President Shimon Peres

Shimon Peres, born in 1923 in Wiszniew, Poland, had been in public life since the founding of the state: architect of Israel's defence industry, twice Prime Minister, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1994. On 13 June 2007 the Knesset elected him the ninth president, and he was sworn in on 15 July, aged 83.

He turned the largely ceremonial office into a platform for diplomacy, science and innovation. He launched the annual Israeli Presidential Conference, "Facing Tomorrow", in 2008, and created the Presidential Medal of Distinction. He received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2014, and in June 2014 joined Pope Francis and Mahmoud Abbas in a prayer for peace at the Vatican. When his single seven-year term ended on 24 July 2014, at 90 he was the oldest head of state in the world. He died in 2016, among the last of Israel's founding generation.