Dr. Asaf Siniver is Associate Professor (Reader) in International Security at the University of Birmingham, UK. He specialises in the politics, diplomacy and history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, with particular emphasis on the role of external actors in the conflict and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. He has published widely on these topics and held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2011-2013) on the Third Party Mediation in the Arab-Israeli Conflict. His books include The October 1973 War: Politics, Diplomacy, Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2013); International Terrorism post-9/11: Comparative Dynamics and Responses (Routledge, 2010); and Nixon, Kissinger and US Foreign Policy Making: The Machinery of Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
The following exchange will focus on his latest book, Abba Eban: A Biography (Duckworth Overlook, 2016).
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Dear Dr. Siniver,
Your new biography of legendary Israeli statesman Abba Eban begins with an almost heart-breaking description of the discrepancy between how admired the urbane, sophisticated Eban was abroad and how he never quite found his proper place among his compatriots and their leaders. As you put it:
Abroad, Eban was lauded as Israel’s Cicero; at home, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol called him “the wise fool,” and when Eshkol’s successor, Golda Meir, heard that Eban was considering running for the premiership, her bemused response was “in which country?”
Why did you choose to begin your book with this discrepancy – why is Eban’s lack of popularity in early Israel a good place to start with? What does it tell us about your hero and about the country he dedicated his life to representing?
Yours,
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
The dissonance between how Eban was received abroad and how he was treated by his compatriots in Israel is not only a major theme in Eban’s life story, but it also says as much about Israel as it does about Eban. This dissonance goes a long way in explaining the trajectory of Eban’s public life, from his ambassadorial years at the United Nations and in Washington in the early 1950s, through his political travails as minister and Member of Knesset from 1959 to 1988, and right up to his death in 2002.
This discrepancy, as you call it, is the result of two interrelated and mutually reinforcing spheres: The first concerns Eban’s upbringing, early experiences and first encounters with the Zionist project. The vast majority of the generation of Israel’s founders and subsequently Eban’s political peers were either born or settled in Palestine during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Many of them fought the Ottoman and British Mandatory authorities as well as the Arabs of Palestine; some were imprisoned and others were exiled; they dried swamps and battled malaria, and filled the rank and file of the of the Yishuv’s pre-state political institutions. Eban – although a social-democrat Zionist like many of his peers – was not a product of this galvanizing pioneering experience. Born in Cape Town in 1915 and raised in London, Eban graduated from Cambridge University with a rare triple first in Classics and Oriental Languages, and until the outbreak of the Second World War was destined to a glorious and idyllic academic career as a Cambridge don. Although he remained in close contact with Zionist leaders such as Chaim Weizmann and Moshe Shertok (Sharett) during this period, it was not until 1946, after seven years in the British Army, that Eban finally joined the Jewish Agency (first in London and then in New York) to fight for Jewish self-determination in Palestine. He had no political affiliations and was not a member of the Mapai party, and while he was recognized as the Voice of Israel during his ambassadorial years at the UN and in Washington during the 1950s, he remained a relatively unknown figure in Israel until his arrival in the country in 1959. Of the political figures which dominated Israeli politics from 1948-1968, Eban is the only one whose mother tongue was English and not Yiddish, Russian or Hebrew; he is the only one who was not born in Palestine, Tsarist Russia or Poland; and he is by far the last and the oldest to settle in Israel, at the age of 44.
The second sphere which distinguished Eban from his peers concerned his arena of action and his worldview – much of it was shaped by the different experiences which influenced his formative years. As an orientalist, a polyglot, an incessant intellectual and, most importantly, as a professional diplomat, Eban’s views on Israel’s place in the Middle East and its relationship with its Arab neighbours were always formulated and expressed through a universalist approach. International law and norms, as well as morality and justice, were used by Eban in equal measures together with Israel’s basic security needs, to defend his country’s policies abroad. Whereas Israel’s leaders (Moshe Sharett being a notable exception) primarily viewed Israel’s position through a security prism, Eban advocated diplomacy as a preferable way to manage Arab-Israeli relations. Although Eban is rightly considered as Israel’s greatest ambassador and its most eloquent defender abroad, he did not hesitate to criticize the military adventurism of Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan. With varying degrees of impact and tenacity, Eban continued to posit himself as one of the most dovish markers in Israeli politics, speaking, for example, against Israel’s occupation of the territories captured in the 1967 Six Day War and the continued expansion of settlements. But in a country perpetually besieged by existential anxieties, Eban’s views were often derided as overly naïve and irrelevant, and insufficiently attuned to Israel’s very real security problems.
These personal and professional discrepancies were further compounded by Eban’s demeanour, which again stood him apart from many of his peers: aloof, long-winded, aristocratic, condescending and pompous where some of the terms which were (often unjustly) used to describe the urbane and intellectual Eban. Compared to “persons of deeds” such as Ben-Gurion, Meir, Dayan and Rabin, Eban was quintessentially a man of words – less impulsive and more formal; an advocate of internationalism and restraint rather than self-reliance and intuition.
Since Eban’s career and Israel’s history are so closely intertwined, this discrepancy is particularly pertinent as it posits two contrasting approaches to managing Israel’s problems, or rather two images of what Israel is and what it could have been.
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