Background

Abba Eban was born as Aubrey Solomon on February 2, 1915, in Cape Town, South Africa. He is the son of Avram Solomon and Alida (Sacks) Solomon. Abba's father Avram went out to South Africa from England with his wife Alida and died there at the age of 23 having two children. Abba's mother returned to London and remarried a radiologist who gave Eban as the family name. Abba is a Hebraic version of Aubrey, which he took when he threw in his life with Israel. Abba's mother sent him to an English boarding school at age 4. He felt orphaned, which may help explain his reserved, formal manner. Abba Eban buried himself in studies, especially of lan­guages, and excelled.

Education

Brought back to England from Cape Town as a small child, Abba Eban attended St. Olave's and St. Saviour's school in Southwark where he excelled in English and classics.

Abba Eban won a scholarship to Cambridge and studied Oriental languages (Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian) and Classics at Queens' College, University of Cambridge, and earned a Master of Arts in 1938. When at Queens' College, Eban took a triple first in oriental languages, outstripping all comers in Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian. In 1938, he was appointed as a Resident Fellow and tutor at Pembroke College and researched Arabic and Hebrew from 1938-1939.

Career

In 1941, as a British army major, Abba Eban served as an aide to the British minister of state in Cairo. He was recruited by British intelligence and brought to the attention of Winston Churchill, who picked him for a secret mission to Egypt to discuss ways in which the Arab nations could be involved on the British side in the war that was just beginning. In 1942 Eban became a liaison officer at allied headquarters in Jerusalem, his responsibility being mainly to communicate with the Jewish population and to recruit for the army. He also had much to do with the Jewish Brigade.

In 1944 Abba was a chief instructor at the Middle East Arab Centre in Jerusalem, but after the war he resigned his commission and settled in Palestine with his wife, joining the Jewish Agency in 1946 as a political information officer to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine and thereafter becoming fully involved with the Zionist cause.

Abba Eban also served as the liaison officer with the United Nations (UN) Special Committee on Palestine in 1947 and as a member of the delegation to the General Assembly that played a critical role in the passage (1947) of the United Nations resolution to partition Palestine. He became the youngest delegate to the United Nations in 1948, where he was a key figure in the debate over the independence of the new state of Israel.

When the new state of Israel was admitted to membership in the United Nations in 1949, Eban became its permanent representative and served in that post until 1959. From 1950 to 1959 he served concurrently as ambassador to the United States and also became a vice-president of the General Assembly in 1953.

In 1959 Abba Eban was elected to the Knesset - Israel's parliamentary body, where he served in a variety of posts through the 1980s, including as a minister without portfolio (1959-1960), as a minister of education and culture under Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion from 1960 to 1963, and from 1959 to 1966 he was also a president of the Weizmann Institute of Science. Then he was appointed as a deputy prime minister from 1963 to 1966, as a minister of foreign relations from 1966 to 1974, member of Knesset Committee on Foreign Affairs and Security, 1974-1984, and its chairman from 1984 till 1988 as well as a chairman of the Board of Governors of Beit Berl. He sat in the Knesset as a member of the Israel Labour Party until 1988.

Eban was the author of several books on politics, history, and biography, including The Toynbee Heresy (1955), Voices of Israel (collection of speeches, 1957), The Tide of Nationalism (1959), Israel In The World (1966), My People: The Story of the Jews (1968), My Country (1972), The New Diplomacy (1983), Maze of Justice, Personal Witness (1992), Heritage: Civilization and the Jews (1984), a companion volume to the television miniseries he wrote for public television, Diplomacy for the Next Century (1998), and the autobiography Abba Eban (An Autobiography) (1977). Some of his early works were published under his Anglicized name, Aubrey Eban.

Abba was a chief consultant and narrator of the nine-part television program Heritage, and editor-in-chief and narrator of the five-part television series Personal Witness: A Nation is Born. He also collaborated in the production of The Brink of Peace, a film on the Middle East peace process for the PBS television network in the United States, was a guest professor at Columbia University in New York, and several other institutions including the University of Haifa, Princeton University, and Pembroke College. Abba Eban died on November 17, 2002, in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Achievements

• Abba Eban's exceptional oratorical gifts in the service of Israel won him the widespread admiration of diplomats and increased support for his country from American Jewry. Eban is often credited with helping to solidify ties between Israel and the United States during both the 1956 Arab-Israeli War and the Six-Day War in 1967. Eban was Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister, Education and Culture Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, and ambassador to the United States and to the United Nations as well as Vice President of the United Nations General Assembly.
  
