Abba Eban, the Israeli diplomat and author whose career spanned the Jewish state’s turbulent founding and a generation of warfare with Arab neighbors, and whose early views on conflict with the Palestinians proved wrenchingly prescient, died Sunday at age 87.
Mr. Eban, who died in a hospital near Tel Aviv, was respected by friends and adversaries alike for his eloquence, intellectual rigor and tireless advocacy of Israel’s cause in the international arena. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, once called him “the voice of the Hebrew nation.”
“He was one of the symbols of the founding generation, a generation that fought and believed in the just fight of the state of Israel,” his nephew Yitzhak Herzog, a former Cabinet secretary, told Israel Radio.
Mr. Eban’s life story, with deep roots in several cultures, in some ways mirrored that of 20th Century Jewry.
Born in 1915 in Cape Town, South Africa, and reared largely in England, he became an honor-winning student at Cambridge. He served in the British army during World War II, starting as a foot soldier and rising to major. Eventually he became a liaison officer for the Allies to the Jews of Palestine, and stayed on there after the war.
With Israel’s independence, Mr. Eban, like many Zionists of his generation, dropped his birth name, Aubrey Solomon Meir, in favor of a Hebrew one. But he never seemed entirely at home in his adopted land, where his personal style–aloof, academic, impeccable in dress and manner–was always at odds with the rough-and-tumble informality that prevailed in Israel’s leadership circles.
In the diplomatic arena, some of his greatest challenges–and triumphs–came at a young age.
In his early 30s, he was handed the crucial task of lobbying the United Nations to approve the creation of Israel. In stirring speeches to the fledgling world body, he invoked the moral imperative that a Jewish homeland must rise from the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust. With the 1947 vote to partition Palestine, he succeeded.
Well-spoken and at ease in more than half a dozen languages, he spent a decade as ambassador to the United Nations and made diplomatic history by serving simultaneously as Israel’s envoy to Washington. There, Mr. Eban developed his trademark skill for mounting a brilliant oratorical defense of Israeli policy, even when he harbored private reservations.
“He was not just a very eloquent speaker and skilled diplomat. He was a man of deep convictions,” said Itamar Rabinovich, a veteran Israeli envoy.
Mr. Eban’s tenure as foreign minister, from 1966-74, coincided with a tumultuous period for Israel that encompassed two decisive wars with Arab neighbors. He ably helped deflect international concern over Israel’s capture of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the Sinai and East Jerusalem. But he worked hard behind the scenes to try to convince successive Israeli governments, with only partial success, that the negotiated return of war-seized territory was the only path to peace and that, without it, relations with the Palestinians would be plagued by violence.
A longtime believer in the inevitability of Palestinian statehood and its necessity to Israel’s interests, Mr. Eban nonetheless cast a coldly critical eye on Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, famously remarking in 1978 that he, among other Arab leaders, “never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
Through the years, as Israel faced moral and military challenges, Mr. Eban’s idealistic view of his country dimmed somewhat. In later years, he told interviewers that he no longer could have echoed with conviction his passionate appeals almost half a century earlier for Israel’s statehood. But he insisted that he saw the creation of the Jewish state as one of the 20th Century’s noblest experiments.
Back home, in the realm of Israeli domestic politics, Mr. Eban never attained the high regard in which he was held overseas. He once joked that he could have been elected prime minister “if people abroad could vote in Israeli elections.”
In 1988, after three decades in the Israeli parliament, he suffered the ignominious loss of his seat as a result of procedural changes spurred by internal politics in his fractious Labor Party. With his political career in effect over, he devoted his time to writing and teaching and was a visiting academic in the United States at Princeton and Columbia Universities.
He narrated public television documentaries and wrote books, most of them on diplomacy and Israel’s history, including “My Country,” “Abba Eban: An Autobiography” and “Heritage: Civilization and the Jews.”
In 2001, he was given his country’s highest honor, the Israel Prize, but was too frail to attend the award ceremony.
Mr. Eban was survived by his wife, Susan, and a son and daughter. He was to be buried Monday in his hometown of Kfar Shmaryahu, outside Tel Aviv, the family said.
