A titan of Zionism died last week.
Abba Eban, 87, was the last of a generation that founded the modern state of Israel. He was a towering personality in the struggle for survival, the tragedy of isolation and the euphoria of victory in battle.
When I first arrived in Israel in 1973, he was foreign minister, Golda Meir was prime minister, Moshe Dayan, the hero of the 1967 war, was defense minister, Teddy Kollek was the mayor of Jerusalem - they all were heroes of the state's founding.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was living at his kibbutz, Sde Boker, in the Negev Desert. That desert was the place he wished that Jews would settle, not Judea and Samaria, or wretched Gaza, where Israeli settlements now proliferate.
Ben-Gurion died that year.
Abba Eban was the voice of Israel that brought eloquence to the vision. The United Nations was his forum.
Other Israelis who later were in the same positions Eban held as ambassadors to the United States and the United Nations, spoke English well, American really - with more of an edge and more anger: Benjamin Netanyahu and Moshe Arens, for example.
But Eban was raised in England, not America, and educated at Cambridge. He spoke the King's English, employing it in a way that was impressive and persuasive at crucial moments in Israel's history. Not the least of these was the battle to get the United Nations to agree to partition Palestine so a Jewish state would be created, to accept Israel as a member, to protect Israel from an onslaught of criticism after the misguided adventure against Egypt in 1956, and to stand firm in justifying Israel's stunningly successful 1967 war against Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
In that war, Israel captured all of the Sinai peninsula from Egypt and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Old City, and the Syrian Golan Heights.
"The threat to Israel was a menace to the very foundations of the international order," he told the United Nations, denouncing Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser for blocking Israel shipping in the Straits of Tiran and for whipping up the Arab world against Israel.
"The state thus threatened bore a name which stirred the deepest memories of civilized mankind, and the people of the threatened state were the surviving remnant of millions, who in living memory had been wiped out by a dictatorship more powerful, through scarcely more malicious, than Nasser's Egypt."
