Israel’s UN Ambassador Abba Eban Gives Stirring Address to UN Security Council

As a Jewish Agency official, using his oratorical abilities and lobbying talents in arguing for partition and the creation of a Jewish state, Abba Eban is appointed as Israel’s UN representative in May 1948. With passion 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 [Arab] aggression.” For most of the 1950s, Eban serves as Israel’s ambassador to the US, and from 1966 – 1974 as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Tall of stature, endowed with wry wit and a memorable English accent, Eban provides the young State of Israel with three decades of marked diplomatic prominence.