Science and Statesmanship

 

 

 

David [Sieff] it’s a particular honor to be introduced by you because of your long association and that of your family with this wonderful institution, and it's a particular privilege to be asked to speak at this very moving event. And I should say, Suzy [Eban], if I had any good sense I should simply stop right now and say we should leave the last word to you because you are really marvelous, and in your presence and with Abba Eban's nephew, Isaac Herzog, a member of a Knesset, Ambassador Daniel Kurtzur and Sheila Kurtzur, who are also very dear and long time friends of ours, Ilan Chet, my wife Fran, and other friends, we are here to honor the memory of an enormously important and great person - scholar, statesman, author, and orator. Abba Eban was truly the voice of Israel for much of the 20th century.

 

As President of the Weizmann Institute, he in essence raised the stature of Weizmann to the international distinction that it has today. Chaim Weizmann himself, of course Israel's first President and the namesake of the institute, had a great influence in Abba Eban's life. It began in an early age when Abba Eban's mother served as secretary and translator in the London office of Weizmann Zionist Organization. In 1917, it was she who translated the Balfour declaration into French and Russian. In his own memoir Personal Witness, Abba Eban said of his mother at the time that "The translation of a document seems like a modest chore, but it linked my family to an unforgettable drama - Zionism had conquered my inner world."

After completing his studies at Cambridge University, he planned to settle into a quiet life of academia, which was rudely interrupted by the beginning of World War II. He joined the Royal Army, and was stationed in Palestine as a member in the Information Corps, spending much of his tenure training Jewish resistance fighters, to repel any possible German invasion into Palestine.

 

After the war Chaim Weizmann helped convince him to devote his life to the creation of a Jewish state, again linking Weizmann and Eban together. Eban joined the Jewish Agency in Palestine in 1946, and so much of the rest is history. He played a very central role in helping secure my country’s recognition of Israel's independence. When Chaim Weizmann was unable to meet President Truman to implore him to recognize the new state, Abba Eban came up with the idea of having a contact with the President's best friend and former business partner, Eddie Jacobson, in Missouri. It was he who called Jacobson to implore Jacobson to in turn call the President. He convinced Eddie Jacobson that he should tell President Truman that Chaim Weizmann indeed was the Andrew Jackson of the Jewish people. Why? Because through the kind of careful research that Abba Eban was used to do he had found that Truman Hero-worshiped in his own words Andrew Jackson even to the extent of having a sculpture of the great southern President on his desk. He told Eddie Jacobson that in fact, no two human beings ever walked on the face of the earth with fewer common attributes than Chaim Weizmann and Andrew Jackson. But, said Eban, on the other hand, the establishment of a Jewish state was in my view a superior interest to historical accuracy.

 

That strategy paid handsome dividend, and the United States of America became the first country to recognize the State of Israel. And I think I can say what Ambassador Kurtzur here, really one of our most distinguished career ambassadors, said - that relationship gets stronger each year.

 

From Israel's creation, Abba Eban became Israel's first ambassador to both the United Nations and the United States, the only person ever to hold these two positions simultaneously, and also the youngest ambassador from Israel and the youngest ambassador to the United Nations Israel has ever had. As our own late beloved Hanan Bar-On said in an article shortly after Abba Eban's passing, "Abba Eban," he said, "as befitting, the fledging state and the tender age of many of its leaders, was the youngest ambassador in Washington and the youngest permanent representative in the UN. He was throughout much of the world the embodiment of the young emerging and fascinating state.”

 

The years that Abba Eban served as President of the Weizmann Institute were seminal years. He was simultaneously a member of the Knesset and Minister of Education, and by fusing these positions, he was able to enlarge his own great vision of the importance of science to the development of Israel and to the development of the developing world. Indeed, as we saw from the wonderful film and from Suzy's own words. He saw science as an early bridge between Israel and the developing nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and through, as we've learned by the film and by Suzy's words, the Rehovot Conferences, and as Ilan himself mentioned, he brought those leaders here on to this campus, and forged early bonds between Israel and developing countries that served Israel so well in its important years. This was in a sense a form of academic diplomacy, a new type of diplomacy, that very well complemented the later diplomacy he would have a few years later when he was appointed as foreign minister, the pinnacle of his career in public service.

 

It was during that time on the great world stage, most notably during the Six Day War and the Yom Kipur War, that Abba Eban earned his reputation as literally "the voice of Israel to the world." His strength of character, his scholarship, his formal English education combined with an extraordinary capacity to speak a Churchilian manner, a rich vocabulary and an authoritative and powerful presence, combined to make him the face and voice of Israel to the world.