  Eban wrote several books on politics, history, and biography, including Voices of Israel (1957), The Tide of Nationalism (1959), My People: The Story of the Jews (1968), The New Diplomacy (1983), Diplomacy for the Next Century (1998). Abba also was a narrator of the television program Heritage, and editor-in-chief and narrator of the television series Personal Witness: A Nation is Born.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Personal Witness: Israel Through My Eyes

    (A companion volume to a new PBS series traces the history...)

    1992
  • Diplomacy for the Next Century

    (In this wise and eloquent book, one of the world's preemi...)

    1998
  • Maze of Justice 1946
  • Voice of Israel 1957
  • The Toynbee Heresy 1955
  • The Tide Of Nationalism 1959
  • My People: The Story of the Jews 1968
  • My Country: The Story of Modern Israel 1972
  • Abba Eban: An Autobiography 1977
  • New Diplomacy: International Affairs in the Modern Age 1983
  • Heritage - Civilization and the Jews 1984

Politics

Abba Eban was a member of the first provisional government, and always the most moderate voice at a time of conflict, uncertainty, and confusion. In 1947 he was sent as head of a special commission to the United Nations and played a critical role in the passage of the United Nations resolution to partition Palestine. The following year Israel became a fait accompli, having declared itself on May 14 to be an independent state.

Eban came to global attention when he rose to address the General Assembly of the United Nations on May 5, 1949. He was already a familiar figure to many of the delegates, having given an effective speech to the Security Council the previous July. On this occasion, his widely reported two-hour appeal for the provisional government of the new state of Israel to be recognized by the UN, and accepted as a member, was given major coverage, and his delivery had journalists and commentators reaching for superlatives. In the United States, he became a world figure overnight, and during subsequent years it was in that country that he continued to evoke the greatest admiration.

As a foreign minister, Abba sought to strengthen relations with the United States and to bring about Israeli association with the European Economic Community. When Israel was threatened with an Arab blockade in May 1967, Eban traveled to Paris, London, and Washington, District of Columbia to seek a peaceful solution. When diplomacy proved fruitless, Eban supported the military decisions in the Six-Day War in June. His eloquent defense of Israel's actions before the Security Council and the General Assembly of the UN was widely admired.

It was Eban who, in 1978, said of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's Yasser Arafat that he "never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity." Later in his career, as Israeli leaders Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin gained power, Eban, who had always been more popular with Jews abroad than those in Israel, lost favor and in 1988 was left off the list of candidates for political office. He sat in the Knesset as a member of the Israel Labour Party until 1988. Abba was always the Israeli minister who was best able to understand and talk to the Arabs, always opposed to war except in extreme necessity and equally to repression.

Views

Quotations: "We Israelis always make the right decisions after we have exhausted all other options."

"I was wrong when I did not fight for my positions. I didn't have the courage."

Membership

• 

  American Academy of Sciences , United States

Personality

Abba Eban remained a liberal, humanitarian, and practical intellectual all his life. He had the rare gift of objectivity, rational assessment of the past and present, and a world view that no other Israeli could claim. Indeed all his books, in spite of his passionate belief in his country's cause, exhibit the cool and objective outlook of a wise statesman, caring for the wellbeing of all people, in all parts of the world, without prejudgment, accurately following cause and effect to explain the international events of the second half of the 20th century.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Aubrey needed broad intellectual scope in the same way one needs air. He always felt the full weight of the responsibility of every word and every idea he conveyed in the service of Israel." - Susan Eban.
  
  "It was a friendship that spanned 70 years. Those who share my antiquity may recall it." - Bernard Lewis.

Connections

Abba Eban married Susan Ambache (Eban) in 1945. They had a son and a daughter.

Father:

Abram Solomon

Mother:

Alida (Sacks) Solomon

Wife:

Susan Ambache Eban

Son:

Eli Eban

Cousin:

Oliver Wolf Sacks

brother-in-law:

Chaim Herzog

granddaughter :

Yael Eban

Grandson:

Omri Eban

Daughter:

Gila Eban

sister-in-law:

Aura Herzog

Friend:

Jacob Robinson

colleague:

David Horowitz

Friend:

Bernard Lewis

colleague:

David Ben-Gurion