Most Powerful

• #1 Ariel Sharon
  IsraelMiddle East Imperial SovereigntyMilitaryPolitical Cold War and Globalization Military CommandState Power Power: 100
  Ariel Sharon (1928–2014) was an Israeli general and politician whose career fused battlefield reputation, territorial strategy, and executive power into one of the most consequential and controversial careers in modern Israeli history. He first became famous through military command in Israel’s formative wars and later turned that reputation into political influence within the Israeli right. Sharon belongs to the topology of imperial sovereignty because his power centered on state command: the capacity to direct force, shape borders in practice, alter party alignments, and redefine the relationship between settlement, security, and diplomacy. Few leaders embodied the Israeli state’s coercive and territorial instincts more completely. Yet his career also contained reversals. The same figure long associated with settlement expansion and hardline security policy ultimately carried out Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza and founded a new centrist party to break the political deadlock he believed the old system could no longer manage. Sharon’s life therefore reveals how sovereign power can be both brutal and adaptive, strategic and improvisational, all while leaving behind deep moral and political division.
• #2 Golda Meir
  IsraelMiddle EastUnited States Imperial SovereigntyPolitical Cold War and Globalization State Power Power: 100
  Golda Meir (1898–1978) was one of the founding political figures of Israel and later its fourth prime minister. She belongs to imperial sovereignty because her power centered on state formation, war leadership, diplomatic mobilization, and the authority to direct institutions in a region defined by conflict and disputed legitimacy. Meir’s career stretched from labor Zionist activism and fundraising in the pre-state years to cabinet leadership in the decades after 1948. She helped convert movement politics into government and translated diaspora support into material state capacity. As foreign minister and then prime minister, she became one of the most recognizable faces of Israel abroad. Her international reputation combined toughness, austerity, and maternal symbolism, but behind that image stood a formidable political operator. Her premiership was defined above all by the Yom Kippur War, a crisis that exposed Israeli intelligence failures and damaged her standing even as she remained central to the wartime response. Meir’s legacy is therefore foundational and contested at once: she helped build a state and defend it, but she also embodied positions and policies that critics see as central to Palestinian dispossession and to the hardening of regional conflict.
• #3 Yitzhak Rabin
  Israel Imperial SovereigntyMilitaryPolitical Cold War and Globalization Military CommandState Power Power: 100
  Yitzhak Rabin (1922 – 1995) was Prime minister and military leader associated with Israel. Yitzhak Rabin is known for serving as a central figure in Israeli security policy and peace negotiations. Imperial sovereignty concentrates power in the authority to make law, command institutions, raise revenue, and direct coercive force. Even in constrained systems, executive power can reshape policy, alliances, and national priorities.
• #4 Ike Perlmutter
  IsraelUnited States IndustrialIndustrial Capital ControlMedia 21st Century Industrial CapitalMonopoly Control Power: 87
  Ike Perlmutter (born 1942) is an Israeli-American investor and former media executive known for his role in Marvel Entertainment’s corporate turnaround and its sale to The Walt Disney Company. He rose from closeout and surplus trading into a distinctive style of control investing that focused on distressed assets, tight expense management, and the monetization of licensing rights. In Marvel’s case, that approach helped transform a bankrupt comics-and-toys business into a high-value intellectual property platform, later integrated into Disney’s global entertainment machine. citeturn2search0turn2search1 Perlmutter’s influence illustrates industrial capital control applied to media property. In this topology, the central assets are characters, stories, and trademarks. The wealth engine is the conversion of those assets into recurring revenue streams through licensing, merchandising, film and television production, theme parks, and consumer products. Power arises from deciding which properties are funded, how aggressively costs are controlled, and how creative decisions interact with corporate governance. Because the assets are intangible, control often concentrates in ownership rights and organizational structure rather than in factories or land.
• #5 David
  Israel Imperial SovereigntyPoliticalReligion AncientAncient and Classical State Power Power: 77
  David (traditionally c. 1040 BCE – 970 BCE) is described in biblical literature as a king who helped transform Israel from a loose federation of tribes into a more centralized monarchy, establishing Jerusalem as a political and cultic center.
• #6 Miriam Adelson
  IsraelUnited States FinancialFinancial Network Control 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 77
  Miriam Adelson (née Farbstein; born 1945) is an Israeli–American physician, businesswoman, philanthropist, and political donor who became one of the most influential figures in U.S. campaign finance after the growth of unlimited outside spending in the 2010s. Trained as a medical doctor, she became closely associated with addiction treatment through clinical work and through institutions supported by the Adelson family. Her public profile expanded dramatically through her marriage to casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and through her role as a major shareholder and leader within the business and media holdings tied to the Adelson family.
• #7 Solomon
  Israel Imperial SovereigntyPolitical AncientAncient and Classical State Power Power: 74
  Solomon (c. 990 BCE – c. 931 BCE) is presented in biblical tradition as the king of Israel who succeeded David, oversaw the construction of the First Temple in Jerusalem, and became a symbol of royal wisdom and centralized administration.