Abba Eban (1915-2002): An Idealist Ignored in His Adopted Israel

By Donald Neff

More than any other, the Oxbridge voice of Abba Eban personified for Americans the struggle by Jews to establish Israel. For a quarter century—as ambassador to the United Nations and the United States, and then as Israel’s foreign minister—Eban projected Israel as a “light unto the nations,” extolling its aspirations and excusing its excesses. Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion called Eban “the voice of the Hebrew nation,” and historian Conor Cruise O’Brien described him as “the most brilliant diplomatist of the second half of the 20th century.” Yet by the time Eban died at 87 on Nov. 17 in Tel Aviv, he was a virtual outcast in his adopted country.

It was Israel more than Eban that had changed. Eban represented what he called “utopian” Israel, the socialist state that in his mind was just, moralistic and a symbol of the oppressed triumphing over evil. That ideal Israel began disappearing for Eban with the conquest of Arab land in the 1967 war. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the confiscation of Palestinian land for construction of settlements for Israelis and the wresting of Palestinian land for Jewish settlements and the country’s growing militancy—particularly the bloody 1982 invasion of Lebanon—turned Eban’s idealism to disillusionment.

Eban disappeared from political life after 1987 when, as a Labor member of the Knesset, he voted in favor of a report criticizing Labor Party leaders Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin for their roles in using American Jonathan Jay Pollard to spy on the United States. Both Peres and Rabin publicly rebuked Eban, and the next year he was left off the list of candidates for parliament. His long political career had come to an end.

Eban voiced his disillusionment with Israel’s militant course in a 1987 interview with New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman:

“When I go abroad I still can speak for Israel in terms of its achievements,” he said. “But, frankly, when I look back at the speech I gave at Israel’s birth to get us into the United Nations, I would not dare make that same speech now. The rhetoric was too utopian. Now I would be much more reserved. I would definitely not use the phrase that we will be ‘a light unto the nations.’”

Eban was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on Feb. 2, 1915, the son of Abraham Meir Solomon, a businessman who had emigrated from Lithuania, and his wife, Alida. The family moved to Britain when Eban was seven months old. Solomon died within a year and his widow later married Dr. Isaac Eban, a London physician whose surname Abba adopted. He grew up as Aubrey Abba Eban, having been given the English proper name alongside the Hebrew Abba. He began using Abba when he joined the Zionist cause after World War II.

Eban’s Zionism came early, through his mother, who was a secretary and translator at the offices of the Zionist Organization in London led by Chaim Weizmann. One of her early chores was to translate in 1917 the Balfour Declaration, which promised British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, into French and Russian. “The translation of a document sounds a modest chore,” Eban later recalled, “but it linked my family to an unforgettable drama… Zionism had conquered my inner world.”

Eban received a classic British education at Cambridge, where he graduated with honors in 1938, and became a lecturer in Arabic, Persian and Hebrew literature at Cambridge’s Pembroke College. During World War II he served in the British Army in Egypt and Palestine. While among the Arabs, he realized that an early Zionist assumption that the impoverished Arab masses would welcome the economic growth that Jewish immigration would bring was “total nonsense.” “The idea that a nation would willingly barter its independence for economic benefits was a typical colonialist illusion,” he wrote.

Eban quit the British army in 1946 and signed on as an official of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, where he helped prepare the Jewish case at the United Nations. He became a member of the Jewish U.N. delegation in 1947 and, two weeks before Israel proclaimed itself independent on May 14, 1948, he delivered his maiden speech supporting a Jewish state. The speech was widely admired, and within days of independence Eban became Israel’s first permanent representative at the United Nations. He was 33, the youngest representative from any country.

Eban’s Cambridge education served him well at the United Nations and among Jews in the United States. His oratory was brilliant and witty—and at times slashing. Among Eban’s tart comments:

“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”

On Nazi information minister Joseph Goebbels: “Every time he opens his mouth, he subtracts from the sum of human knowledge.”

Eban described Lord Halifax, British foreign secretary under Neville Chamberlain, as “a man of principle, but one of his principles was expediency.”

Of John Foster Dulles, U.S. secretary of state from 1953 to 1959, Eban said, “Dulles often wrestled with his conscience and always won.”

On PLO leader Yasser Arafat: “He never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

Eban’s oratory won many admirers, among them former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger: “I have never encountered anyone who matched his command of the English language. Sentences poured forth in mellifluous constructions complicated enough to test the listener’s intelligence and simultaneously leave him transfixed by the speaker’s virtuosity.”

American Jews particularly relished Eban’s brilliance. They wined and dined him, and when finally he decided to return to Israel to enter the Knesset in 1959 he was treated to a series of fond farewells across the country. As he recalled: “In all the major cities farewell occasions were organized; it was as if I were running an election campaign in America instead of preparing for one in Israel. In Chicago six thousand people assembled in the Opera House to hear Senator Paul Douglas express regret that I was not running in the United States as the Democratic candidate for the presidency.”

Despite such acclaim in America and the world of diplomacy, Eban returned to a country that neither appreciated nor particularly liked him. Eban’s formal ways and sophistication struck his fellow citizens as pompous and pretentious. The new Israelis were largely Eastern European peasant socialists with rough manners and open scorn for the civil niceties of diplomacy. They considered themselves pioneer stock facing the real world of taming the land and forging a state in a hostile climate.

Nonetheless, Eban’s international fame earned him a seat in the Knesset in 1959 and a place in the government as a minister without portfolio in 1960. He became the minister of education and culture and in 1963 he was appointed deputy prime minister. In 1966, he became foreign minister, a cabinet post he retained until 1974. It was his last position in any Israeli government. He remained in the Knesset until 1988, when his political career ended. Despite the expectations of his many American admirers, Abba Eban never rose to become his country’s prime minister.

Donald Neff is the author of the Warriors trilogy, 50 Years of Israel, and the recently reissued Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945, all available from the AET Book Club.