Nadene Goldfoot
1. David Ben Gurion (1886-1973) Mapai Party-was the primary national founder of the State of Israel and the first prime minister of Israel. Born in Russian Empire-controlled Płońsk, he moved to Palestine in 1906. He was the 1st minister of Defense, intrepid pioneer and overseer of the country's initial development, who pugnaciously fought Begin every step along the way until, mellowed by age, sought a reconciliation. Arriving in Eretz, Immediately on landing in Jaffa, 7 September 1906, Ben Gurion set off, on foot, in a group of fourteen, to Petah Tikva. It was the largest of the 13 Jewish agricultural settlements and consisted of 80 households with a population of nearly 1500; of these around 200 were Second Aliyah pioneers like Ben Gurion.
2. Moshe Sharett (1894-1965) Mapai-Moshe Sharett was a Russian-born Israeli politician who served as Israel's second prime minister from 1954 to 1955. Sharett's term was both preceded and succeeded by the premiership of David Ben-Gurion. Sharett also served as the country's first foreign minister between 1948 and 1956. Born in Kherson in the Russian Empire (today in Ukraine), Sharett immigrated to Ottoman Palestine as a child in 1906. For two years, 1906–1907, the family lived in a rented house in the village of Ein-Sinya, north of Ramallah. In 1910 his family moved to Jaffa, then became one of the founding families of Tel Aviv.
3rd PM election. David Ben Gurion again, Mapai-In 1954 he resigned as prime minister and minister of defence but remained a member of the Knesset. He returned as minister of defence in 1955 after the Lavon Affair and the resignation of Pinhas Lavon. Later that year he became prime minister again, following the 1955 elections. Under his leadership, Israel responded aggressively to Arab guerrilla attacks, and in 1956, invaded Egypt along with British and French forces after Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal during the Suez Crisis.
3. Levi Eshkol (1895-1969) Mapai-Levi Eshkol, born Levi Yitzhak Shkolnik, was an Israeli statesman who served as the third Prime Minister of Israel from 1963 until his death from a heart attack in 1969. A founder of the Israeli Labor Party, he served in numerous senior roles, including Minister of Defense and Minister of Finance. Levi Eshkol (Shkolnik) was born in the shtetl of Oratov, Lipovetsky Uyezd, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire (now Orativ, Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine). Both his parents were Jewish, with his mother Dvora (born as Dvora Krasnyanskaya) coming from a Hasidic background, whereas his father Joseph Shkolnik came from a family of Mitnagdim. Both families were business-oriented and were owners of agricultural businesses including flour mills, industrial plants and forestry associated businesses.
4. Yigal Allon (1918-1980) Labor He was an Israeli politician, commander of the Palmach, and general in the IDF. He served as one of the leaders of Ahdut HaAvoda party and the Israeli Labor party, and briefly as acting Prime Minister of Israel in 1969 - the first native born prime minister. Yigal Peikowitz (later Allon) was born in Kfar Tavor. His father, Reuven, immigrated to Palestine in 1890 along with his father and elder brother from Belarus, then a part of the Russian Empire. His mother, Haia Shortz-Peikowitz, came from a religious family from Safed, and her father was a founding member of Rosh Pinna. When Yigal was five years old, his mother passed away and his older brothers went their own path. Yigal, the youngest child, remained with his father. The area of Kfar Tavor was isolated and had to cope with daily raids and thefts by neighboring Arab and Bedouin communities. When Yigal reached age 13 and a Bar mitzvah was held, his father gave him a gun and sent him to protect farm crops from thieves.
