Abba Eban

• 1. Introduction

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  Abba Eban stood before the United Nations General Assembly in 1967 and delivered a defence of Israel so finely constructed that Henry Kissinger later said he had never encountered anyone who matched his command of the English language. Born Aubrey Solomon Meir Eban in Cape Town on the 2nd of February 1915, he would go on to hold some of the most consequential diplomatic posts of the twentieth century. He was Israel's first permanent representative to the United Nations, its second ambassador to the United States, and eventually its foreign minister during one of the most dangerous weeks in the country's history. He mastered ten languages, earned a triple first at Cambridge, and coined a phrase about peace negotiations that is still quoted today. But behind those achievements lies a life shaped by loss, reinvention, and a persistent tension between the stage he commanded and the inner circles he never quite reached.

• 2. A Cambridge Mind

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  Eban's father, Avram Solomon, died in London less than a week before his son's first birthday. The family had traveled there seeking treatment for an illness that remained undiagnosed to the end. That early loss placed young Aubrey in the care of relatives, and he recalled being sent to his grandfather's house to study Hebrew, Talmud, and Biblical literature. He also lived for a period in Belfast, Northern Ireland, before settling into a school career at St Olave's Grammar School in Southwark.

  At Queens' College, Cambridge, he read Classics and Oriental languages and achieved what the record describes as a very rare triple first, covering Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian. Those three languages were just three of the ten he would reportedly master over his lifetime. He enjoyed translating newspaper articles into Ancient Greek as a private exercise. At twenty-three he became a Fellow of Pembroke College, a position he held from 1938 to 1939, and every sign pointed toward a life in academia. He was also deeply involved in the Federation of Zionist Youth during these years and served as editor of its journal, The Young Zionist, which pulled him toward a different kind of career entirely.

  World War II settled the question. At the outbreak of the war, he began working for Chaim Weizmann at the Zionist Organization in London from December 1939, and the trajectory toward diplomacy was set.

• 3. Intelligence, Identity, Reinvention

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  Eban served in the British Army in Egypt and Mandate Palestine, becoming an intelligence officer in Jerusalem. His work there involved coordinating and training volunteers to resist a potential German invasion, and he acted as a liaison officer between the Allies and the Jewish Yishuv. During this period he was known by the name "Aubrey Evans."

  After the war he stayed in Jerusalem to help establish and run the British Foreign Office's Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, which later relocated from Jerusalem to Shemlan near Beirut. His scholarly background was not decorative. In 1947 he translated from the original Arabic a 1937 novel by Tawfiq al-Hakim, Maze of Justice: Diary of a Country Prosecutor.

  The name change came at a pivotal moment. When he was posted to New York to work with the United Nations as it debated the Palestine Question in 1947, he changed his name to the Hebrew word Abba, meaning "Father." It was a deliberate act of identification with the new state he was helping to bring into being.

• 4. The United Nations Years

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  In 1947, Eban was appointed as a liaison officer to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. His work there contributed to the approval of Resolution 181, the partition plan that recommended dividing Palestine into Jewish and Arab segments. It was a diplomatic achievement that placed him at the center of a founding moment.

  In July 1948, during the Arab-Israeli War, the Arab Higher Committee filed a formal complaint with the United Nations alleging that Palestinian Jews had engaged in war crimes, including what was described as "bacteriological warfare." The specific claim was that the Haganah had poisoned water wells. Eban denied the accusations vigorously, attempted to block further investigations, and countered by accusing the Arab states of "antisemitic incitement." The accusations, as it turned out, were proven true in 2022 when Operation Cast Thy Bread was publicly revealed.

  Throughout the following decade Eban remained a central figure at the United Nations. In 1952 he was elected vice president of the UN General Assembly. A collection of his speeches before the Security Council, the General Assembly, and at universities and other venues between 1948 and 1968 was compiled in a volume titled Voice of Israel. Kissinger's description of his oratory captures something of what those audiences experienced: sentences that poured forth in constructions complicated enough to test the listener's intelligence while simultaneously leaving that listener transfixed. From 1950 to 1959, alongside his UN role, he also served as Israel's ambassador to the United States.

• 5. Foreign Minister in Crisis

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  Eban returned to Israel in 1959 and was elected to the Knesset as a member of Mapai. He served as Minister of Education and Culture under David Ben-Gurion from 1960 to 1963, then as deputy to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol until 1966. Concurrently, from 1959 to 1966, he served as president of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.

  From 1966 to 1974 he held the post of Foreign Minister, and the most testing moment came with the Six-Day War. Speaking to the UN General Assembly, he framed the conflict as a defensive response: "So on the fateful morning of the 5th of June, when Egyptian forces moved by air and land against Israel's western coast and southern territory, our country's choice was plain." Despite that public stance, he privately supported trading occupied territories for peace.

  The USS Liberty incident placed him in a more complicated position. Five days after the attack on the American intelligence ship, Israel's Ambassador to the US, Avraham Harman, cabled from Washington to Eban in Tel Aviv reporting that an American source had "clear proof that from a certain stage the pilot discovered the identity of the ship and continued the attack anyway." Three days after that cable, Harman repeated the warning, telling Eban that the White House was "very angry" because "the Americans probably have findings showing that our pilots indeed knew that the ship was American." Eban also helped shape UN Security Council Resolution 242 in 1967 and Resolution 338 in 1973. In 1969 he was received by Pope Paul VI.

• 6. The Dove Who Spoke Too Late

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  His remark about Arab diplomacy was made after the Geneva peace talks in December 1973: that the Arabs "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." The comment circulated widely and became one of the most quoted lines in the history of Middle East diplomacy. It also captured something about Eban's own position within Israeli politics, where he was generally understood to sit on the "dovish" side but was often criticized for staying quiet during internal debates while he remained in the cabinet.

  After he left the cabinet he grew more outspoken. In 1977 and again in 1981, it was widely understood that Shimon Peres intended to name him Foreign Minister if the Labor Party won those elections. Both times, Labor lost. In 1984 he was offered a post as minister without portfolio in the national unity government, but he declined and chose instead to chair the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, a position he held from 1984 to 1988.

  In 1988, after three decades in the Knesset, he lost his seat over internal splits within the Labour Party. His book Diplomacy for the Next Century contains a pointed observation about Benjamin Netanyahu: "Only Binyamin Netanyahu, the newly elected Israeli leader, failed to comprehend the centrality of the Palestine issue in the Middle East."

• 7. Teaching, Television, Legacy

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  After leaving the Knesset, Eban spent his remaining years writing and teaching. He served as a visiting academic at Princeton University, Columbia University, and George Washington University. He narrated and hosted television documentaries, including Heritage: Civilization and the Jews, broadcast on PBS in 1984. He also served as narrator for Israel, A Nation Is Born in 1992, and On the Brink of Peace, broadcast on PBS in 1997.

  In 2001, a year before his death, he received the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement and special contribution to society and the State. He died on the 17th of November 2002 and was buried in Kfar Shmaryahu, north of Tel Aviv. His wife, Shoshana "Suzy" Eban (née Ambache, sister of Aura Herzog), died in 2011.

  His son Eli Eban became a clarinetist who teaches at Indiana University, a career path as far from the Security Council as one can imagine. Eli has two children, Yael and Omri Eban.