Abba Eban

Abba Solomon Meir Eban (/ˈɑːbə ˈiːbən/ ^ⓘ; Hebrew: אבא שלמה אבן [ˈ(ʔ)aba ˈ(ʔ)even]; born Aubrey Solomon Meir Eban; 2 February 1915 – 17 November 2002) was a South African-born Israeli diplomat and politician, and a scholar of the Arabic and Hebrew languages.

During his career, he served as Foreign Affairs Minister, Education Minister, and Deputy Prime Minister of Israel. He was the second ambassador to the United States and the first Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations. He was also vice president of the United Nations General Assembly and president of the Weizmann Institute of Science. Eban famously remarked of the Palestinians, "The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."

Eban was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on 2 February 1915 to Lithuanian Jewish parents. His father, Avram Solomon, died in London to which the family had come seeking treatment for his undiagnosed illness less than a week before Eban's first birthday. He recalled being sent to his grandfather's house as a child to study the Hebrew language, Talmud, and Biblical literature. He lived for a period of time in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

He attended St Olave's Grammar School, then in Southwark, and read Classics and Oriental languages at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he achieved a very rare triple first, studying Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian; these were three of the ten languages he would reportedly master (he enjoyed translating newspaper articles into Ancient Greek). At the age of 23, he became a Fellow of Pembroke College, a role he held from 1938 to 1939, and was marked for a distinguished academic career.

During his time at university and afterwards, Eban was highly involved in the Federation of Zionist Youth and was editor of its journal, The Young Zionist. At the outbreak of World War II, he worked for Chaim Weizmann at the Zionist Organization in London from December 1939.

Eban served in the British Army in Egypt and Mandate Palestine, becoming an intelligence officer in Jerusalem, where he coordinated and trained volunteers for resistance in the event of a German invasion, serving as a liaison officer for the Allies to the Jewish Yishuv.

After the war he continued in his post, helping to establish and run the British Foreign Office's Middle East Centre for Arab Studies which was originally based in Jerusalem before relocating to Shemlan near Beirut. He was at that time known as "Aubrey Evans".

In 1947, he translated from the original Arabic Maze of Justice: Diary of a Country Prosecutor, a 1937 novel by Tawfiq al-Hakim.