Eban Abba Solomon - Abba Eban: a biography

This edition first published in hardcover in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2015 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

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Copyright 2015 by Asaf Siniver

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ISBN 978-1-4683-1648-3

Abba Eban

A BIOGRAPHY

ASAF SINIVER

WITH 52 BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPHS

A skilled debater, a master of language, and a passionate defender of Israel, Abba Eban had a diplomatic presence that was in many ways a contradiction unlike any the world has seen since. While he was celebrated internationally for his exceptional wit and his moderate, reasoned world- view, these same qualities painted him as elitist and foreign in his home country. The disparity in perception of Eban at home and abroad was such that both his critics and his friends agreed that he would have been a wonderful prime ministerin any country but Israel.

In Abba Eban, the first new biography of Eban in over forty years, Asaf Siniver writes a nuanced and complete account of one of the most complex figures in twentieth-century foreign affairs. We see Eban growing up and coming into his own as part of the Cambridge Union, and watch him steadily become known as The Voice of Israel. Siniver draws on a vast amount of interviews, writings, and other newly available material to show that, in his unceasing quest for stability and peace for his home country, Eban often faced opposition from Israel itself; no matter how many allies he gained abroad, the man never understood his own domestic politics well enough to achieve all he hoped. A new examination of Israels Elder Statesman, Abba Eban is a fascinating look at a life that still offers a valuable perspective on Israel even today.

To the memory of my mother,
Sara Siniver, 19432015

Now here is the problem, Eban continued. Why does all of this carry so little weight in interparty contests where there are people who lack any international resonance? Is this indifference unique to the Labor movement, which devours its people, or is it a sign of Israeli parochialism? Or perhaps I am responsible for it due to insufficient concern for public relations. In any case, the problem is a problem, even if it did not concern me personally. I believe that this is a unique phenomenon and therefore deserves attention.

Abba Eban was, and remains, a unique phenomenon. There is no modern comparison to the huge dissonance between the utter reverence that Eban enjoyed abroad and the travails he endured at home. The qualities that led Conor Cruise OBrien to eulogize Eban as the greatest diplomat of the second half of the twentieth centuryhis exceptional eloquence and oratory, enviable wit, nuanced understanding of diplomacy as a vocation, fluency in ten languages, and moderate worldviewwere frowned upon in Israel as inanely foreign, elitist, and full of pomposity. Ebans friends and critics alike often noted that he would have been a wonderful prime ministerin any country but Israel. Born in Cape Town in 1915 and raised in England, a Cambridge don by the age of twenty-three, and a major in the British Army during World War II, Eban was always destined to be greeted with suspicion and distrust from his contemporaries in Israel, many of whom settled in Mandatory Palestine as teenagers in the interwar period, where they toiled the land, dried swamps, fought the Arabs, and harassed the British authorities. In many respects, Eban was an antihero to the early Israeli generation of land-working pioneers who were audacious, resourceful, and battle-scarred. Abroad, Eban was lauded as Israels Cicero; at home, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol called him the wise fool, and when Eshkols successor, Golda Meir, heard that Eban was considering running for the premiership, her bemused response was in which country?

But Ebans urbane internationalism and perceived elitism alone do not capture the essence of his uneasy relationship with his compatriots. Eban was a voice of reason and moderation in a country that spoke with hyperbolic anxiety. As Israels ambassador to the United States in the 1950s, he berated his governments military adventurism and political intransigence. As its foreign minister he bemoaned the messianic territorial obsession that engulfed the nation following the 1967 Six-Day War. Eban urged the revival of a peace mystique in Israeli society, but his stirring rhetoric was trounced by the cold pragmatism of Meir and the political opportunism of her defense minister, Moshe Dayan. Following Ebans shocking exit from the cabinet in 1974, his criticism of the countrys militant obduracy continued to grow both in frequency and ferocity. Israels disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and its heavy treatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank had led him to conclude in 1987 that frankly, when I look back at the speech I gave at Israels birth to get us into the United Nations, I would not dare make that same speech now I would definitely not use the phrase that we will be a light unto the nations.

Ebans life, achievements, and failures cannot be narrowly defined by the

It is precisely this defense of universal values against the rise of national chauvinism that captures much of the Eban story and points to the dichotomy of global veneration and domestic skepticism he encountered for much of his life. As the distinguished American historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. noted in lamenting this tragic discord in his friends life, His courage in pressing for reconciliation along with his ironical British style, denied him the political success in Israel to which his dedication and talent entitled him.

A BBA E BAN HAD A TREMENDOUS SENSE OF HIS PLACE IN HISTORY , AND THIS IS partly reflected in the stupendous volume of works he left behind. Few, if any, Israeli leaders gave more interviews and press conferences or wrote more

And yet, the only biography ever written on Eban was published back in 1972, by the syndicated journalist Robert St. John, though it sits more comfortably in the company of unapologetic hagiographies than emphatically detached scholarship. In 2008, six years after her husbands death, Suzy Eban published her memoir, A Sense of Purpose: Reflections, in which she staunchly defended her husbands legacy. In between St. Johns biography and Suzy Ebans memoir, Abba Ebans two dense memoirs, An Autobiography (1977) and Personal Witness: Israel through My Eyes (1992), were both published to wide acclaim. But these four accounts encounter certain difficulties in merging the two faces of the art of biography: the writing of a life story and the writing of a history. As the Israeli historian and biographer of Ben-Gurion, Shabtai Teveth, pointed, all biographers face a similar dilemma: the chronicling of which events must gain prominencethose that influenced the life of the hero or those that affected the life of a generation. There is no easy answer here. According to Teveth, the biographer will face the wrath of the critics regardless of the path he has chosen: a pithy literary page-turner will be condemned by historians for scholarly brevity, while a heavily footnoted tome of painstakingly assembled moments in time will scare away a general readership.unfortunately, however, they also contain too much self-congratulation and not enough self-introspection.