4. Golda Meir (1898-1978) Labor She was an Israeli politician, teacher, and kibbutznikit who served as the fourth prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974. She was the first woman to become head of government in Israel. (Born Golda Mabovitch; 3 May 1898 – 8 December 1978) She was an Israeli politician, teacher, and kibbutznikit who served as the fourth prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974. She was the first woman to become head of government in Israel. Born in Kyiv in the Russian Empire, she immigrated to Wisconsin, United States as a child with her family in 1906, and was educated there, becoming a teacher. After getting married, she and her husband emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1921, settling on a kibbutz. Meir was elected prime minister of Israel on 17 March 1969, after serving as labour minister and foreign minister. The world's fourth and Israel's only woman to hold the office of prime minister, and the first in any country in the Middle East, she has been described as the "Iron Lady" of Israeli politics.
5. Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995) Labor He was an Israeli politician, statesman and general. He was the fifth Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms in office, 1974–77, and from 1992 until his assassination in 1995. Rabin was born in Jerusalem to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and was raised in a Labor Zionist household. Rabin was born at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem on 1 March 1922, Mandatory Palestine, to Nehemiah (1886 – 1 December 1971) and Rosa (née Cohen; 1890 – 12 November 1937) Rabin, immigrants of the Third Aliyah, the third wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine from Europe. Nehemiah was born Nehemiah Rubitzov in the shtetl Sydorovychi near Ivankiv in the southern Pale of Settlement (present-day Ukraine). His father Menachem died when he was a boy, and Nehemiah worked to support his family from an early 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 Rabin went to Mandatory Palestine with a group of volunteers from the Jewish Legion. Yitzhak's mother, Rosa Cohen, was born in 1890 in Mogilev in Belarus. Her father, a rabbi, opposed the Zionist movement and sent Rosa to a Christian high school for girls in Gomel, which gave her a broad general education. The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the fifth prime minister of Israel, took place on 4 November 1995 at 21:30, at the end of a rally in support of the Oslo Accords at the Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv. The assassin, an Israeli ultranationalist named Yigal Amir, radically opposed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's peace initiative, particularly the signing of the Oslo Accords.
6. Menachem Begin (1913-1992) Likud, Israel's extraordinary prime minister, infused with an overwhelming sense of Jewish history, a man of acute integrity, vision and compassion, who led a brutal fight against the British in Palestine, negotiated a historic peace treaty with Egypt, and launched a controversial war in Lebanon which was followed by his retirement into mysterious seclusion. Menachem Begin was an Israeli politician, founder of Likud and the sixth Prime Minister of Israel. Before the creation of the state of Israel, he was the leader of the Zionist militant group Irgun, the Revisionist breakaway from the larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. Menachem Begin was born to Zeev Dov and Hassia Begun in what was then Brest-Litovsk in the Russian Empire (today Brest, Belarus). He was the youngest of three children. On his mother's side he was descended from distinguished rabbis. His father, a timber merchant, was a community leader, a passionate Zionist, and an admirer of Theodor Herzl. The midwife who attended his birth was the grandmother of Ariel Sharon.
7. Yitzhak Shamir (1915-2012) Likud Yitzhak Shamir was an Israeli politician and the seventh Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms, 1983–1984 and 1986–1992. Before the establishment of the State of Israel, Shamir was a leader of the Zionist paramilitary and the tougher organization, Lehi.or the Stern Group which my cousin, Stanley Goldfoot, was chief of Intelligence. After the establishment of the Israeli state he served in the Mossad between 1955 and 1965 and as a Knesset member. He served as the sixth Speaker of the Knesset, and as foreign affairs minister. Shamir was the country's third-longest-serving prime minister, after Benjamin Netanyahu and David Ben-Gurion. Yitzhak Yezernitsky (later Yitzhak Shamir) was born in the predominantly Jewish village of Ruzhany called a Shtetl, Grodno province, Russian Empire (now Belarus), which after World War I returned to Poland, as the son of Perla and Shlomo, owner of a leather factory. Shamir later moved to Białystok and studied at a Hebrew high school network. As a youth, he joined Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement. He studied law at the University of Warsaw, but cut his studies short in order to emigrate to what was then Mandatory Palestine. In 1935, Shamir immigrated to Palestine, where he worked in an accountant's office. He later adopted as his surname the name he used on a forged underground identity card, Shamir. He told his wife this was because Shamir means a thorn that stabs and a rock that can cut steel. In 1944 he married Shulamit, whom he met in a detention camp where she was incarcerated after the ship on which she sailed to Mandate Palestine from Bulgaria in 1941 was declared illegal. They had two children, Yair and Gilada. Shulamit died on July 29, 2011. His parents and two sisters were murdered in the Holocaust.
