning an M.Sc. in operations research. Dayan has a wife Tamar and three children.

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Victor Shem-Tov
Victor Shem-Tov (Hebrew: ויקטור שם-טוב‎, Bulgarian: Виктор Шемтов, Viktor Shemtov; born 1 February 1915) is a former Israeli politician who held several ministerial portfolios in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Born in Bulgaria to a family of Samokov goldsmiths, Shem-Tov mostly lived in the capital Sofia and was a member of the Maccabi Youth movement. He made aliyah in 1939, the same year in which he joined Hashomer Hatzair. He became a member of the Jerusalem Workers' Council in 1946, and was chairman of the Bulgarian Immigrants Association between 1949 and 1950.
In 1961 he served on the Histadrut's actions committee. In the same year he was elected to the Knesset on Mapam's list. He retained his seat in the 1965 elections, and was also voted onto Jerusalem's City Council. During the Knesset term Mapam joined the Alignment alliance.
Despite losing his seat in the 1969 elections, Shem-Tov was appointed Minister without Portfolio in Golda Meir's government in December 1969. In July 1970 he became Minister of Health. He also failed to win a seat in the 1973 elections, but retained his place in the cabinet. When Yitzhak Rabin formed a new government in June 1974 following Meir's resignation, he was also appointed Minister of Welfare, though he held the post only until October that year.

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Wadie Haddad
Wadie Haddad (1927 – March 28, 1978), also known as Abu Hani, was a Palestinian leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's armed wing. He was responsible for organizing several civilian airplane hijackings in support of the Palestinian cause in the 1960s and 1970s.
Haddad was born to Palestinian Christian (Orthodox Christian) parents in Safed, in what is today northern Israel, in 1927. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War his family's home was destroyed and his family fled to Lebanon. He studied medicine at the American University of Beirut, where he met fellow Palestinian refugee, George Habash. Together they helped found the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), a pan-Arabist and Arab socialist grouping aiming to create the State of Palestine and unite the Arab countries.
After graduating, he relocated with Habash (a paediatrician) to Amman, Jordan, where they established a clinic. He worked with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in 1956, but due to his Palestinian nationalist activism he was arrested by the Jordanian authorities in 1957. In 1961, he managed to escape to Syria. Haddad argued for armed struggle against Israel from 1963 onwards, and succeeded in militarizing the ANM.

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William B. Quandt
William B. Quandt (born 1941) is an American scholar, author, professor and member of the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. He previously served as senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and as a member on the National Security Council in the Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter administrations. He was actively involved in the negotiations that led to the Camp David Accords and the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty. His areas of expertise include Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, the Peace Process, and U.S. Foreign Policy.
Quandt was born in 1941 in Los Angeles, California. He received his BA in International Relations from Stanford University in 1963, and his Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT in 1968. He has received several research grants, including ones from the Social Science Research Council (1966–1968), and the Council on Foreign Relations (1972–1973). He was also an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, worked at the Rand Corporation in the Department of Social Science from 1968–1972, and taught at UCLA and MIT.

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Ya'akov Ben-Yezri
Ya'akov Ben-Yezri (Hebrew: יעקב בן-יזרי‎, born 1 January 1927) is an Israeli politician. He served as a Knesset member on behalf of Gil and as the country's Minister of Health between 2006 and 2009.
Ben-Yezri was born in Fes in Morocco, and made aliyah to Israel on 30 November 1949. In 1955 he was elected to Pardes Hana local council, serving until 1963. In 1958 he became a clerk at Clalit health services, a job he worked in until 1993. He also served as a regional director for the company between 1974 and 1993. He is also a former national chairman of the Health Funds' Workers Organization and chairman of the Health Funds' Pensioners Organization.
He was voted into the 17th Knesset in the 2006 elections. Since 4 May 2006, he has served as the country's Minister of Health. Ben-Yezri, a confessed smoker, later caused controversy when he lit up whilst being interviewed on television.
He was placed fourth on the Gil list for the 2009 elections, but the party failed to cross the electoral threshold, and he lost his seat.

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Ya'akov Margi
Ya'akov Margi (Hebrew: יעקב מרגי‎, born 18 November 1960) is an Israeli politician who currently serves as a member of the Knesset for Shas and as the country's Minister of Religious Services.
Margi was born in Morocco and brought to Israel during Operation Yakhin in 1962.
Between 1993 and 2003 he served as chairman of the local religious council in Beersheba. Since 2001 he has been the director general of Shas. He was first elected to the Knesset in 2003. After retaining his seat in the 2006 elections, Margi served as group chairperson of the party's faction at the Knesset. He also served briefly as chairman of the House Committee.
He retained his seat again in the 2009 elections, having been placed sixth on the Shas list, and was appointed Minister of Religious Services in the Netanyahu government.
Margi lives in Sde Tzvi. He is married and a father of two.
During Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Israel, he wrote a letter to the pontiff demanding that he clearly condemn the purveyors of Holocaust denial and antisemitism.

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Ya'akov Tzur
Ya'akov Tzur (Hebrew: יעקב צור‎, born Ya'akov Steinberg on 4 April 1937) is a former Israeli politician who held several ministerial portfolios in the 1980s and 1990s.
Born in Haifa during the Mandate era, Tzur studied bible and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Between 1955 and 1957 he was part of the Yotvata settlement group, and in 1957 became a member of kibbutz Netiv HaLamed-Heh. He worked as a teacher in schools in Givat Brenner and Kfar Menachem, before serving as director of the education department of HaKibbutz HaMeuhad between 1972 and 1974. In 1976 he became the movement's secretary, overseeing its 1979 merger into the United Kibbutz Movement i (of which he served as secretary until 1981).
In 1981 he was elected to the Knesset on the Alignment's list. Re-elected in 1984, he was appointed Minister of Immigrant Absorption. Following the 1988 elections he became Minister of Health, serving until the Alignment withdrew from the government in March 1990.
Although he lost his seat in the 1992 elections, he was appointed Minister of Agriculture in Yitzhak Rabin's government, serving until 1996.

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Yaakov Dori
Yaakov Dori (1899–1973) (Hebrew: יעקב דורי‎) was the first Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Born in the present day Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire) as Yakov Dostrovsky (Russian: Яков Достровский), son of Tzvi and Myriam, his family emigrated to Ottoman Palestine following the anti-Jewish pogrom in Odessa in 1905. Upon completing high school at the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa, he enlisted in the Jewish Legion of the British Army during World War I. Following the war he studied engineering at the University of Ghent. When he returned to Palestine in 1926 he joined the Haganah and adopted the underground name of "Dan". In Haganah he was the commander of the Haganah Forces of Haifa.
In 1939, Dori was appointed Chief of Staff of the Haganah, a position he held until 1946. As CoS Haganah it was Yaakov Dori's duty to take the Haganah from a diffuse self defense organisation to a model army. From 1946 to 1947 he also headed the Palestinian Jewish delegation sent to purchase arms in the United States.

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Yaakov Edri
Ya'akov Edri (Hebrew: יעקב אדרי‎, also spelt Edery or Edrey, born 25 November 1950) is an Israeli politician and member of the Knesset for Kadima. Formerly Minister of Immigrant Absorption, Minister of Health and a Minister without Portfolio, Edri is the Minister of Negev and Galilee Development in the current government.
Born in Morocco, Edri emigrated to Israel in 1959. He attended the University of Haifa, where he gained a BA in political science and an MA in public administration.
Between 1989 and 2003, he served as mayor of Or Akiva, where he currently resides. In 2003, he was elected to the Knesset on the Likud list. On 10 March 2003, he was appointed Deputy Minister of Internal Security. In late November 2005, he resigned from Likud and joined Kadima. On 18 January 2006 he was appointed Minister of Health and the Minister for the Development of the Negev and the Galilee.
Edri retained his seat in the 2006 elections, and on 27 July was named Minister without Portfolio responsible for Jerusalem Affairs. As part of a cabinet reshuffle in July 2007 he became both Minister of Immigrant Absorption and Minister of Negev and Galilee Development. He lost the former portfolio on 14 July 2008 when Eli Aflalo was appointed to the post.

