Mini-Review: Abba Eban

To celebrate the 40^th Anniversary of the Six-Day Arab-Israeli war, I’ve been holed up most of the last couple of days reading the Autobiography of Abba Eban. And I come away a believer: he’s got to count as one of the first-tier political figures of the modern age, fit company for Churchill and deGaulle.

This is a strong claim for a guy who never served as head of government, or even head of state, and who does not rate much attention in standard histories of Israel in his time. But I think I can justify it. What Eban did was to define a nation, both to the world and (perhaps to a lesser extent) to itself. He had a clear notion of what it meant to be Israel, a notion which he stuck to with persistence and defended with skill and guile. But at least as important, he articulated that vision with almost unparalleled rhetorical skill. Israel’s founding narrative has plenty of heroes, but I doubt that there is any single person—no not even David Ben Gurion—who did more to establish the identity of the new state.

Happily (for it is a long book) his fluency and magnetism come across as well on paper as they seem to have registered in the General Assembly of the United Nations—so much so that after a while you forget you are not listening to a real person; you want to say: “Abba, this is wonderful, but shouldn’t you go back to take your place on the world stage? Oh—you’ve been dead for five years, sorry, my bad.”

Eban had a set of qualifications that peculiarly equipped him for his job although in other ways it may have served also as a limit. Among the first generation of Israeli leaders, he was virtually the only one who was not either Israel-born, or directly from Eastern Europe: he had grown up in London, where he learned Greek and Latin at day school, Hebrew from his grandfather. He went on to Cambridge where he achieved what may be the best academic record in the history of the school—a triple-starred first—plus a dazzling record as a student debater. His particular skill was languages: it is said he was fluent in ten of them in all, including Arabic (he translated an Arabic novel into English). Indeed it was the breadth of his cultural background that prompted London Zionist leaders to pluck him out early for diplomatic work.

After service in colonial Palestine in World War II, he threw himself into Zionist work full time and found himself, almost by accident, in New York at the UN as the man charged to introduce the new state of Israel on the world stage. Indeed skeptics will say that his entire career sums up in a handful of speeches. This isn’t true, but if it is true, it is true in the same sense as it is true for Churchill or Lincoln: a few speeches at the right moment can change the course of history.

Eban’s fall in that class. But like Churchill and Lincoln, he in fact did a great deal more than speak. Indeed Eban proved indefatigable in his off-stage diplomacy, establishing himself with virtually every important world leader and saving Israel’s bacon (okay, poor choice of words) more than once in his tumultuous career.

Eban worked at the UN through the founding of Israel in 1948, and on through the ill-fated Suez adventure in 1956. He moved back to Israel in 1959, hoping to find a place in domestic politics. In fact, his important work continued to be his role as Israel’s public face, which he assumed again in and around the Six-Day War in 1967, and again in the disastrous Yom Kippur War in 1973. Aside from that, he never quite made it to the top rung of national politics. Indeed he remarks in an aside, that there are any number of important diplomats who have proven more effective abroad than at him: he no doubt understood that the class might include itself.

Eban recounts all this in detail that is exhaustive to a fault, sustained by the drive and vigor of his prose. Yet one can’t help be haunted by the stark fact underlying every discussion of Israel: contrary to what we all seem to have thought at the time, the place was not empty when the Israelis got there, almost everything the Israelis have accomplished has had to be scratched unwillingly from somebody else.

This fact is inescapable. But the devil is in a thousand details, and we can imagine one, a hundred, a multitude of Israels, each different from the one we have and many uglier and less inviting. It is no small part of Eban’s achievement that he helped to define Israel at its (at least) potential best.

Eban’s book (and, in large measure, his political career) ends just about when “modern Israel” begins—with the advent of Likud, and the quarrel over continued occupancy of Gaza and the West Bank. It’s vain to speculate on how things would have been different if he had been present at Madrid, at Oslo, at Camp David, whatever. One can’t help but believe that it would have been different somehow: indeed by his own account, from the day the 1967 War ended, Eban understood that the real job was to win the peace—to use the military victory as the basis for a sustained and lasting resolution of conflict in the Middle East. And we’re not there yet.

Source: Abba Eban, An Autobiography (1977)

Background and framework: Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy (2007)