Avi Ohayon · CC BY-SA 3.0

Held nearly every senior office in Israel across sixty-six years, including prime minister twice and president, and changed his mind about the central question of his life. Having built the country's defence establishment and, by most accounts, its nuclear programme, he spent his last decades arguing for territorial compromise, sharing the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for the Oslo Accords with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. Born in what is now Belarus; most of the family that stayed behind was burned alive in a synagogue.