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Yair Naveh
Yair Naveh (Hebrew: יאיר נוה‎, born September 5, 1957) is a Major General in the Israel Defense Forces and is the current Deputy Chief of the General Staff. In 1975, he was drafted into the IDF where he served in all positions in the Golani Infantry Brigade from Company Commander to Brigade Commander. He lives in Zikhron Ya'akov.
Naveh was previously the head of Israeli Home Front Command until nominated by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to his post as Central Command chief. It is believed by some Israelis that Sharon nominated Naveh because he is the highest ranked religious officer and that as head of Central Command, he would be forced to carry out the evacuation of West Bank settlements in 2005.
Naveh holds a Bachelors degree in History and Political Science, as well as a Masters degree in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies.
Naveh predicted that King Abdullah would fall and that he would be Jordan's last king, drawing an angry reaction from Jordan, for which Israel had to apologize on Naveh's behalf.

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Yasser Arafat
Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini (Arabic: محمد ياسر عبد الرحمن عبد الرؤوف عرفات القدوة الحسيني‎‎; 24 August 1929 – 11 November 2004), popularly known as Yasser Arafat (Arabic: ياسر عرفات‎) or by his kunya Abu Ammar (Arabic: أبو عمار‎, 'Abū `Ammār), was a Palestinian leader and a Laureate of the Nobel Prize. He was Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), President of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), and leader of the Fatah political party, which he founded in 1959. Arafat spent much of his life fighting against Israel in the name of Palestinian self-determination. Originally opposed to Israel's existence, he modified his position in 1988 when he accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242. Arafat and his movement operated from several Arab countries. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Fatah faced off with Jordan in a brief civil war. Forced out of Jordan and into Lebanon, Arafat and Fatah were major targets of Israel's 1978 and 1982 invasions of that country.

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Yehuda Avner
Yehuda Avner (born 1928) is an Israeli former prime ministerial advisor and diplomat. He served as personal secretary and speechwriter to Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Golda Meir and Levi Eshkol, and as Israeli Ambassador to Australia and the United Kingdom.
Yehuda Avner (originally Haffner) was born in Manchester, England in 1928. He was active in the Religious-Zionist youth movement, Bnei Akiva, and was committed to helping build a Jewish State in Palestine. In his book The Prime Ministers, he recalled the antisemitism he saw and experienced in Britain, including antisemitic rioting in the aftermath of the Sergeants affair. Upon high school graduation in 1947, moved to Jerusalem, then part of British Mandatory Palestine to participate in the second Machon L'Madrichei Chutz La'Aretz.
Avner fought in the Siege of Jerusalem during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In 1949, he was amongst the founders of Kibbutz Lavi, a religious kibbutz located in Israel's Galilee region. He temporarily moved back to Britain to work for the Bnei Akiva movement as National Director (Mazkir) before returning to Israel in 1954.

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Yehuda Leib Maimon
Yehuda Leib Maimon (Hebrew: יהודה לייב מימון‎, born Yehuda Leib Fishman on 11 December 1875, died 10 July 1962, also known as Yehuda Leib Hacohen Maimon) was an Israeli rabbi, politician and leader of the religious Zionism movement, originating from Bessarabia.
Born in 1875 in Mărculeşti, Bessarabia (then part of the Russian Empire, now in Moldova), Maimon studied in a number of yeshivot and received rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein, the author of the Aruch HaShulchan. He was one of the founders of the Mizrachi movement in 1902. By this time Maimon had moved to the Russian Empire, where he was arrested several times for Zionist activity. He was a delegate to the ninth Zionist Congress in 1909, and attended every one until Israeli independence in 1948.^{[citation needed]}
In 1913 Maimon moved to Palestine (then part of the Ottoman Empire), but was expelled during the First World War. He moved to the United States, where he organised the Mizrachi movement. After returning to Mandate Palestine (now under British control) in 1919, Maimon became leader of Mizrachi in the country and together with Abraham Isaac Kook he helped establish the Chief Rabbinate. He was elected to the board of the Jewish Agency in 1935, but was imprisoned by the British in Latrun in 1946.^{[citation needed]}

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Yekutiel Adam
Yekutiel "Kuti" Adam (Hebrew: יקותיאל "קותי" אדם‎) (November 3, 1927 – June 10, 1982) was an Israeli general and former Deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces.
He was born in Tel Aviv, Israel to Yehuda and Elisheva Adam (formerly Adamov). He was named after his grandfather, who was killed in combat in 1919. His family were Mountain Jews from the Caucasus region.
At the age of 15, Yekutiel joined the Haganah. At 20, he became a commander.
On May 1, 1948, he was one of the commanders who captured the Palestinian village Salame, to the south of Tel Aviv. He later joined an elite Haganah unit that conducted raids into enemy territory.
In March, 1950, Adam married and built a house in Tel Aviv. At that time, he became an officer in the IDF, with the rank of lieutenant. Adam rose quickly through the ranks. In 1952, he became a captain in the Givati Brigade. Then he went on to command the Be'er Sheva bloc as a lieutenant colonel.
He went on to study in the war academy in France in 1964-66 and returned to assume the rank of colonel. In the Six-Day War, he served under Ariel Sharon, proving his worth. Following the war, he became commander of the Golani Brigade. The Golani Brigade was responsible for keeping the peace in the north during the War of Attrition. During this time, Adam was promoted to brigadier general and served as the vice commander of the IDF's Northern Command until the end of the Yom Kippur War.

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Yigael Yadin
Yigael Yadin (Hebrew: יִגָּאֵל יָדִין‎‎, born Yigael Sukenik (Hebrew: יגאל סוקניק) on 21 March 1917, died 28 June 1984) was an Israeli archeologist, politician, and the second Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces.
Yadin was born in 1917 to noted archeologist Eleazar Sukenik and educationalist and women's rights activist Hasya Feinsod Sukenik. He joined the Haganah at age 15, and served there in a variety of different capacities. In 1946, however, he left the Haganah following an argument with its commander Yitzhak Sadeh over the inclusion of a machine gun as part of standard squad equipment.
He was a university student when, in 1947, shortly before the State of Israel declared its independence, he was called back to active service by David Ben-Gurion. He was Head of Operations during Israel's War of Independence, and was responsible for many of the key decisions made during the course of that war. In June 1948 he threatened to resign during the Generals' Revolt during which he accused Ben-Gurion of attempting "to transform the army as a whole into an army of one political party (Mapai)".

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Yigal Allon
Yigal Allon (Hebrew: יגאל אלון‎, 10 October 1918 – 29 February 1980) was an Israeli politician, a commander of the Palmach, and a general in the IDF. He served as one of the leaders of Ahdut HaAvoda party and the Israeli Labor party, and acting Prime Minister of Israel, and was a member of the Knesset and government minister from the 10th through the 17th Governments.
Allon was born in Kfar Tavor in the Ottoman Empire. In 1937 he graduated from Kadoorie Agricultural High School, and joined kibbutz Ginosar.
He died in Afula on 29 February 1980 and was buried on the shore of Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee) in the cemetery of Kibbutz Ginosar.
Allon commanded a field unit of the Haganah and then a mobile patrol in northern Palestine during the Arab riots of 1936–39. During this period he participated in several operations of the Special Night Squads (SNS), under the command of Orde Charles Wingate and H.E.N. Bredin. In 1941 he became one of the founding members of the Palmach. That same year he took part in the British invasion of Lebanon and Syria. In 1943 he became the Deputy Commander of the organization, and served in this post until 1945, when he became Commander in Chief.

