Israel Ambassador Abba Eban, who is also Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations, today formally made known that he is leaving his posts at the end of May in order to return to Israel. He will enter the political field in Israel.
Ambassador Eban presented his letters of credence to President Truman on September 5, 1950. He had pleaded Israel’s cause before the United Nations ever since Israel’s establishment on May 15, 1948, and served as permanent representative since Israel’s admission to the UN on May 11, 1949.
In accepting Mr. Eban’s resignation, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion wrote: “You have been able to intensify the links between America and Israel by emphasizing the spiritual values and political interests common to them both. For each of our countries is attached to the divinely conceived values of human freedom and to the democratic system based on the concept of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Reviewing Mr. Eban’s work at the United Nations, the Prime Minister referred to the eager suspense with which you have been heard in the international forum as a result of your strong personality and arresting speech.” He added: “It is my conviction that your integration into the political life of our country heralds many achievements no less great than those which you have accomplished as our representative abroad. I am certain that the strength which has sustained you in your foreign service will be with you in even greater measure at home. “
THANKS BEN GURION FOR ENABLING HIM TO ENTER PUBLIC LIFE IN ISRAEL
In a letter to Mr. Ben Gurion, Ambassador Eban recalled conversations in Jerusalem in which he had discussed the prospect of “entering the public life of the country in the framework of its parliamentary institutions.” He expressed his “deep appreciation of the encouragement” which the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Golda Meir had given him in his aspiration to enter this new sphere of activity, and his gratitude “for having been accorded the privilege of representing our country on the soil of the great power which has maintained relations of friendship and recognition with Israel since the early hours of our independence.”
In a separate letter asking to be relieved of his function as permanent representative of Israel to the United Nations. Mr. Eban recalled that eleven years had passed since he was first called upon to appear in the UN Security Council to defend Israel’s rights of sovereignty, peace and self-defense. “From that time to this, the United Nations has been a central arena for Israel’s political struggles,” Mr. Eban wrote. “It is in the UN arena that our country has made its first strides towards the development of a general foreign policy aimed at the strengthening of peace, the prevention of atomic conflict, the evolution of African and Asian peoples from dependent status to full sovereignty, and the institution of international cooperation for economic development and the defense of human rights.
“Many nations which are now establishing direct relations with us in diplomacy and commerce encountered us for the first time in the United Nations forum. Above all,” Mr. Eban stated, “the very spectacle of Israel in the family of nations symbolizes the end of the age-long disabilities which our nation endured for many centuries.”
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