The Israeli Ambassador

The man with the job of getting U.S. arms for Israel is Abba Eban, 40, for five years Israeli ambassador to Washington.

Patient and persuasive, Abba Eban is rated highly by the U.S. and foreign diplomats who work with him. Sympathizers to Israel consider him one of the five ablest diplomats in Washington; opponents call him a nuisance or a menace, but none dispute his cleverness. "Eban is super-able," said one diplomat, a neutral. "He fences a beautiful duel with words."

Abba Eban was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1915. He moved on to London in 1922, studied and later taught Arabic, Hebrew and Persian at Cambridge. He once debated the case that the British educational system at Cambridge was insupportable "because it professed to educate a governing class which could not govern." Eban went to the World

Zionist Congress in Geneva in August 1939, then joined the British army, rising from private to major in seven years. In 1946, he began working full time for the emerging Jewish state, first as an information officer in London, then as a.delegate to the U.N. In May 1950, he was appointed Ambassador to the U.S., the youngest diplomat to hold such a rank in Washington.

Abba Eban who last week welcomed his Foreign Minister, Moshe Sharett, in the U.S. on a bond-raising tour, was one of the very few diplomats who predicted that Egypt's rising young Colonel Nasser would elect to join neither West nor East but Nehru's neutralists. For all his urbanity, Abba Eban sometimes argues his case with a touch of bitterness and bite. "Israel," he once said, "stands out as an island of freedom in the wilderness of despotism."

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