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Yigal Amir
Yigal Amir (Hebrew: יגאל עמיר‎, born May 23, 1970) is the Israeli assassin of Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin. The assassination took place on November 4, 1995 at the conclusion of a rally in Tel Aviv. Amir is currently serving a life sentence for murder plus six years for injuring Rabin's bodyguard, Yoram Rubin, under aggravating circumstances. He was later sentenced to an additional 8 years for conspiracy to murder.
Yigal Amir was born to a religious Yemenite Jewish family in Herzliya, Israel. His mother, Geula, was a kindergarten teacher, and his father, Shlomo, was a sofer. Yigal Amir attended a Haredi elementary school in Herzliya and a high school yeshiva in Tel Aviv. He then joined the Israel Defense Forces as a Hesder student, combining army training in the Golani Brigade with religious study at Yeshivat Kerem B'Yavneh.
Amir was a law and computer science student at Bar-Ilan University and a right-wing radical who had strenuously opposed Rabin's signing of the Oslo Accords. During his studies at Bar-Ilan University, he was active in organizing protest rallies.

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Yisrael Bar-Yehuda
Yisrael Bar-Yehuda (Hebrew: ישראל בר-יהודה‎, 15 November 1895 – 15 November 1965) was a Zionist activist and Israeli politician.
Born Yisrael Idelson in Konotop in the Russian Empire (now Sumy Oblast, Ukraine) in 1895, Bar-Yehuda attended an Academic High School and the Mine Engineering Institute in Ekaterinoslav. In 1909 joined Tze'irei Zion (later to be merged into Hashomer Hatzair) and was made a member of its central committee in Russia in 1917. He was Secretary of the Central Committee of the “Socialist Zionists”, where he met and married Beba Idelson (whom he would later divorce). In 1922 they were arrested by the Soviet authorities and exiled to Siberia. In 1924, thanks to an intercession by Maxim Gorki's wife, their banishment was converted to deportation to Mandate Palestine. They traveled to Lithuania and from there to Berlin by way of Danzig. For the next two years in Berlin they were active in establishing the World Union of Socialist Zionists and became the Movement's Secretary.

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Yisrael Barzilai
Yisrael Barzilai (Hebrew: ישראל ברזילי‎, born Yisrael Izenberg on 1 October 1913, died 12 June 1970) was an Israeli politician who served as a government minister during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s.
Born in an area that was later to become part of Poland), Barzilai joined Hashomer Hatzair at the age of 11. In 1932 he moved to Paris to study, before making aliyah to Mandate Palestine in 1934. In Palestine he joined the HeHalutz movement, and in 1938 was elected head of the independent settlements department of Kibbutz Artzi. In 1939 he was one of the founders of kibbutz Negba.
In 1947 he became secretary of the World Union of Mapam. Between 1948 and 1951 he worked as the Israeli consul in Poland. After returning to Israel, he served as political secretary of Mapam between 1953 and 1955.
He was first elected to the Knesset on Mapam's list in 1955, and was appointed Minister of Health in David Ben-Gurion's government. In November 1958 he also became Minister of Postal Services after the National Religious Party withdrew from the government. After the 1959 elections he continued as Minister of Health.

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Yisrael Yeshayahu
Yisrael Yeshayahu Sharabi (Hebrew: ישראל ישעיהו שרעבי‎, 20 April 1908 – 20 June 1979) was a Yemen-born Israeli politician, minister and the fifth Speaker of the Knesset.
Born in Sa'dah, Yemen, Yeshayahu was a member of the Dor Daim movement, before making aliyah in 1929. He became head of the Yemenite Immigrant and Eastern Jewry Department of the Histadrut in 1934, a position he retained until 1948 when he started organizing the immigration of Yemenite Jews, including Operation Magic Carpet.
He worked as a Hitler impersonator from 1939 to 1945, earning himself the affectionate title 'Jewish Hitler'.
A member of the Tel Aviv Workers Council, he was also a delegate to the Zionist Congress and the Assembly of Representatives. He served Deputy Secretary of Government and communications officer between the Government and the Knesset between 1948 and 1949.
He narrowly missed out on being elected to the first Knesset in 1949, but entered it in 1951 as a replacement for Aryeh Sheftel and retained his seat in every election until 1977. He was appointed Minister of Postal Services in 1967, a role he retained until the 1969 elections. After serving as Secretary General of the Labour Party between 1971 and 1972, he was made Speaker of the Knesset in 1972, a role he retained until 1977.

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Yitzhak Cohen
Rabbi Yitzhak Cohen (Hebrew: יצחק כהן‎, born 2 December 1951) is an Israeli politician who has served as a member of the Knesset for Shas since 1996, and is the current Deputy Minister of Finance.
Born in Ashkelon, Cohen served on the city's council and was its former deputy mayor.
He served as Secretary-General of Shas' educational institution (El HaMa'ayan). He was first elected to Knesset in 1996. In his time in Knesset he has served on the Finance Committee, Labor and Welfare Committee, Committee on Foreign Workers, Foreign Affairs & Defense Committee, Joint Committee for the Defense Budget, Special Committee for Discussion of the Security Service Law Substitute Member, Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, and the House Committee. He has also been a member of the Knesset Forum on the Middle East lobby, and is currently a member of the Lobby for Ethiopian Immigrants.
He became the Minister of Religious Affairs in July 1999, and resigned a year later. He served as the Deputy Minister of Finance from 2001–2003. In 2006 he was appointed the Minister without Portfolio, and is in charge of religious councils, a role converted to Religious Services Minister in January 2008.

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Yitzhak Gruenbaum
Yitzhak Gruenbaum (Polish: Izaak Grünbaum, Hebrew and Yiddish: יצחק גרינבוים, born 1879 died 1970) was a noted leader of the Zionist movement among Polish Jewry between the two world wars and of the Yishuv in Mandatory Palestine, and the first Interior Minister of Israel.
Gruenbaum was born in Warsaw, Poland. While a student of jurisprudence, he began activities on behalf of the Zionist movement and engaged in journalism. He served as editor of several periodicals widely circulated among Polish Jewry, including the Hebrew Ha-Zefirah and the Hebrew weekly Ha-Olam. Under his editorship, the Yiddish daily, Haynt, took on a pro-Zionist slant.
On the political scene in Poland, Gruenbaum headed the Al Hamishmar radical Zionist faction. In 1919 he was elected to the Sejm (Polish parliament), where, together with Apolinary Hartglas, he organized a "Jewish bloc" that united most of the Jewish parties. He was the moving force in forming a collaboration with other minority parties represented in the Sejm, including Germans, Ukrainians, and others, to form a Bloc of National Minorities alliance in 1922, that acted to protect the rights of minority populations in Poland. His efforts brought about an increase of Jewish representation in the Sejm, which was accompanied by a rise in antisemitism. Gruenbaum was known for his courageous and militant stance against antisemitism and on behalf of minorities' rights, while equally critical of the ultra-orthodox party Agudat Israel and Jewish lobbying.

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Yitzhak Hofi
Yitzhak Hofi (Hebrew: יצחק חופי‎) (born 25 January 1927) was a General, member of the Palmach, the head of the Israeli Northern Command and the director of Mossad.
Hofi was born in Tel Aviv. He joined the Haganah in 1944 and commanded a company in the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. He continued to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces in a variety of command, staff and training posts. He headed the Northern Command of the IDF during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. He was Acting Chief of Staff for a brief period in 1974, before retiring from the military and taking the post of director of Mossad. Before that he was a general in the Israeli Defense Forces in charge of the Northern Command. In July 1976, Hofi lobbied strongly for a rescue mission to be mounted to save the large number of Israeli passengers on a hijacked Air France airliner flown to Entebbe International Airport in Uganda. In order to facilitate the resulting Operation Entebbe, Hofi directed Mossad katsas to survey the airport, and used contacts in Kenyan intelligence to allow the refueling of Israeli planes in Nairobi on the return journey.

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Yitzhak Levy
Rabbi Yitzhak Levy (Hebrew: יצחק לוי‎, born 6 July 1947) is an Israeli rabbi and politician who served as a member of the Knesset for the National Religious Party (NRP) and the Ahi faction of the National Union between 1988 and 2009. Between 1998 and 2002 he was NRP leader, and also held several ministerial portfolios.
Levy was born in Casablanca in Morocco in 1947, the son of Daniel-Yitzhak Levy, who later served as a member of the Knesset for the National Religious Party. The family immigrated to Israel in 1957. He studied at Yeshivat Kerem B'Yavneh and Yeshivat Hakotel, where he received rabbinical ordination. He served as an officer in the IDF, achieving the rank of major. He was a member of the Bnei Akiva Executive and World Secretariat, and Secretary-General of the National Religious Movement from 1986 to 1995. He was the Rabbi of the Bnei Akiva Talmudic College in Kfar Maimon and was among the initiators of the establishment of the Jewish quarter in Jerusalem, and one of the founders of the Israeli settlement of Elon Moreh in the West Bank.

