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5763: Articles posted from September 2002-September 2003
Get the real situation in Israel every day.
 Abba Eban
Photo by AP
By Robert Rosenberg
November 18, 2002
Abba Eban did not live long enough to see peace between Israel and the Palestinians and therefore the entire Arab world. That is a shame, because as much as his voice was about defending Israel it was about Israel reaching a logical compromise for peace with its neighbors, becoming an integral part of a Middle East spurred on to economic propserity and cultural wealth by virute of resolving the conflict.
Always a statesman, never a politician, he was never appreciated as much in Israel as he was everywhere else he traveled. It was not merely the wealth of his vocabulary that made listening to an Eban speech the rheotical equivalent of attending a Mozart or Beethoven concert. It was the depth of the message that he delivered that could be so inspiring.
Unfortunately, his speeches in the heyday of his career as foreign minister from 1966, before the Six Day War to 1974, after the Yom Kippur War, convinced neither the Arabs at the time to recognize Israel nor Israelis to recognize the Palestinians. It was a voice of reason in a cacophony of of hysterical emotionalism, and as such, was doomed to be drowned out by the mob raging in a storm. That storm of irrationality is now at what feels like a peak, but there is no sign on the radars of an approaching calm. Though his voice was not heard in recent years it is, by many, missed now more than ever.
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