10th time an election and Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995) Labor was elected again. In 1992 he again was elected leader of the Labor Party and Prime Minister.
8. Shimon Peres (1923-2016) Labor Shimon Peres was an Israeli politician who served as the eighth prime minister of Israel from 1984 to 1986 and from 1995 to 1996 and as the ninth president of Israel from 2007 to 2014. He was a member of twelve cabinets and represented five political parties in a political career spanning 70 years. Shimon Peres was born Szymon Perski, on 2 August 1923, in Wiszniew, Poland (now Vishnyeva, Belarus), to Yitzhak (1896–1962) and Sara (1905–1969, née Meltzer) Perski. The family spoke Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian at home, and Peres learned Polish at school. He then learned to speak English and French. His father was a wealthy timber merchant, later branching out into other commodities; his mother was a librarian. Peres had a younger brother, Gershon. He was related to the American film star Lauren Bacall (born Betty Joan Perske), and they were described as first cousins, but Peres said, "In 1952 or 1953, I came to New York... Lauren Bacall called me, said that she wanted to meet, and we did. We sat and talked about where our families came from, and discovered that we were from the same family... but I'm not exactly sure what our relation is... It was she who later said that she was my cousin; I didn't say that".
1967 photgraph of Bibi in IDF
9. Benjamin Netanyahu (1949) Likud Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu is an Israeli politician who has been serving as the prime minister of Israel since December 2022, having previously held the office from 1996 to 1999 and again from 2009 to 2021. Netanyahu is the longest-tenured prime minister in the country's history, having served for a total of over 15 years. He is also the first prime minister to be born in Israel after its Declaration of Independence. He is the chairman of the Likud party. He's been elected again for 2023. Netanyahu was born in 1949 in Tel Aviv. His mother, Tzila Segal (1912–2000), was born in Petah Tikva in the Ottoman Empire's Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem, and his father, Warsaw-born Benzion Netanyahu (né Mileikowsky; 1910–2012), was a historian specializing in the Jewish Golden age of Spain. Netanyahu's paternal grandfather, Nathan Mileikowsky, was a rabbi and Zionist writer. When Netanyahu's father emigrated to Israel, he hebraized his surname from "Mileikowsky" to "Netanyahu", meaning "God has given." While his family is predominantly Ashkenazi, he has said that a DNA test revealed him to have some Sephardic ancestry. He claims descent from the Vilna Gaon. Netanyahu also is the best English speaker of all PMs being he lived in the USA several times. He's appreciated by all American Jews for this when we listen to his comments and ability of debate.
10. Ehud Barak (1942) Labor Ehud Barak is an Israeli general and politician who served as the tenth prime minister from 1999 to 2001. He was leader of the Labor Party until January 2011. A lieutenant general in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Barak shares with two others the honor of being the most highly decorated soldier in Israel's history, having taken part in many battles and combat missions. He was appointed Chief of General Staff in 1991, serving until 1995. He is a graduate in physics, mathematics, and economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Stanford University. Ehud Barak was born on kibbutz Mishmar HaSharon in what was then Mandatory Palestine. He is the eldest of four sons of Esther (née Godin; 25 June 1914 – 12 August 2013) and Yisrael Mendel Brog (24 August 1910 – 8 February 2002). His paternal grandparents, Frieda and Reuven Brog, were murdered in Pušalotas (Pushelat) in northern Lithuania (then ruled by Russian Empire) in 1912, leaving his father orphaned at the age of two. Barak's maternal grandparents, Elka and Shmuel Godin, died at the Treblinka extermination camp during the Holocaust.Ehud hebraized his family name from "Brog" to "Barak" in 1972.
