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EBAN, ABBA (1915–2002).Born in Cape Town, South Africa, and
brought up in England, Eban studied oriental languages at Cambridge
University. In 1938 he immigrated to Palestine, where he lived until his
death. During Word War II Eban held the rank of major, serving on the
staff of the British minister of state in Cairo. Later he served as an in-
telligence officer in Jerusalem. During his service, Eban trained Jewish
volunteers for resistance in the event Germany invaded Palestine.
In 1947 Eban was the liaison of the Jewish Agency to the United
Nations Special Committee on Palestine and a member of the Jewish
Agency’s delegation to the General Assembly, which was instrumen-
tal in securing the UN resolution on the partition of Palestine.
After the State of Israel was created, Eban was Israel’s representa-
tive to the United Nations, a position he held for nine years
(1950–1959). He was concurrently Israel’s ambassador to the United
States in Washington, D.C. In his exchanges with other delegates at
the United Nations, Eban represented Israel exceptionally well. In
1959 Eban was elected a member of the Knesset. He served for some
time as minister of education in the Labor government of Prime Min-
ister David Ben-Gurion. From 1966 until 1974 Eban was Israel’s for-
eign minister. In May 1967, on the eve of the Six-Day War, he held
intensive talks with leaders in France, Britain, and the United States,
in an effort to win support for Israel.EICHMANN’S CAPTURE. One of the renowned operations of the
Mossadwas finding and capturing the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eich-
mann, who was the architect of the Final Solution of the so-called Jew-
ish problem in Europe. This “solution” was to concentrate all the Jews
in ghettoes and ship them to special camps for extermination. In the fall
of 1957, an Israeli diplomat named Walter Eytan received a phone call
from Fritz Bauer, a public prosecutor in West Germany, informing him
that Eichmann was alive and living in Argentina, probably under an as-
sumed name. No other information was known at the time.
Later the Mossad learned that a young man presumed to be one of
Eichmann’s sons, called Nicholas, had become involved with an Ar-
gentinean Jewish girl. Apparently not knowing that she was Jewish,
he bragged to her about his father’s role in the Final Solution in Eu-82 • EBAN, ABBA06-102 (02) A-G.qxd 3/24/06 7:23 AM Page 82