Personal Witness
Eban, Abba
That isn't right! Behave yourself!"—one close associate observed—"it might have made it easier for the rest of us." Whatever his defects, Eban has enjoyed an extraordinary political career. In...
...The classic example occurred in 1933...
...It is one of history's minor ironies that the senior American official who reportedly was most critical of Israel'saction—then-Vice President George Bush—came to be the man who benefited most from it...
...W hen liberals and conservatives agree in challenging one of the central pillars of the post–World War II order, something very important is afoot...
...Even to someone familiar with the special virulence of Israeli political life, the vehemence of his attack on former Prime Minister Shamir and his policies is astonishing...
...But pointing out that Shamir is not a crazed ideologue...
...S ince his fall from grace in 1974, Eban has carved out a new role for himself...
...Eban may well be right about world opinion...
...The world," he writes, "is closing its mind against coercive jurisdictions...
...As Eban sees it, the sins of that establishment are neatly encapsulated in a popular Israeli saying: "It doesn't matter what the goyim say, but what the Jews do...
...and that Likud's autonomy proposals, however "limited" and restrictive they might seem to Palestinians in search of statehood, would be welcomed with cries of ecstasy by Kurds and other genuinely disenfranchised groups—none of these statements is politically correct...
...To Eban, this smacks of hubris, zealotry, and a suicidal parochialism...
...He went on to serve as education minister, foreign minister, and deputy prime minister in various Labor governments...
...He remained in charge of Israel's...
...Needless to say, our argument made zero headway...
...And both did so by turning their backs on the source of their youthful greatness...
...All the standard elements of the left's indictment of Israel are present and accounted for: Israeli democracy is called into question...
...Shamir believes that Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza should enjoy autonomy, but not sovereignty...
...In 1981, Israel faced a dilemma not at all dissimilar...
...We shall be left isolated and lonely as a dry tree in the desert," he wrote...
...Today, he is recognized by liberal pundits the world over as a Great Man...
...Peres was horrified...
...Israeli oppression is assailed...
...Eban threw away his prospects for a glittering career in...
...In describing the diplomatic campaigns that he successfully waged on Israel's behalf, Eban is out to demonstrate that international opinion—"what the goyim say"—does matter, for only by winning the battle for public opinion can Israel hope to translate its military victories into lasting political achievements...
...Citing the tragic fate of Bosnia, Nye concludes: "Simple-minded application of a liberal principle led to fascistic practice...
...and championing Palestinian nationalism is politically super-correct...
...Paul Johnson has observed that "the belief that all people are ready for independence has proved illusory, at an incalculable cost in human misery...
...CP...
...The one exception is Shimon Peres...
...In 1947, when he was only 32, he became the head of Israel's delegation to the United Nations, and played a key role in Israel's successful bid for statehood...
...Both men, in the fullness of time, came to enjoy widespread acclaim as media-certified Great Men...
...For it is inconceivable that Desert Storm could even have been launched had Saddam Hussein already possessed nuclear weapons...
...So they go unstated by Abba Eban...
...The idea that national freedom is indispensable for Bosnia-Herzegovina while military rule is reasonable for the Palestinian people defies all logic...
...T here is, however, another side to the story...
...Bashing Shamir is politically correct...
...Yitzhak Rabin, newly installed as head of a Labor government, dropped Abba Eban from his cabinet...
...delegation for twelve years, while simultaneously serving for nine of those years as Israel's ambassador to the United States...
...Shortly before Begin ordered the attack on Osirak, he contacted the Labor party leader and informed him of the planned operation...
...f Eban is reticent in expressing his views about the Osirak raid, he is quite outspoken about another contentious issue: Israeli policy toward the West Bank and Gaza...
...Sometimes, effective statesmanship does demand zealotry, does require a defiant indifference to the opinions of mankind...
...But he also knew that an Israeli attack on Osirak would be universally condemned...
...No wonder that eleven years after Israel's attack, Bush's Vice President, Dan Quayle, acknowledged "the enormous debt the entire world owes to Israel in general, and to one Israeli leader in particular: Menachem Begin...
...This is well put, but if he really meant what he said, surely Eban would join in the effort to change world opinion, instead of citing the disastrous precedent of Bosnia-Herzegovina as proof of the inevitability of a Palestinian state on the West Bank...
