A Jewish Agency official who used his oratorical abilities and lobbying talents in arguing for partition and the creation of a Jewish state, Abba Eban was appointed Israel’s U.N. representative in May 1948. In a passionate address to the U.N. Security Council, he says, “Israel is the product of the most sustained historic tenacity which the ages recall. … The Jewish people has not striven toward this goal for twenty centuries in order that, having once achieved it with the full endorsement of an international opinion, it will now surrender it in response to illegitimate and unsuccessful aggression.” For most of the 1950s, Eban serves as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, and from 1966 to 1974 he is the foreign minister. Tall of stature, endowed with wry wit and a memorable English accent, Eban provides the young State of Israel with three decades of diplomatic prominence.
