Word: eban
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...Abba Eban, the Israeli Foreign Minister, answered in ringing Churchillian cadences, coining the word "politicide" (death of a country) as the crime of which the Arabs were guilty (see THE WORLD). He was followed by a group of Arab and European spokesmen who either denounced Israel or admonished it against territorial aggrandizement. Of the rhetorical encirclement Eban is said to have quipped: "Never have so few owed so little to so many...
Defiantly rejecting the "intemperant utterance" of Russia's Aleksei Kosygin, who preceded him in the rostrum, Eban spelled out the actions of Moscow and the Arab states themselves as unassailable proof of who was responsible for the Mideast war. Rather than accept Israel's "sovereign right to existence," Eban said, the Arabs adopted a "doctrine of 'day-by-day military confrontation.' " Rather than working for peace, Russia "has for 14 years afflicted the Middle East with a headlong armaments race." Eban read off the deadly catalogue of Russian arms that had been delivered to the Arabs...
...What it asks in exchange for the land it has conquered is not a return to its dangerous existence before the war but a guarantee that it can live in peace. "Our watchword is not backward to belligerency, but forward to peace," explained its ever-eloquent Foreign Minister Abba Eban. Israel's prime demand, he said, is Arab acceptance of its right to exist. And Israel is pressing for direct peace talks with Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the Arab nations whose armies it defeated. It also demands the right of passage through the Suez Canal and the Gulf...
There was something else in the Russian diatribes that made Israel even angrier. "The U.S.S.R. has formulated an obscene comparison between the Israel defense forces and the Hitlerite hordes which overran Europe in the Second World War," Eban said. "There is a flagrant breach of international morality and human decency in this comparison. Our nation never compromised with Hitler Germany. It never signed a pact with it, as did the U.S.S.R. in 1939. To associate the name of Israel with the accursed tyrant who engulfed the Jewish people in a tidal wave of slaughter is to violate every canon...
...different propositions. On the purely technical matter of aggression, Israel scarcely bothers to deny any longer that it started shooting first. On the day before the guns opened up, the Israeli Cabinet met secretly to discuss whether to launch a "preemptive" attack before the gathering Arab armies struck. Abba Eban argued for further diplomatic efforts. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan insisted that the safety of the nation would not permit delay. Dayan carried the day. The attack was authorized by a vote of 16-2, the only nays being cast by the left-wing socialists...