Summary
Israel’s ambassador in Washington and representative at the UN, who in Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace is the recurring voice of Israel’s Western orientation abroad: appealing for Western aid after the 1953 Soviet break, agreeing that Israel could mobilize 200,000 soldiers alongside the USA, calling Arab national aspirations “flawed”, and earning a proposed Dutch citation for work against Indonesia’s claims (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.135, p.141-146, p.163, p.173).
Details
- Eban declared, when later asking Britain and the USA for arms, that Israel had no weapon not of Western origin; the British Foreign Office reminded him in an announcement of 13/10/55 that Israel had received arms from Czechoslovakia in 1948 (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.104).
- The view was expressed in Israel (Al Hamishmar, 13/4/52) that Eban was the real author of the American Zionist Council memorandum proposing Israel’s services for Western military interests in exchange for aid, and parallel aid to the Arab states (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.135).
- After the USSR broke relations in February 1953, Eban appealed in Washington to the Western powers for material and spiritual [!] aid, saying Israel had aroused the Soviet rulers’ anger by its overt democratic and pro-Western policies, which imposed a moral obligation on the West (Davar, 15/2/53) (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.141).
- At the Independence Loan conference in March 1953 Eban expressed full agreement with Henry Morgenthau’s assertion that Israel could mobilize 200,000 soldiers alongside the USA in the event of war, adding Morgenthau had underestimated Israel’s capacity; Ben-Gurion answered Sneh’s Knesset question by calling the report a journalistic fabrication, and the authors note in brackets that Eban himself received Israeli citizenship only in 1959 (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.144-146).
- Eban, called to Israel for consultations, warned the cabinet against setting up the USA as an unfriendly state in debate, and counted the State Department’s agreement to offer guarantees against distortion of the regional balance of power “an important achievement for Israel” (Israeli newspapers, 27/8/54); Sharett’s later complaint that US aid to Egypt carried no condition in Israel’s favour is glossed by the authors: what happened to Abba Eban’s guarantees? (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.151-152).
- In Paris on 30/1/52 Eban announced that “Israel relates positively to aspirations for national independence, but the national aspirations of many of the Arab and Muslim countries are flawed in various ways and in general it is the unwillingness to integrate into the network of international interests, including security arrangements” (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.163).
- Holland proposed giving Eban and Moshe Tov a citation “for their work in the UN General Assembly for Holland and against the claims of Indonesia” (Maariv, 27/6/58); the authors answer that Indonesians will give Eban no citation apart from the “mark of Cain” of one who does the bidding of the colonialists (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.173).
Related pages
Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, United States, Nahum Goldmann, Moshe Sharett, David Ben-Gurion, Non-alignment