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Yitzhak Moda'i
Yitzhak Moda'i (Hebrew: יצחק מודעי‎, born 17 January 1926, died 22 May 1998) was an Israeli politician, who served five terms in the Knesset for Likud and then the New Liberal Party over the course of a 20-year career.
Born in Tel Aviv during the Mandate era, Moda'i attended High School in Tel Aviv before studying at the Technion in Haifa, later becoming chairman of the Technion Graduates Association in 1961. He went on to study law at the Tel Aviv branch of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and law and economics at the London School of Economics.
In 1961 he joined the Liberal Party, and was a member of its directorate between 1965 and 1968. From 1969 until 1973 he served as a member of Herzliya's municipal council.
He was first elected to the Knesset on the Likud list (the Liberal Party had become a faction within Likud, alongside Herut). He was re-elected in 1977, and served as Minister of National Infrastructure in Menachem Begin's first government, also holding the post of Minister of Communications between 15 January 1979 and 22 December 1980.

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Yitzhak Navon
Yitzhak Navon (Hebrew: יצחק נבון‎, born 9 April 1921) is an Israeli politician, diplomat, and author. He served as the fifth President of Israel between 1978 and 1982 as a member of the center-left Alignment party. He was the first Israeli president to be born in Jerusalem, then within the British Mandate for Palestine, and the first not to have been born in and made aliyah from the Russian Empire.
In 2005, he was voted the 108th-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.
Born in Jerusalem, Navon is a descendant of a Sephardi family of rabbis. On his father's side, he is descended from Spanish Jews who settled in Turkey after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. The family (Baruch Mizrahi family or Al Mashraki) moved to Jerusalem in 1670. On his mother's side, he is descended from the renowned kabbalist Haim Ben Attar. The Ben-Atar family came from Morocco to Jerusalem in 1884.

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Yitzhak Rabin

Yitzhak Rabin (help·info) (Hebrew: יִצְחָק רַבִּין ‎‎ IPA: [jitsˈχak ʁaˈbin]; March 1, 1922 – November 4, 1995) 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.
In 1994, Rabin won the Nobel Peace Prize together with Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat. He was assassinated by right-wing Israeli radical Yigal Amir, who was opposed to Rabin's signing of the Oslo Accords. Rabin was the first native-born prime minister of Israel, the only prime minister to be assassinated and the second to die in office after Levi Eshkol.
Rabin was born in Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine to Nehemiah and Rosa (née Cohen), two immigrants of the Third Aliyah, the third wave of Jewish immigration to Israel from Europe. Nehemiah Rubitzov was born in the Ukrainian village Sydorovychi near Ivankiv in 1886. His father died when he was a child, and he worked to support his family from a young age. At the age of 18, he emigrated to the United States, where he joined the Poale Zion party and changed his surname to Rabin. In 1917, Nehemiah went to the British Mandate of Palestine with a group of volunteers from the Jewish Legion.

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Yitzhak Rafael
Yitzhak Rafael (Hebrew: יצחק רפאל‎, born 5 July 1914, died 3 August 1999) was an Israeli politician who served as Minister of Religions in the mid-1970s.
Rafael was born in Sabov in Galicia in 1914, and attended high school in Poland. During his youth he was a member of the Torah and Work youth movement, and founded a local branch of the Bnei Akiva youth movement.
He made aliyah to Mandate Palestine in 1935 and worked as a teacher in Jerusalem. He attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, gaining an MA in Humanities. He went on to study at the New York Theological Seminary, where he was awarded a doctorate in literature.
He worked for the Jewish Agency and was director of the department of Craftsman and Small Business. Between 1940 and 1947 he edited a small journal. He was a member of the Hagana and represented Hapoel HaMizrachi in the Assembly of Representatives in 1944. During the 1948 war he was a member of the Jerusalem Emergency Committee. Between 1948 and 1953 he was a member of the Jewish Agency's board, and headed its aliyah department, where he was responsible for the large influx of Jewish refugees (numbering over 685,000 between 1948 and 1951), rejecting calls to put a limit on numbers.

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Yitzhak-Meir Levin
Rabbi Yitzhak-Meir Levin (Hebrew: יצחק-מאיר לוין‎, born 30 January 1893, died 7 August 1971) was an Haredi (ultra-orthodox Jewish) politician. He had political roles in Poland and Israel. One of 37 people to sign the Israeli declaration of independence, he served in several Israeli cabinets, and was a longtime leader and Knesset minster for Agudath Israel and related parties.
Born in Góra Kalwaria (known as Ger in Yiddish) in the Russian Empire (today in Poland), Levin studied at yeshivas, before being certified as a rabbi.
A founder of Agudath Israel in Poland, he was elected to Warsaw Community Council as a representative of the organisation in 1924, and five years later was elected to the World Agudath Israel presidium. In 1937 he was elected as one of the two co-chairmen of the organisation's executive committee. Between 1937 and 1939 he was a member of the Sejm, the Polish parliament, representing Agudath Israel. In 1940 became the sole chairman.
He was also involved in founding the Beis Yaakov school system for religious Jewish girls.

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Yoav Galant
Aluf Yoav Galant (Hebrew: יואב גלנט‎; born November 1958) is a general in the Israel Defense Forces and a former commander of the Southern Command.
Galant was initially chosen in to succeed Gabi Ashkenazi as the next Chief of General Staff in 2011 by Defense Minister Ehud Barak and approved by the Israeli government However, his appointment was later cancelled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Barak following months of scandal surrounding his appointment due to allegations that he had seized public lands for his personal use near his home.
Galant was born in November 1958 in Jaffa, Israel. His mother, Fruma, was a Holocaust survivor and his father, Michael, served in the Givati Brigade in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, including the Samson's Foxes unit. Michael participated in Operation Yoav and named his son for the operation. Galant received a B.A. in Business and Finance Management from the University of Haifa.
Galant lives in Moshav Amikam. He is married to Claudine, a retired IDF lieutenant colonel, and they have a son and two daughters.

wn.com/Yoav_Galant

Yom-Tov Samia
Maj. Gen. (res) Dr Yom Tov Samia is the former head of the Israel Defense Forces' Southern Command from January 2001 to December 2003, ending 29 years of military service as a Major General. Dr. Samia holds a Ph.D in Sociology and Political Science.
In 1998 he won the Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies's Tshetshik Prize for Israel's Security for his research on "The Organizational Climate of the IDF's Field Units."
Maj. Gen. (res) Samia was President & CEO of the BARAN Group, is currently (2008) President of "Yam Deshers" LTD, President and CEO of Israel Corp (Biofuels), S. B. Security, Katz Logistics, Orgad Holding, E.D.S. Isarel, Girit Celadon Israel (Gates and Checkpoints systems)
Maj. Gen. (res.) Dr. Yom Tov Samia writes for various magazines on issues of national security, such as this 2007 article from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs entitled Weapons Smuggling from Egypt to Gaza: What Can Egypt and Israel Do? [1]
He is also noted having questioned Israel's initial claim of responsibility and contracting an independent investigation of the Muhammad al-Durrah incident while he was commander of the Southern Command in 2000.

