Ambassador Ayalon has served in Israel’s Foreign Service for over 20 years. He began his diplomatic career in Panama, and then went on to the UN mission in New York. He was political advisor to three different prime ministers: Ehud Barak, Binyamin Netanyahu, and Ariel Sharon. In 2002, Ambassador Ayalon was appointed by then Prime Minister Sharon and Minister Shimon Peres, to represent Israel as Israel’s Ambassador to Washington. During his tenure there, Israel-US relations increased and improved, with American support of Israel reaching an all-time high in many areas.

Upon his retirement from diplomatic service in 2006, Ambassador Ayalon joined Nefesh B’Nefesh, an organization committed to revitalizing Aliyah, and the Or Movement for settlement in the Negev and the Galilee.

In February 2009, Ambassador Ayalon was sworn in as a Member of the Knesset representing the Yisrael Beiteinu party. He joined political life in order to continue contributing, taking action, and executing the will of the voters as faithfully as possible, in order to help Israel make progress and prosper as a Jewish and democratic state.

For more than 25 years, Dr. Arie Ben has been managing the KKL-JNF (Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael/Jewish National Fund) Museum and Educational Center in Tel Aviv. He started the project in 1988 to present Israeli history from the JNF point of view. The building that houses the museum was used by the first government of Israel (also known as the “Provisional People’s Council”) during the last months before Israeli independence in 1948.

Before joining KKL-JNF, Ben served in the Ministry of Education as a principal and in the Police Forces as a teacher. He also served in the Israeli Defense Forces, where he served in the Air Force in the Yom Kippur War. He later served as a Lieutenant Colonel in the tanks and logistics units in the reserves.

Alon Ben-Gurion is the grandson of Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion. He served as a paratrooper in the Yom Kippur War and later worked in Israel’s hotel industry. After moving to the United States, Ben-Gurion earned a Master of Science degree in Hotel Management from the Hotel Administration School of Cornell University in New York. He has worked in hotels and restaurants around the world, including kosher kitchens in his native Israel. In 1997, he became the general manager of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.

Dr. Ben-Yehuda is the grandson of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the writer, lexicographer, newspaper editor and teacher behind the revival of Hebrew as a conversational language.

Ben-Yehuda was born in Jerusalem on September 25, 1938. His religious education began in the home of his maternal grandparents, and at the young age of four he was already reading and studying Torah with his grandfather.

Since arriving in the U.S. in 1958, Ben-Yehuda has served as a teacher and rabbi in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida. In June of 2004, he earned a doctorate in literature with a thesis on reexamining of the Jewish Scriptures (Genesis) from the Hebrew text.

Since July 2008, he has been a “Rabbi at Large”, serving as guest rabbi, prayer leader and lecturer in many pulpits in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Israel.

In 2009, he published a biography of his grandfather, Fulfillment of Prophecy: The Life Story of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.

Dr. Motti Golani is a professor at the University of Haifa’s Department of Israel Studies. He is an historian of British Mandate Palestine and the State of Israel, and a senior member at the Middle East Center of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford. His publications include Zion in Zionism: Zionist Policy and the Question of Jerusalem, 1937-1949 and The End of the British Mandate for Palestine, 1948.

Dr. Golani is currently working on a biography of Chaim Weizmann.

Yossi Katz is a full professor of Geography at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv. He holds the Chair for the Study of the History and Activities of the Jewish National Fund. He specializes in the modern history of Israel, Zionism, and the process of Jewish settlement in Israel. He has published 23 books including The Business of Settlement: Private Entrepreneurship in the Jewish Settlement of Palestine, Partner to Partition: The Jewish Agency’s Partition Plan in the Mandate Era and The Battle for the Land: The History of the Jewish National Fund.

Michael Makovsky joined the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) in 2013 as CEO. A U.S. national security expert, he has worked extensively on Iran’s nuclear program, the Middle East, and the intersection of international energy markets and politics with U.S. national security.

Makovsky has written articles, op-eds, and editorials on national security issues for a host of publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. He is also the author of Churchill’s Promised Land, a diplomatic-intellectual history of Winston Churchill’s complex relationship with Zionism.

Makovsky has a Ph.D. in diplomatic history from Harvard, an MBA in finance from Columbia Business School, and a B.A. in history from the University of Chicago.

Dr. Meron Medzini is a Visiting Professor of Political Science at the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of six books and scores of articles on Israel’s foreign policy.

A native Israeli, Medzini is the former director of Israel’s Government Press Office. He also served as a spokesman for Prime Ministers Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin.

Medzini’s mother Regina went to school with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir during their childhood in Milwaukee. They later immigrated to Palestine together in 1921 and remained lifelong friends; as a result, Medzini quite literally grew up in Golda’s kitchen.

Medzini’s book Golda: A Political Biography won the Prime Minister’s Prize in 2010. His essay on applying China’s Taiwan Straits model to the Arab-Israeli conflict was published by China’s International Herald Leader (IHL).

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University in Montreal, and a Visiting Scholar affiliated with the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.

Troy is the author of Why I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today. The book has been hailed as a “must read”, and the most persuasive presentation of the Zionist case “in decades”. It has been released in a third expanded and updated edition, having sold over 25,000 copies.

Troy is a native of Queens, New York. He received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard. He has appeared on most major Canadian and American television networks and has been widely published and quoted in the media.