ISRAEL: ABBA EBAN A FORMER ISRAELI FOREIGN MINISTER AND A PREMIER DIPLOMAT DIES AGED EIGHTY SEVEN

Record ID: 400844

  • Title: ISRAEL: ABBA EBAN A FORMER ISRAELI FOREIGN MINISTER AND A PREMIER DIPLOMAT DIES AGED EIGHTY SEVEN
  • Date: 19th November 2002
  • Summary: (W5) HERZLIYA, ISRAEL (NOVEMBER 18, 2002) (REUTERS) 1. MV KNESSET GUARDS STANDING CLOSE TO ABBA EBAN'S COFFIN 0.06 2. MV EBAN'S COFFIN 0.12 3. SCU FORMER ISRAELI FOREIGN MINISTER SHIMON PERES PASSING BY COFFIN 0.21 4. MV FORMER ISRAELI DEFENCE MINISTER, BINJAMIN BEN ELIEZER GREETING EBAN' S FAMILY MEMBERS 0.28 5. SCU AMRAM M
  • Embargoed: 4th December 2002 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: HERZLIYA, ISRAEL
  • Country: Israel
  • Reuters ID: LVA7H32VSUB7H6RTLK4CCKSPSBRY
  • Story Text: Abba Eban, a former Israeli foreign minister and a
    premier diplomat, has passed away at the age of 87.

    Distinguished early in his career for his eloquence, Eban
    helped argue the case for Israel's creation as a delegate to
    the United Nations which voted to recognise the Jewish state
    in 1947.

    A lone dove for most of his political career in Israel's
    centre-left Labour Party, Eban championed an image of an
    idealistic democratic Jewish state rising from the ashes of
    the Holocaust.

    Abba Eban, Israel's quintessential diplomat and one of
    the world's most eloquent statesmen, pleaded his country's
    cause for more than 40 years in the international arena.

    But the one-time Cambridge don, whose English-accented
    Hebrew and foreign etiquette made him seem to many Israelis a
    stranger in his adopted land, never achieved the same
    popularity at home as he did overseas.

    Eban died at 87 in a hospital near Tel Aviv on Sunday
    (November 17).

    A statement he made after the Palestine Liberation
    Organisation rejected the 1978 Camp David accords that led to
    Israel's first peace treaty with Arabs, Egypt, remains a
    mantra for Israeli diplomats today.

    Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, he said, was someone
    who "never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity".

    Twenty-two years later, Arafat rejected Israeli terms for
    a Palestinian state in U.S.-brokered peace talks, also at Camp
    David. Israel has since been trying to quell a Palestinian
    uprising that erupted in September 2000.

    A prolific writer and teacher on world affairs, Eban once
    summed up international conflict by saying: "Men and nations
    behave wisely once other alternatives have been exhausted."
    Born Aubrey Solomon Meir in Cape Town, South Africa, on
    February 2, 1915, Eban adopted his Hebrew name soon after
    Israel's independence in 1948.


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