11. Ariel Sharon born Ariel Scheinermann (1928-2014) Likud Ariel Sharon was an Israeli general and politician who served as the 11th Prime Minister of Israel from March 2001 until April 2006. Sharon was a commander in the Israeli Army from its creation in 1948. Sharon remains a highly polarizing figure in Middle East history. Israelis almost universally revere Sharon as a war hero and statesman who played a vital role in defining the country's borders, whereas Palestinians revile Sharon as a war criminal who suppressed their aspirations for statehood. Sharon was born on 26 February 1928 in Kfar Malal, an agricultural moshav, then in Mandatory Palestine, to Shmuel Scheinerman (1896–1956) of Brest-Litovsk and Vera (née Schneirov) Scheinerman (1900–1988) of Mogilev. His parents met while at university in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia), where Sharon's father was studying agronomy and his mother was studying medicine. They immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1922 in the wake of the Russian Communist government's growing persecution of Jews in the region. In Palestine, Vera Scheinerman went by the name Dvora. The family arrived with the Third Aliyah and settled in Kfar Malal, a socialist, secular community. (Ariel Sharon himself would remain proudly secular throughout his life.) Although his parents were Mapai supporters, they did not always accept communal consensus: Sharon spoke Russian and Hebrew. As a teenager, he began to take part in the armed night-patrols of his moshav. In 1942 at the age of 14, Sharon joined the Gadna, a paramilitary youth battalion, and later the Haganah, the underground paramilitary force and the Jewish military precursor to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
12. Ehud Olmert (1945) Kadima Ehud Olmert is an Israeli politician and lawyer. He served as the 12th 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.After serving as PM, he was sentenced to serve a prison term over convictions for accepting bribes and for obstruction of justice during his terms as mayor of Jerusalem and as trade minister. Olmert was born near Binyamina in the British Mandate of Palestine. According to Olmert, his parents, Bella (Wagman) and Mordechai Olmert, escaped "persecution in Ukraine and Russia, and found sanctuary in Harbin, China. They emigrated to Israel to fulfill their dream of building a Jewish and democratic state living in peace in the land of our ancestors." His father later became a member of the Knesset for Herut. Olmert's childhood included membership in the Beitar Youth Organization and dealing with the fact that his parents were often blacklisted and alienated due to their affiliation with the Jewish militia group the Irgun. They were also part of Herut, the opposition to the long-ruling Mapai party. However, by the 1970s, this was proving less detrimental to one's career than during the 1950s.
15th listing. Benjamin Netanyahu (1949) Likud, elected again.
13. Naftali Bennett (1972) Yamina an Israeli politician who served as the 13th prime minister of Israel from 13 June 2021 to 30 June 2022, and as the 3rd Alternate Prime Minister of Israel from 1 July to 8 November 2022,Born and raised in Haifa, the son of American Jewish immigrants from the United States-San Francisco in July 1967, Bennett served in the Sayeret Matkal-the toughest (Netanyahu's former group), and Maglan special forces units of the Israel Defense Forces, commanding many combat operations, and subsequently became a software entrepreneur. Both his parents were from Ashkenazi Jewish backgrounds. His father's ancestors were from Poland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Bennett's paternal great-great-great-grandfather Julius Salomonson was from Łobżenica, Poland, and arrived in San Francisco in 1851 during the California Gold Rush. His mother's ancestors lived in Russia and Poland, and her parents immigrated to the United States prior to World War II. They later moved to Israel, joining their daughter's family there, and settled on Vitkin Street in Haifa, close to where Bennett and his brothers grew up. Some of his mother's family members who remained in Poland were murdered in the Holocaust. Bennett's parents were raised in non-Orthodox Jewish homes and were progressive activists during the 1960s. His father was arrested while taking part in an anti-racism sit-in protest in 1964. They later began to observe Modern Orthodox Judaism and embraced right-wing Israeli politics. After moving to Israel in 1967, they volunteered for a few months at kibbutz Dafna, where they studied the Hebrew language, then settled in the Ahuza neighborhood of Haifa. Jim Bennett found a job in the Technion, working for its fundraising team, and became a successful real estate broker turned real estate entrepreneur. Myrna Bennett was the deputy director general of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel's northern region.