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Yoram Aridor
Yoram Aridor (Hebrew: יורם ארידור‎, born 24 October 1933) is an Israeli former politician, who served as a member of the Knesset from 1969 until 1988, as well as holding two ministerial posts.
Born in Tel Aviv, Aridor studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and practiced law while being active in the Herut movement. He was first elected to the Knesset in 1969 as a member of Gahal, an alliance of Herut and the Liberal Party. Following the 1977 elections he became a deputy minister in Menachem Begin's government.
Aridor's first ministerial appointment was the Minister of Communications, in 1981. In this position, Aridor immediately restored television color broadcasting. In the 1970s, color bursts (the signals encoding colors) were actively removed from IBA transmissions, in an attempt to discourage the population from buying new television sets. Aridor's action led to an increase of his popularity, and boosted his political career.
Two weeks later he was appointed the Minister of Finance, and again took a populist approach, lowering taxes on automobiles and household appliances. As such, his days as finance minister were called the "Merry Aridor Days". The lowering of inflation in Israel during his first years in office is attributed in part to this policy, leading to an increase in government's income from taxes. In subsequent years however, the inflation rose sharply (from 102% in 1981 to 191% in 1983), and as a countermeasure Aridor proposed to peg the Israeli shekel to the US dollar at a fixed exchange rate. He resigned his position on 15 October 1983 due to widespread criticism of his "dollarization plan".

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Yosef Almogi
Yosef Aharon Almogi (Hebrew: יוסף אהרון אלמוגי‎, 5 May 1910 – 2 November 1991) was an Israeli politician who served as a member of the Knesset between 1955 and 1977, as well as holding several ministerial posts.
Born Josef Karlenboim in Hrubieszów in the Russian Empire (today in Poland), he joined the Dror movement in 1924 and moved to Mandate Palestine in 1930. He served as a commander of the Haganah in Kfar Saba, Tel Aviv (1936) and Haifa (1937). In 1940 he enlisted in the British Army, and fought in Greece. He was captured and spent the remainder of the War in a German POW camp.
Upon returning to Israel after the war, Almogi became active in politics and joined David Ben-Gurion's Mapai. He was active in the Haifa Workers Council, serving as Alternate Secretary from 1947 to 1951 and then Secretary from 1951 to 1959. He was the General Secretary of Mapai from 1959 to 1961.
First elected to the Knesset in the 1955 elections, Almogi was made Minister without Portfolio after the 1961 elections, before taking over the roles of Minister of Housing and Minister of Development in October 1962. When Levi Eshkol replaced Ben-Gurion as PM in 1963, Almogi kept both positions.

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Yosef Burg
Yosef Shlomo Burg (Hebrew: יוסף שלמה בורג‎, born 31 January 1909, died 15 October 1999) was an Israeli politician. In 1949, he was elected to the first Knesset, and served in many ministerial positions for the next 40 years. He was one of the founders of the National Religious Party.
Yosef Shlomo Burg was born in Dresden, Germany. He attended the Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin and the University of Berlin from 1928 to 1931. He received a Doctorate in mathematics and logic from the University of Leipzig in 1933. He continued to study at the Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin and was ordained as a rabbi in 1938.
While at the University of Leipzig, he joined the Young Mizrahi religious Zionist movement. He arranged Jewish prayer services in private homes after German synagogues were burned, and worked underground to help Jews escape to England and the Netherlands. His mother and grandmother died in Nazi concentration camps.
In 1939, he immigrated to Mandate Palestine. He worked as teacher at the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium in Tel Aviv before moving to Jerusalem. There he become a research fellow at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Burg lived in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem. His son, Avraham Burg, was speaker of the fifteenth Knesset.

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Yosef Sapir
Yosef Sapir (Hebrew: יוסף ספיר‎; January 27, 1902 – February 26, 1972) was an Israeli politician and Knesset member of the 1st to 7th Knessets. He served as head of the General Zionists and was a founding member of the Gahal party.
Sapir was born in Jaffa in 1902, during Ottoman period. Between 1940 and 1951, he served as the mayor of Petah Tikva, where a major street (part of Road 481) has been named after him. Shortly after his tenure, Sapir joined the national government at the end of 1952 as the Health Minister and went on to become the Minister of Transportation in 1953 until 1955.
In Levi Eshkol's emergency government formed on the eve of the Six-Day War, Sapir served as a Minister without Portfolio and assumed the post of Minister of Trade and Industry in Golda Meir's government, until Gahal left the coalition on August 6, 1970.
Karmei Yosef, a communal settlement founded in 1984 between Ramle and Beit Shemesh, was named in his honor.

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Yosef Serlin
Yosef Serlin (Hebrew: יוסף סרלין‎, 24 February 1906 – 15 January 1974) was a Zionist activist, lawyer and Israeli politician.
Serlin was born in Białystok in the Russian Empire (now in Poland), where he attended a Hebrew High School. He studied law at the University of Warsaw and was certified as a lawyer in 1929. He was active in the Zionist Movement in Poland and was chairman of the Federation of Academic Zionists in Warsaw. He was made personal secretary to Nahum Sokolow in 1930. He was also a member of the Central Committee of Radical Zionists in Poland.
In 1933 he immigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine and worked as a lawyer in Tel Aviv. He was one of the founders of the General Zionists and later deputy chairman of the World Confederation of General Zionists Association. He was also a member of the Zionist Actions Committee.
After the establishment of the State of Israel In 1948 he was a member of the Provisional State Council. He was then elected to the first through fourth Knessets for the General Zionists. In 1954 he joined Yosef Sapir and Simha Erlich to tighten their grip on the party. However, 1957 saw a schism between him and Sapir and a decline of his power within the party. In 1961 he became one of leaders of the Liberal Party, for which he was elected to the fifth Knesset. The Liberal Party then merged into Gahal, for which he was elected to the sixth and seventh Knessets. He was a member of the House, Labor, Constitution, Law and Justice, Economic Affairs, and Finance Committees. He was also deputy Speaker of the Knesset.

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Yossi Beilin
Dr. Yosef "Yossi" Beilin (Hebrew: יוסי ביילין‎, born in Petah Tikva on 12 June 1948) is a left-wing Israeli politician and a former Knesset member, Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister and Justice Minister, representing both the Labor Party and Meretz-Yachad, of which he served as chairman between 2003 and 2006. He is best known for his involvement with the Oslo accords, the Geneva Initiative and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in general. His signed expositions on Israeli political and social current events are frequently carried in the left-of-centre daily newspaper Haaretz and the right-of-centre daily newspaper Israel HaYom.
The majority of Beilin's political career, from 1977 until 2003 is associated with the Labour party. He served as its spokesman from 1977 until 1984, at which point his career in the public service began. He was a Cabinet Secretary until 1986 and a Director General of the Foreign Ministry until 1986-1988. In 1988 he was elected to the Knesset in which he was to serve until 1999. During this period he was Deputy Finance Minister (1988–1990) and Deputy Foreign Minister (1992–1995) under Shimon Peres. His long time involvement with Shimon Peres earned him the derogatory nickname "Peres' poodle" in the early 1990s, a term coined by Peres' political rival, Yitzhak Rabin.

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Yossi Peled
Yossi Peled (Hebrew: יוסי פלד‎, born 18 January 1941) is an Israeli general and politician, the former Aluf of the Northern Command in the Israel Defense Forces. He currently serves as a member of the Knesset for Likud.
Yossi Peled was born Jozef (Jefke) Mendelevich in Poland. ("Jefke," or Little Joe, is the diminutive form of the Flemish nickname for Jozef/Joseph). During World War II, his family fled to Belgium, and his father entrusted him and his sister to a Catholic family. All of his family except his mother died in Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust. After the war, his mother reclaimed him, and they made aliyah to what became Israel with the assistance of the Jewish Brigade.
Peled studied history at Tel Aviv University, gaining a BA, and later settled in kibbutz Negba.
Peled served in the Israel Defense Forces for 30 years. During the Six-Day War, Peled was a company commander in the 9th Battalion of the 7th Armored Brigade of the 84th Armored Division, under General Israel Tal. In the War of Attrition, he served as a battalion commander on the Suez Canal.

