On March 28, 1900, Mordechai Bentov was born in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, a town in what was then the Russian Empire but is now Poland. He was one of the people who signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence and was a member of the left-wing Marxist-Zionist Mapam party in the first eight Knessets. Bentov studied law for two years at the University of Warsaw before he immigrated to the Palestinian Mandate in 1920, where he continued to study law in Jerusalem. He then entered politics after graduation, serving as a representative for Histadrut, a labor organization for Jewish workers, and as a representative to the World Zionist Congress. As part of the Jewish delegation to the British government's Round Table Conference in 1939, Bentov helped to decide what would become British Mandatory Palestine. After the Round Table Conference failed to produce a desirable plan for the future of the Mandate, Bentov chaired the League of Nations Committee, which published a report on the future of Palestine. The report came to be widely known as “The Bentov Book.”After the dissolution of the League of Nations and the foundation of the United Nations, Bentov became a representative of the Jewish Agency to the UN in 1947. During the provisional government of Israel that guided the country through the War of Independence, Bentov’s roles included being the Minister of Labour and Reconstruction, the Minister of Development, and the Minister of Housing.Bentov wrote four books during his lifetime: The Constitutional Development of Palestine (1941), The Road to Bi-National Independence for Palestine (1947), Yisrael, ha-Palestina’im ve-ha-Semol (“Israel, the Palestinians, and the Left”) (1971), and a 1984 memoir.Bentov died at age 84 at Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek.