To celebrate the 40th 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
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
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
Eban worked at the UN through the founding of
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
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
Source: Abba Eban, An Autobiography (1977)
Background and framework: Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy (2007)
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