Ron Nachman
Ron Nachman (, 6 August 1942 – 18 January 2013) was an Israeli politician and former Knesset member for the Likud. The founder of Ariel, one of the largest Israeli settlements in the West Bank, he was its mayor from 1985 until his death in 2013. Biography Born in Tel Aviv during the Mandate era, Nachman studied at Tel Aviv University, where he gained an LLB and a BA in political science and law studies. He joined the settlement enterprise in 1972. As a board member of Israel Military Industries he established the "Tel Aviv Group" to settle the territories captured by Israel in June 1967. It was only in 1978 that something actually took off on the ground. After helping found Ariel in 1978, he became its first mayor in 1985, and was re-elected four times. Nachman had argued for making Ariel an integral part of Israel. Since 1997, he had worked to have the former College of Judea and Samaria upgraded to university status. Although the college had renamed itself the Ariel University Center of Samaria, both Minister of Education Yuli Tamir and the Council for Higher Education had vowed to block it. Nevertheless, in 2012 the College