Fritz Cohen · Public domain

Declared the State of Israel on 14 May 1948 and led it through the war that followed, having spent the previous forty years organising for exactly that moment. As first prime minister he built the institutions — army, civil service, absorption of a million refugees from Europe and the Arab world in a decade — and made the hard, unpopular calls, including the 1952 reparations agreement with West Germany that brought crowds into the streets against him. Retired to a hut in the Negev.