...That both proposals are equally unacceptable to Palestinian nationalists of the PLO and Hammas varieties must surely be clear to Eban in his calmer moments...
...Conservatives, too, are attacking the "Self-Determination Trap...
...In a recent Washington Post article, a former deputy undersecretary in the Carter Administration, Joseph Nye, argued that, "the experience of Yugoslavia shows that the liberal principle of self-determination can lead to highly illiberal results...
...In the illustrations accompanying Personal Witness, the one that shows Foreign Minister Eban meeting with his West German counterpart, Willy Brandt, seems especially appropriate...
...But while international opinion has endorsed the principle of national self-determination in the most unqualified terms in the past, there are signs that it may no longer do so in the future...
...After the 1956 Suez campaign, and again after the 1967 Six-Day War, he upheld his country's good name and advanced its foreign policy objectives in speeches that have rightly been called Churchillian...
...Hitler had just come to power, and Poland's Marshal Pilsudski approached France with a proposal for a joint pre-emptive strike on Germany...
...pointed out that this resolution appeared to sanction terrorism, provided it was carried out in the name of national liberation...
...When I served on Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick's staff at the U.S...
...But the attentive reader will note that the only contemporary Israeli politician for whom Abba Eban has words of praise is Shimon Peres...
...Johnson predicts the return of international trusteeships in places like Somalia, "restoring to the word colonialism the good name it once enjoyed—in Mediterranean antiquity no less than the nineteenth century...
...He responded with a secret letter warning Begin that the bombing of Osirak would turn the entire world against Israel...
...Abba Eban writes that "movements of ideas are becoming more potent than movements of armies...
...Prime Minister Menachem Begin knew that if Israel hoped to destroy Iraq's nuclear weapons potential, it would have to act quickly...
...Eban believes that Palestinians should enjoy sovereignty as well, provided that they renounce an essential element of sovereignty—namely, the right to deploy military forces on their own terrritory...
...and the inevitable comparison between Israel and South Africa is drawn—to South Africa's benefit...
...drawing invidious comparisons between the halcyon days of yesteryear and the moral abyss into which Israel has fallen today is also politically correct...
...The U.S...
...To retain this gratifying status, Eban cannot allow his views to stray beyond the bounds of political correctness...
...But Eban is too busy denouncing Israeli policy to concern himself with broader issues...
...Nearly all of Israel's leaders have believed that, in the final analysis, "it doesn't matter what the goyim say, but what the Jews do...
...British academia and politics, and became the "Voice of Israel...
...When he ordered the attack, and the predictable firestorm of international criticism descended on Israel, Begin stood his ground, wagged his finger at the cameras, and in his heavily accented English intoned, "Never Again...
...Mission to the U.N., the General Assembly was presented with an annual resolution affirming the right of people everywhere to use "all means necessary"to secure their "national liberation...
...Admittedly, Menachem Begin was a tough old bird...
...In 1974, however, the unthinkable happened...
...It is difficult to say what Abba Eban thought of Begin's action, since in nearly 700 densely written pages, he succeeds at not discussing it...
...To a man of Eban's temperament, the decision must have been a shattering blow...
...The French, however, fearful that international public opinion would never condone such an action, declined...
...What makes this denunciation especially odd is that, once one gets past the indignant rhetoric, Eban's actual proposals for the West Bank and Gaza are not all that different from Shamir's...
...Their careers have remarkable parallels...
...Iraq's military reactor, Osirak, was nearing completion...
...In effect, Eban has written a cautionary tale: when what America's Founders called "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" was the guiding principle of Israel's statecraft, Israel scored its greatest diplomatic breakthroughs...
...that Israeli hawks and doves both share certain elementary security concerns...
...But when Israel's statecraft lost sight of this principle, Israel experienced its most humiliating reverses...
...Eban is convinced that international opinion will never countenance a prolonged Israeli presence there...
...But there is no reason to suppose that David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, or Yitzhak Shamir would have behaved any differently...
...Personal Witness is Abba Eban's attempt to get even—not just with Yitzhak Rabin, but with the entire Israeli political establishment...
...Peres was right about the international reaction, but Begin was more right to ignore it...
...Both men did great things when young: Brandt joined the anti-Nazi resistance and later served with distinction as the embattled mayor of West Berlin...
Vol. 26 • February 1993 • No. 2