14. Yair Lapid (1963) Yesh Atid Yair Lapid is an Israeli politician and former journalist who is the Leader of the Opposition since January 2023, having previously served in that role from 2020 to 2021. He served as the 14th Prime Minister of Israel from 1 July to 29 December 2022.Before entering politics in 2012, Lapid was an author, TV presenter and news anchor. The centrist Yesh Atid party, which he founded, became the second-largest party in the Knesset by winning 19 seats in its first legislative election in 2013. The greater-than-anticipated results contributed to Lapid's reputation as a leading centrist. Yair Lapid was born in Tel Aviv, the son of journalist and politician Yosef "Tommy" Lapid, who served as Justice Minister, and novelist and playwright Shulamit (Giladi) Lapid. His father was born in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) to Hungarian Jewish parents, and his mother was born in Tel Aviv. His maternal grandfather David Giladi, originally from Transylvania (now Romania), was a writer and journalist who was among the founders of the newspaper Maariv. He has a sister, Merav, who is a clinical psychologist. Another sister, Michal, died in a car accident in 1984. His paternal grandfather Bela (Meir) Lampel, a lawyer and Zionist activist, was murdered in Mauthausen concentration camp, while his great-grandmother Hermione Lampel was sent to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in a gas chamber.
18th listing. Benjamin Netanyahu (1949) Likud with wife Sarah Ben Artzi In 1963 Netanyahu, the son of the historian Benzion Netanyahu, moved with his family to Philadelphia in the United States. After enlisting in the Israeli military in 1967, he became a soldier in the elite special operations unit Sayeret Matkal and was on the team that rescued a hijacked jet plane at the Tel Aviv airport in 1972. He later studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.B.A., 1976), taking time out to fight in the Yom Kippur War in Israel in 1973. After his brother Jonathan died while leading the successful Entebbe raid in 1976, Benjamin founded the Jonathan Institute, which sponsored conferences on terrorism. Netanyahu held several ambassadorship positions before being elected to the Knesset (Israeli parliament) as a Likud member in 1988. He served as deputy minister of foreign affairs (1988–91) and then as a deputy minister in Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s coalition cabinet (1991–92). In 1993 he easily won election as the leader of the Likud party, succeeding Shamir in that post. Netanyahu became noted for his opposition to the 1993 Israel-PLO peace accords and the resulting Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Benjamin Netanyahu: 15 years, 128 days as of 3 February 2023 (first term: 3 years and 18 days; second term: 12 years and 74 days; third term: 36 days so far, and holding)
Sara Netanyahu (Hebrew: שרה נתניהו; née Ben-Artzi; born 5 November 1958) is the wife of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By profession, she is an educational and career psychologist. She is the Spouse of the Prime Minister of Israel holding the role for her third time. Sara Ben-Artzi (later Netanyahu) was born in the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Tiv'on, near Haifa. Her father, Shmuel Ben-Artzi, was a Polish-born Israeli Jewish educator, author, poet and biblical scholar, who died in 2011 at the age of 96. Her mother, Chava (née Paritzky; 1922–2003), was a sixth-generation Jerusalemite. She has three brothers, all of whom were Israel Bible Contest champions: Matanya Ben-Artzi, a professor of mathematics, Hagai Ben-Artzi, a professor of Bible and Jewish Thought, and Amatzia Ben-Artzi, a technology entrepreneur. She's the mother of their 2 sons, Yair and Avner.
Resource:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_Israel
Bibi has written an auto-biography called "BIBI My Story. It tells a lot about the war.
Wikipedia on all PMs
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Benjamin-Netanyahu
Book: The Prime Ministers by Yehuda Avner
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