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Yossi Sarid
Yossi Sarid (Hebrew: יוסי שריד‎, born 24 October 1940) is a left-wing Israeli news commentator and former politician. He served as a member of the Knesset for the Alignment, Ratz and Meretz between 1974 and 2006. A former Minister of Education and Minister of the Environment, he led Meretz between 1996 and 2003.
Born in Rehovot, Sarid served in the Artillery Corps and as a Military Correspondent during his national service in the IDF. He went on to work as a media aide to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.
He was first elected to the Knesset in 1973 on the Alignment list. He was re-elected in 1977, 1981 and 1984. After the Alignment agreed to join a national unity government with Likud in 1984, Sarid left the party on 22 October to join Shulamit Aloni's Ratz. He was re-elected on the Ratz list in 1988.
In 1992, Ratz merged with Shinui and Mapam to form Meretz. The new party won 12 seats in the elections that year and joined Yitzhak Rabin's coalition. Sarid was appointed Minister of the Environment, a position he kept when Shimon Peres formed a new government after Rabin's assassination in 1995.

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Yuli Tamir
Yael "Yuli" Tamir (Hebrew: יולי תמיר‎, born 26 February 1954) is an Israeli academic and former politician who served as a member of the Knesset for the Labor Party between 2003 and 2010, and as Minister of Immigrant Absorption and Education.
Born in Tel Aviv (some sources state Ramat Gan), Tamir served in Aman's 848 Unit during her national service, and during the Yom Kippur War, she served as an officer in an outpost on the Sinai. She received a BA in Biology and an MA in Political Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received a PhD in Political Philosophy from Oxford. Between 1989 and 1999, she was a philosophy lecturer in Tel Aviv University and a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of Jerusalem, Princeton and Harvard universities.
Tamir was one of the founders of Peace Now in 1978, and between 1980 and 1985, she was an activist for Ratz. From 1998 until 1999, she was chairwoman of the Israeli Association for Civil Rights. From 1995, she became active in the Labour Party. Although Tamir failed to win election to the Knesset in the 1999 election, she was appointed Minister of Immigrant Absorption by Ehud Barak. She was elected to the Knesset in the following 2003 election, and served on the finance, constitutional, law and order, public input, and culture and sport committees. She also served on the investigatory parliamentary committee into government corruption.

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Yuri Andropov
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov (Russian: Ю́рий Влади́мирович Андро́пов, tr. Yuriy Vladimirovich Andropov; IPA: [ˈjʉrʲɪj vlɐˈdʲimʲɪrəvʲɪtɕ ɐnˈdropəf]; 15 June [O.S. 2 June] 1914 – 9 February 1984) was a Soviet politician and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 12 November 1982 until his death fifteen months later.
Andropov was the son of a railway official Vladimir Konstantinovich Andropov, who was a member of a Don Cossack noble family. His mother was Yevgenia Karlovna Fleckenstein, a daughter of a wealthy Moscow businessman, Karl Franzovich Fleckenstein, a German Russian from Vyborg. Andropov was educated at the Rybinsk Water Transport Technical College.
Andropov joined the Komsomol in 1930. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1939 and was First Secretary of the Central Committee of Komsomol in the Soviet Karelo-Finnish Republic from 1940 to 1944.
During World War II, Andropov took part in partisan guerrilla activities in Finland. From 1944 onwards, he left Komsomol for Communist Party work. In 1947, he was elected Second Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Karelo-Finnish SSR.

wn.com/Yuri_Andropov

Zalman Aran
Zalman Aran (Hebrew: זלמן ארן‎, 1 March 1899 – 6 September 1970) was a Zionist activist, educator and Israeli politician.
Aran was born Zalman Aharonowitz in 1899 in Yuzovka in the Russian Empire (now Donetsk, Ukraine), and received a religious education in a heder. He later studied agriculture in Kharkov. In his youth, he was active in Tze'irei Zion, and in 1917 became a member of the "Self-Defense Organization Committee" of the movement. He worked as a teacher and a statistician from 1918 to 1923. In 1920, after the party split, he joined the Zionist Socialists and was a member of its secret Central Committee from 1924 to 1925.
In 1926, he immigrated to Mandate Palestine, where he joined the Ahdut HaAvoda Party. He worked in building and road construction. In 1930, after Ahdut HaAvoda merged into Mapai, he was appointed the new party's General Secretary in Tel Aviv. From 1936 to 1947 he worked in the Histadrut Executive Committee as Treasurer and Director of the Information Department, and was one of the founders of the School for Histadrut Activists. He also became a member of the Zionist Executive Committee in 1946 and a member of its Presidium in 1948.

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Zalman Shazar
Zalman Shazar (Hebrew: זלמן שז"ר) (November 24, 1889 – October 5, 1974) was an Israeli politician, author. and poet. Shazar served as the third President of Israel from 1963 to 1973.
Shazar (Shneur Zalman Rubashov) was born to a Hasidic family of the Chabad-Lubavitch denomination in Mir, near Minsk, in the Russian Empire (today in Hrodna Voblast, Belarus), he received a religious education as a youth. In his teenage years he became involved in the Poale Zion Movement. Shazar immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1924, and became a member of the secretariat of the Histadrut.
Shazar died on October 5, 1974. He is buried on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
Shazar served as the editor-in-chief of the Israeli newspaper Davar from 1944 to 1949.
He was elected to the first Knesset in 1949 as a member of Mapai, and was appointed Minister of Education in David Ben-Gurion's first government. He was not a member of Ben-Gurion's second cabinet, but retained his seat in the 1951 and 1955 elections. He also became a member of the Jewish Agency Executive in 1952. He resigned from the Knesset in 1956, and from 1956 to 1960 was acting chairman of the Jewish Agency's Jerusalem Executive.

wn.com/Zalman_Shazar

Zalman Shoval
Zalman Shoval (Hebrew: זלמן שובל‎, born 28 April 1930) is an Israeli politician and diplomat. He was the Israeli ambassador to the United States in the years 1990-1993 and 1998–2000, and an active member of the Knesset in the Rafi party of Ben Gurion, the Statal List, and the Likud party.
Shoval was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), then home to a large Jewish community, as the son of a Jewish family originating in Eastern Europe. His father was born in Latvia. They immmigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1938. Shoval attended the "Geula" high school in Tel Aviv before studying for a BA at UC Berkeley, an MA at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and then a PhD (by correspondence) in international studies.
Between 1955 and 1957 he worked in the Ministry Foreign Affairs, after which he became involved in finance, twice serving as chairman of the Bankers Association Council.
Shoval joined David Ben-Gurion when he left to found Rafi in 1965, and then again when Ben-Gurion founded the National List in 1969. In the elections that year he narrowly missed out on being elected to the Knesset - Shoval was placed fifth on the party's list, but it won only four seats. However, when Ben-Gurion resigned from the Knesset in May 1970, Shoval took his place.

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Zerach Warhaftig
Rabbi Dr. Zerach Warhaftig (Hebrew: זרח ורהפטיג‎, Yiddish: זרח ווארהאפטיק, also spelt Zerah Wahrhaftig, Zorach Warhaftig or Zérach Varhaftig, 2 February 1906 - 26 September 2002) was an Israeli lawyer and politician and a signatory of Israel's Declaration of Independence.
Warhaftig was born in Volkovysk in the Russian Empire (today Vaŭkavysk, Belarus) in 1906. His parents were Yerucham Warhaftig and Rivka Fainstein. During World War II Rabbi Warhaftig convinced the Japanese Vice-Consul in Kaunas Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, to issue visas for the entire Mir yeshiva. By doing this Chiune Sugihara saved thousands of lives and families from the hands of the Nazis who by then were in control of Poland and then Lithuania. He immigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1947 and immediately got involved in politics. Initially he joined the Hapoel HaMizrachi party, a religious-zionist party, and was elected to the first Knesset as part of the United Religious Front, an alliance between Mizrachi, Hapoel HaMizrachi, Agudat Israel and Agudat Israel Workers. In 1948 he had also started lecturing in Jewish Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a role he maintained until 1963.

