Abba Eban

While there are various theories as to why the Russians shifted their stance on Israel, Stalin's decision is still shrouded in mystery.

Aba Eban later recalled, "Nothing had prepared us for this windfall.

Moscow was reversing its traditional posture by proposing the option of a Jewish state.

I had come to the United Nations with a pessimistic assumption about the balance of forces.

is insane.

All these countries that want a two-state solution, and Aba Eban had a great quote about this in 1954, when this was still a new problem.

And he said, if the Arab world is so eager to see a two-state solution, they hold 99% of the territory, they have most of the natural resources of the Middle East and most of the wealth of the Middle East.

They have more than enough capability to find some land and establish a state for the Palestinian and for the Arabs.

And there were many people who were involved.

What's his name? Abba Eben, already in the 40s, wrote an article in Commentary about Confederation.

He understood that possibility that we have to build with others.

The Israeli Declaration of Independence mentions the fact at the end of the Declaration of Independence, there's a line about cooperation with others economically.

The Zionist project has been pretty open about what it wanted.

It did have wonderful diplomats like Abba Eben who knew how to present the case and who was very eloquent and so on.

Today people say they don't really care about presenting the case because they lost it in public opinion but they don't care about...

They do care about public opinion but They have a control of the government.

I mean Israel is maybe not completely to blame here for why they're still in occupation because there have been plenty of opportunities for the Palestinians to try and reach an accommodation that would have allowed them to have some limited self-government and maybe over time greater self-government.

My observation is that the late Abba Eban said the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

I think that's been borne out sadly by events.

And by the time I got back to Israel in 2002, after not having been there for maybe 12 years or so, I was struck by, in the midst of the second Intifada, how the political support for any kind of political solution with regard to the Palestinians had really been sorely undermined and tested by the violence and the terrorism and all of that.

I could go on and on.

Abba Eban, South African, educated at Cambridge.

Abba Eban grew up in M- uh, sorry, uh, Golda Meir grew up in Milwaukee.

Yeah.

These were Europeans and Americans speaking in European and languages and English to English speakers or German speakers or French speakers or Russian speakers.

Israel points to this to argue that it should get to pick and choose which territories it can occupy instead of withdrawing from them all, which was the impression that Egypt, Jordan, the US, and pretty much the entire international community was under when the resolution passed.

And if this wasn't slimy enough, Then-Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban was actually lobbying Lord Keredon as he was drafting the resolution to remove the word the before the phrase territories occupied and Eban also requested the removal of the preamble which stipulated the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.

This is a pretty important historical detail.

The Israelis were literally manipulating the drafting process with the goal to engineer the resolution's language to the point where it could be stretched to justify Israeli expansionism.

If we can look back at the armed struggle waged by SWAPO and other Namibian resistance fighters and approve of their just fight against their white supremacist occupiers, Why wouldn't we feel the same way about the Arab resistance to their Israeli Jewish supremacist occupiers? It's the same principle.

Nonetheless, it's because of this moral argument and the strong legal case made within the anti-colonial framework that the international community understood why Egypt and Syria launched their campaign, and the UN Security Council never condemned it.

Abba Eban himself acknowledged the attitude of the international community in the wake of the October War.

The Egyptian attack on Israel on Yom Kippur aroused no international revulsion.

Um, but I mean, we talked about the creation of the state of Israel and, and the, the history of that.

Um, Abba, Ab- is it Abbas or Abba Eban? Um, he said that the Palestinians never lose an opportunity to lose an opportunity.

And if you look back at the history-

Yeah