Moshe Arens (Hebrew: משה ארנס‎, born 27 December 1925) is an Israeli aeronautical engineer, researcher and former diplomat and politician. A member of the Knesset between 1973 and 1992 and again from 1999 until 2003, he served as Minister of Defense three times and once as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Arens has also served as the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and was professor at the Technion in Haifa.

Early life and education

Moshe Arens was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, to a Jewish family. His father was an industrialist and his mother was a dentist. When he was a year old, his family moved to Riga, Latvia. where he attended elementary school. In 1939, Arens and his family immigrated to the United States, where his father had business interests. The family settled in New York City, where Arens attended George Washington High School.

As a youth, Arens was a leader in the Betar youth movement. During World War II, Arens served in the United States Army Corps of Engineers as a technical sergeant. Following the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948, Arens moved to the new State of Israel and joined the Irgun, despite the opposition of his father. He was sent to North Africa (mostly Morocco and Algeria) and Europe to help local Jewish communities establish self-defense groups. In March 1949, he returned to Israel, and became a founding member of the Herut party, which had grown out of the Irgun. After being denied a job in Israel's military industries, he began working as an engineer for an American company dealing in designing water systems for Tel Aviv.