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Zevulun Hammer
Zevulun Hammer (Hebrew: זבולון המר‎, 31 May 1936 – 20 January 1998) was an Israeli politician, minister and Deputy Prime Minister.
Hammer was born in Haifa during the British Mandate of Palestine. He was an active member of the Bnei Akiva youth movement (which he led), and served in the Israeli Armored Corps in a Nahal programme. He graduated from Bar-Ilan University with a BA in Judaism and Bible, as well as a teaching certificate and worked as a teacher. At the university, he headed the Student Union and was a member of the Presidium of the Israeli Students Association and the World Union of Jewish Students.
Hammer was first elected to the Knesset in 1969 as a member of the National Religious Party. He became Deputy Minister of Education and Culture in January 1973. In November 1975 he was appointed Minister of Welfare, but in December 1976 his party resigned from the cabinet
After the 1977 elections he was appointed Minister of Education, a role he retained until September 1984. For a brief period during the 10th Knesset, Hammer and Yehuda Ben-Meir broke away from the NRP and formed a new faction, Gesher – Zionist Religious Centre; however, they returned to the NRP after two weeks.

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Zevulun Orlev
Zevulun Orlev (Hebrew: זבולון אורלב‎, born 9 November 1945) is an Israeli politician and a former leader of the National Religious Party. He was Minister of Welfare & Social Services (March 2003 - November 2004), and is currently a Member of the Knesset for the The Jewish Home party. Orlev is a decorated war hero who received the Medal of Distinguished Service in the Yom Kippur War.
Born in Rehovot, Orlev studied humanities and social sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, before training to be a teacher at Moreshet Yaakov College. During his national service he became a Sergeant, and was awarded a Medal of Distinguished Service for valour during the Yom Kippur War. He later worked as Director General of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, and Director General of the Ministry of Education and Culture. Orlev lives in Jerusalem's Givat Mordechai neighborhood with his wife, Nira. They have four children.
He was first elected to the Knesset in the 1999 elections on the National Religious Party list. After being re-elected in the 2003 elections, Orlev was appointed Minister of Welfare and Social Services in Ariel Sharon's government. During the crisis in the party over the Gaza disengagement plan, Orlev led the camp which believed staying in the government, rather than leaving the coalition, was the best option. In response, NRP leader Effi Eitam called Orlev a "Meimadnik". When Eitam and Yitzhak Levy quit the government in 2004, Orlev and many NRP members refused to leave the coalition. Orlev then succeeded in taking control of the party, resulting in Eitam and Levy leaving to form the Renewed Religious National Zionist Party (since renamed Ahi), which would later join the National Union.

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Zvi Zamir
Zvi Zamir (Hebrew: צבי זמיר‎) born Zvicka Zarzevsky (born 1925) was a Major General in the Israel Defense Forces and the Director of the Mossad from 1968 to 1974. Born in Poland, Zamir immigrated with his family to the then British Mandate of Palestine when only seven months old. At the age of 18 Zamir began his military career, first as a soldier in the Haganah's Palmach, a unit that included future Israeli leaders among the likes of Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Zamir fought in the newly created Israel Defense Forces. After the war he continued climbing the chain of command, eventually promoted to the Commander of the Southern Command. His final IDF post before being appointed Mossad Director came in 1966 when he was appointed the military attaché to London.
During his tenure at the Mossad, he helped carry out Operation Wrath of God, the Israeli response to the Munich Massacre, and dealt with the lead up and aftermath of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. After the German government refused to accept an Israeli team during the Munich hostage crisis, Zamir was sent to observe any activities. He was at the Fürstenfeldbruck airbase the night that the failed rescue attempt left all nine remaining Israeli hostages dead. Zamir was interviewed about the incident in 1999 when he spoke with the producer of One Day in September, a documentary on the massacre. In it he strongly criticized the German rescue effort for its complete lack of coordination. He had previously been interviewed on this subject for an NBC profile during their coverage of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, and he has discussed the massacre several times since. Zamir currently resides in Zahala, Israel, just north of Tel Aviv.

wn.com/Zvi_Zamir

Óscar Arias
Óscar Arias Sánchez (born 13 September 1940) is a Costa Rican politician who was President of Costa Rica from 2006 to 2010. He previously served as President from 1986 to 1990 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for his efforts to end civil wars then raging in several other Central American countries.
He is also a recipient of the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism and a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. In 2003, he was elected to the Board of Directors of the International Criminal Court's TrustFund for Victims. He is also currently a member of the Club de Madrid, a nonprofit composed of 81 former leaders of democratic states, that works to strengthen democratic institutions.

Raised by an upper class family in the province of Heredia, Óscar Arias concluded his secondary schooling at the Saint Francis College in the capital city of San José. He then went to the United States and enrolled in Boston University with the intention of studying medicine, but he soon returned to his home country and completed degrees in law and economics at the University of Costa Rica. In 1967, Arias traveled to the United Kingom and enrolled in the London School of Economics. He receive a doctoral degree in political science from the University of Essex in 1974. Arias has received over fifty honorary degrees, including doctorates from Harvard University, Princeton University, Dartmouth College, Oberlin College, Wake Forest University, Ithaca College and Washington University in St. Louis.

wn.com/Óscar_Arias

Yitzhak Rabin יִצְחָק רַבִּין

5th Prime Minister of Israel
In office July 13, 1992 – November 4, 1995
President	Chaim Herzog Ezer Weizman
Preceded by	Yitzhak Shamir
Succeeded by	Shimon Peres
In office June 3, 1974 – April 22, 1977
President	Ephraim Katzir
Preceded by	Golda Meir
Succeeded by	Menachem Begin
Personal details
Born	(1922-03-01)March 1, 1922 Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine
Died	November 4, 1995(1995-11-04) (aged 73) Tel Aviv, Israel
Political party	Alignment, Labor Party
Spouse(s)	Leah Rabin
Children	Dalia Rabin-Pelossof Yuval Rabin
Profession	Military officer
Religion	Secular Judaism
Signature
Military service
Service/branch	Haganah Israeli Army
Years of service	1941–1967
Rank	Lieutenant General
Battles/wars	Syria-Lebanon Campaign Israeli War of Independence Six-Day War

Party political offices
Preceded by Golda Meir	Leader of the Alignment 1973–1977	Succeeded by Shimon Peres
Preceded by Shimon Peres	Leader of the Labor Party 1992–1995	Succeeded by Shimon Peres
Awards
Preceded by Colin Powell	The Ronald Reagan Freedom Award 1994	Succeeded by King Hussein I

Persondata
Name	Rabin, Yitzhak
Alternative names	יִצְחָק רַבִּין (Hebrew)
Short description	Prime Minister of Israel
Date of birth	1 March 1922
Place of birth	Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel)
Date of death	4 November 1995
Place of death	Tel Aviv, Israel

Bill Boggs
Born	William Boggs III (1946-07-11) July 11, 1946 (age 65) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Education	University of Pennsylvania
Occupation	Television journalist

Persondata
Name	Boggs, Bill
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1944
Place of birth	Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Date of death
Place of death

“	Military cemeteries in every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of national leaders to sanctify human life.	”
—Yitzhak Rabin, 1994 Nobel Peace Prize lecture^[20]

Jimmy Carter

39th President of the United States
In office January 20, 1977 – January 20, 1981
Vice President	Walter Mondale
Preceded by	Gerald Ford
Succeeded by	Ronald Reagan
76th Governor of Georgia
In office January 12, 1971 – January 14, 1975
Lieutenant	Lester Maddox
Preceded by	Lester Maddox
Succeeded by	George Busbee
Georgia State Senator from the 14th District
In office January 14, 1963 – January 10, 1967
Preceded by	Constituency established
Succeeded by	Hugh Carter
Constituency	Sumter County
Personal details
Born	James Earl Carter, Jr. (1924-10-01) October 1, 1924 (age 87) Plains, Georgia, U.S.
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Rosalynn Smith (1946–present)
Children	Jack James Donnel Amy
Alma mater	Georgia Southwestern State Georgia Tech U.S.N.A. (B.S.)
Profession	Farmer Naval Officer
Religion	Baptist^[1]
Signature
Military service
Service/branch	United States Navy
Years of service	1946–1953
Rank	Lieutenant
Awards	Nobel Peace Prize Grand-croix de l'Ordre de la Couronne

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Persondata
Name	Carter, Jimmy
Alternative names	Carter, James Earl, Jr.
Short description	President of the United States
Date of birth	1924-10-01
Place of birth	Plains, Georgia, United States
Date of death
Place of death

Alpha Blondy
Alpha Blondy at Solidays Festival, (Longchamp Racecourse), France, 2008
Background information
Birth name	Seydou Koné
Born	(1953-01-01) January 1, 1953 (age 59) Dimbokro, Côte d'Ivoire
Genres	Reggae
Occupations	Singer/Songwriter
Years active	1981–present
Website	AlphaBlondy.info alphablondyjahgloryfoundation.org

Album/Released	Track List	Notes
Jah Glory! (1983)	"Jah Glory" "The End" "Bêbi Yêrê Yé" "Bintou Wêrê-wêrê" "Brigadier Sabari" "Dou Nougnan"	featuring The Natty Rebels
Cocody Rock! (1984)	"Cocody Rock" "Tere" "Super Powers" "Interplanetary Revolution" "Fangan Kameleba" "Bory Samory"
Apartheid Is Nazism (1985)	"Afriki" "Jah Houphouet" "Apartheid Is Nazism" "Idjidja" "Sahel" "Sebe Allah Y'e" "Kiti" "Come Back Jesus" "Djinamory"
Jerusalem (1986)	"Jerusalem" "Politiqui" "Bloodshed In Africa" "I Love Paris" "Kalachnikov Love" "Travailler C'est Trop Dur" "Miva" "Boulevard De La Mort" "Dji"	featuring Wailers Band
Revolution (1987)	"Sweet Fanta Diallo" "Blesser" "Jah Houphouet Boigny Nous Parle" "Rock And Roll Remedy" "Time" "Election Koutcha" "Miri"	featuring The Solar System
Rasta Poué (1988)	"Rasta Poué" "Bintou Wêrê-wêrê" "Jah Glory" "Dou Nougnan" "Brigadier Sabari" "The End" "Bêbi Yêrê Yé" "Rasta Fou"
The Prophets (1989)	"The Prophet (Allah Léka Netchi)" "Banana" "Coup D'etat" "Kolombaria" "Face To Face" "Black Men Tears" "Corinthiens" "Jah Music"	featuring The Solar System

Album / Released	Track List
Masada (1992) featuring The Solar System	"Masada" "Multipartisme (Mediocratie)" "Rendez-vous" "God Is One" "Yeye" "Desert Storm" "Houphouet Yako" "Peace In Liberia" "Papa Bakoye" "Les Chiens" "Sciences Sans Conscience" "Fulgence Kassy" "Ca Me Fait Si Mal" "Mystic Night Move"
SOS Guerre Tribale (1993)	"Babylone Kêlê" "Yagba Dimension" "Cissê Kiri" "Café Cacao" "Sida In The City" "Véto De Dieu"
Live Au Zénith (Paris) (1993)	"Intro: Jah Houphouët Boigny Nous Parle" "Psaume 23" "Jerusalem" "Masada" "Politiqui" "Cocody Rock" "Multipartisme (Médiocratie)" "God Is One" "Dji" "Come Back Jesus" "Bénédiction"
Dieu (1994) featuring The Solar System	"Abortion Is A Crime" "Dieu" "Wild Time" "Amour Papier Longueur" "La Guerre (d'après "War" de Bob Marley & The Wailers)" "Mon Père Avait Raison" "Rocking Time" "Heal Me" "Gorée (Sénégal)" "Afrique-Antilles" "Soukeina (Nangnele)" "Dos Au Mur"
Grand Bassam Zion Rock (1996) featuring The Solar System	"Ragga Gangstar" "Alpha Kaya" "Zion Love" "Course Au Pouvoir" "Ya Fohi" "Valérie" "Grand Bassam" "Mo" "Cheik Amadou Bamba" "Sefon Dance" "Unité Nationale" "Silence Houphouët D'or" "N'kabourou" "Mystère Naturel"
The Best Of (Alpha Blondy album) (1997)	"Cocody Rock" "Apartheid Is Nazism" "Come Back Jesus" "Jerusalem" "Politiqui" "Sweet Fanta Diallo" "Banana" "Café Cacao" "Masada" "Rendez-vous" "Yéyé" "Fulgence Kassy" "Amour Papier Longueur" "Rendez-vous (Cool Summer Mix)"
Yitzhak Rabin (1998) featuring The Solar System	"New Dawn" "Yitzhak Rabin" "Assinie Mafia" "Les Imbeciles" "Armee Francaise" "Hypocrites" "Guerre Civile" "Saraka" "Les Larmes De Therese" "Lalogo" "Bakoroni" "Maimouna"
Elohim (1999)	"Les Voleurs De La Republique" "Monin" "Journalistes En Danger (Democrature)" "Waikiki Rock" "When I Need You" "Take No Prisoner (Cannibalistic)" "Petini Go Gaou" "Sabotage" "Lune De Miel (Honeymoon)" "Haridjinan" "La Queu Du Diable" "Dictature" "Djeneba" "Black Samourai"

Album / Released	Track List
Paris Bercy (2001)	CD 1 "Intro" "New Dawn" "Hypocrite" "Jah Glory" "La Queue Du Diable" "Black Samourai" "Samala" "Sweet Fanta Diallo" "Assinie Mafia" "Guerre Civile" "Las Iarmes De Thérèse" "Peace In Liberia" CD 2 "Les Imbeciles" "Unité Nationale" "Medley: Afriki/Bintou/Idjidja/Samory/Rasta Poué" "Haridjinan" "Journalistes En Danger" "Dou Nougnan" "Tere" "Brigadier Sabari "
Merci (2002)	"Wari" "Who Are You" "Quitte Dans Ça" "Souroukou Logo" "God Bless Africa" "Zoukéfiez-moi Ça" "Ato Afri Loué" "Politruc" "Hey Jack" "Vanité" "Si On M'avait Dit" "Le Feu"
Akwaba: The Very Best Of (2005) featuring The Solar System	"Sweet Sweet (Mix)" "Good Luck Is Africa" "Yana De Fohi" "Apartheid Is Nazism" "Cocody Rock (Remix)" "Jerusalem" "Banana Poyo (Mix)" "Black Samourai" "Rasta Poué" "Travailler C'est Trop Dur" "Rendez-vous (Cool Summer Mix)" "Assinie Mafia" "Masada" "Wari" "Young Guns" "Sweet Fanta Diallo" "Afriki" "Desert Storm" "Bloodshed In Africa" "Dieu"
Jah Victory (2007)	"I Wish You Were Here" "Sankara" "Ranita" "Ne Tirez Pas Sur L'Ambulance" "Demain T'Appartient" "Bahia" "Mister Grande Gueule" "Africa Yako" "Cameroun" "Jah Light" "Le Bal Des Combattus" "Tampiri" "Les Salauds" "Sales Racistes" "Ikafo" "Jesus" "Gban-gban" "La Planete" "La Route De La Paix"

Persondata
Name	Blondy, Alpha
Alternative names
Short description	Ivorian reggae singer
Date of birth	January 1, 1953
Place of birth	Dimbokro, Côte d'Ivoire
Date of death
Place of death

Persondata
Name	Peace, David
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1967
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death

Rabin, Yitzhak Filmography

Famous quotes by Yitzhak Rabin:

"What he did right now, pulling out of Gaza, is in the same path of my father's concept,"

"I don't think he would have been able to bridge the great differences between the Palestinians and Israel."

"Along with the death of his mother,"

"No Arab ruler will consider the peace process seriously so long as he is able to toy with the idea of achieving more by the way of violence."

"Israel has an important principle: It is only Israel that is responsible for our security."

"Yes to Peace, No to Violence."

"Enough of blood and tears. Enough!"

"You don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies."

Make changes yourself !

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[edit] Nobel Peace Prize

[edit] Palestine Peace Not Apartheid

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[edit] Red Riding Quartet

[edit] Tokyo Trilogy

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