Voice of Israel.

EBAN, Abba.

Item Number: 51085

New York: Horizon Press, 1957.

First edition. Octavo, original half cloth, map endpapers. Inscribed by the author on the half-title page, “To H.E. Sir Harold Caccia Abba Eban.” The recipient Sir Harold Caccia was Ambassador to Austria from 1951 to 1954, and from 1956 to 1961 Ambassador to the United States. He was sent to Washington to repair relations badly damaged by the Suez crisis of 1956. The breakdown in mutual confidence arose when Britain and France joined an Israeli invasion of Egypt and sent military forces to capture the Suez Canal, which had been nationalized by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. In the years that followed, he was instrumental in restoring and nurturing the “special relationship” between London and Washington. In 1961, he became Permanent Under-Secretary of State, an office he held until 1965. Near fine in a very good dust jacket with some closed tears and wear. An excellent association copy.

Abba Eban was an Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister, Education Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, and ambassador to the United States and to the United Nations. He was also Vice President of the United Nations General Assembly and President of the Weizmann Institute of Science. In 1947, he was appointed as a liaison officer to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, where he was successful in attaining approval for the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab segments—Resolution 181. At this stage, he changed his name to the Hebrew word Abba (however it was seldom used informally), meaning "Father", as he could foresee himself as the father of the nation of Israel. Eban continued at the United Nations over the next decade. From 1950 to 1959 he also served as his country's ambassador to the United States. He was renowned for his oratorical skills. Henry Kissinger remarked: "I have never encountered anyone who matched his command of the English language. Sentences poured forth in mellifluous constructions complicated enough to test the listener’s intelligence and simultaneously leave him transfixed by the speaker's virtuosity." Eban's grasp of history and fluency in ten languages enhanced his speech-making in the United Nations. In 1952, he was elected Vice President of the UN General Assembly.