Sublime

September 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered to create a Palestinian state in Gaza, almost all of the West Bank, and half of Jerusalem.

From the get-go, Ben-Gurion relentlessly tried to reach a peace deal between the Arabs and the Jews.

Peres subsequently served in a number of significant roles beyond his being a member of the Knesset, including minister of foreign affairs, minister of defense, minister of finance, and prime minister from 1984 to 1986. Now, committed to Rabin’s vision of peace, he pushed on with Oslo. In November and December 1995, Israel redeployed out of all the

The Labor Party won the postponed elections in December 1973, but Golda Meir resigned in April 1974 and was succeeded by Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin had a smaller majority than Meir had had in her first term, and with the country still seething, he was in many ways presiding over a party whose hegemony was about to end.

Arafat knew he could get Israel to overreact, first by electing a more hawkish prime minister to replace the dovish Ehud Barak,

One of the most highly decorated soldiers in Israel’s history, Barak had campaigned on a platform built on three fundamental promises. He pledged to get Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon, from which Israel had never figured out how to extract itself. He committed himself to making peace with Syria. And finally, despite increasing doubts about

Just as it had been a right-wing, Likud administration that had made peace with Egypt, it was a Likud administration that agreed to the first indirect talks with the Palestinians. In October 1991, with Yitzhak Shamir still prime minister, Israeli officials sat with Syrian, Lebanese, and Jordanian delegations in Spain, in what would become known as

Although there is much work to do on gender equality in Israel, too, it is also worth noting that Israel is the only country in the democratic world in which women are drafted into the army and have been since the state’s creation. It was also one of the first democracies to elect a woman as prime minister and one of the first to have a woman as he