 

I know this for a fact, my wife Fran and I had the great privilege of hearing him first hand in our own synagogue in Atlanta. In 1989 he did our family an enormous favor. I had established a memorial service in my father's synagogue for my late father and late uncle. And at a time when he was suffering greatly from a severe hip problem, so much so that he had to speak on a high stand, he nevertheless traveled all the way to Atlanta and delivered a powerful and eloquent talk. And that, Suzy, may I say, is something that will always, indelibly, be on my mind because it showed not only a capacity to think great thoughts about countries and foreign relations, but also to have the capacity to think about the importance to our family of this talk.

 

He was at the same time that rare combination of visionary and pragmatist, idealist and realist. For one thing he realized that his political popularity abroad somewhat exceeded that at home, and he joked that "I could have been prime minister if the people abroad could have voted in Israeli elections." He also showed that rare combination by two quotations, which to me embody vision and realism. One is, he says that "Nations often behave wisely once they've exhausted all other alternatives, and in the Arab-Israeli dispute all other alternatives to peace were exhausted a long time ago," And yet he could also remind us pragmatically that famous saying that is still said to this very hour namely: "The Palestinians never lose an opportunity to lose an opportunity."

 

He was an author of a handful of remarkable books, including My People - a comprehensive history of the Jewish people, as well as My Country - the history of modern Israel. He helped create the phenomenally popular public television series "Heritage, Civilization and the Jews," and "Israel - A Nation Is Born."

 

As we've seen in 1998 he got the Chaim Weizmann Award of Sciences and Humanities - a fitting tribute to someone whose life intersected with Chaim Weizmann himself and with this Institute. They walked hand in hand to fulfill Weizmann's vision and Abba Eban's vision, of science, and the pursuit of the strength of this state and for all mankind.

 

Let me close my opening remarks by saying that we hope for the day when Abba Eban's vision of the Jewish state existing peacefully among all its neighbors, will be fulfilled. He was a great humanitarian, he was a great Israeli, he was a great Jew, he was a great humanitarian and global treasure.

 

He also had a great sense of Jewish history, and of the tragedy of the holocaust, and permit me to dedicate the balance of my remarks to Suzy and Isaac to his blessed memory.

 

Nothing can restore what has been lost in the holocaust. Rabbis no longer teaching the next tractate of Talmud to the next generation, cantors no longer chanting haunting melodies in synagogues, small and large, musicians and writers, poets and actors, business entrepreneurs and yes, scientists, whose creative genius was extinguished, mothers never able to create the warm candle lit glow of a Shabbat evening, farmers and shop-keepers no longer eking out on meager, and yet proud living, one and a half million children never able to create their own Jewish spark in the world, the Yiddish language, which had been the transmission bell of European Jewish culture, barely a whisper, the heart of Jewish civilization in eastern Europe torn asunder. We remain today the only religious group in the world whose number is smaller than it was in 1939.

 

We say to ourselves 'Zechor', remember, and we tell the world and ourselves 'remember', but how? How do we remember? Let me suggest five ways, each of which I think speaks to Abba Eban's life, and speaks to the holocaust and its currency.

 

First and foremost is simply to perpetuate the memory of the six million by telling the brutal truth about the holocaust. One can't see Abba Eban at the UN without recognizing that he insisted on always telling the brutal truth. In this case, the truth about the evil designs of the Nazi perpetrators and their collaborators. The truth about those who allowed their neighbors to be taken to their deaths without protest. The truth about the role of neutral nations, who provided the financial and material support to help sustain the German killing machine. The truth about how the allied leaders of the great western democracies, including the United States, refused to ease restrictive immigration quarters at the 1938 Evian Conference, singling unmistakably to Hitler. Their blind eye to the fate of Jews, a blind eye that lasted throughout the war. And not coincidentally, within months of the Evian conference, darkness began with Crystalnacht. And yes, the truth about the heroic non Jews who risked their lives to save Jews and the many brave Jewish partisans and fighters in the ghettos and forests of Europe.

 

During the Clinton administration we developed two U.S government reports detailing the role neutral nations played in supporting the Third Reich. We obtained apologies from the Presidents of Austria and Germany for their private companies' brutal employment of slave labor, and encouraged countries to face their past honestly, by holding four international conferences with over 40 countries, and helping 21 of them, including the United States, create historical commissions to study their roles during the war, the most honest and self searching, of which, by the way, including ours, were the Swiss and French commissions. We developed a sixteen-nation holocaust education task force to promote holocaust education around the world, and Yad Vashem is the mentor for that task force.

 

Exposure of the truth was not only important looking back, but remains important in the world, and the South Africa truth and reconciliation commission helped create a peaceful end to the apartheid state, following the type of example we did.

 

A second way to remember is to insist that the lessons of the holocaust be applied to contemporary problems. To make the protection of human rights a key part of our agenda today. It was my own confrontation with the holocaust that led me to persuade President Carter to create a special Visa status that allowed 50 thousand Iranian - Jews, Christians and Bahais - fleeing the Islamic revolution and Ayatollah Humeini in 1979-80, in the United States. And yet when we consider the killing fields of Cambodia, the genocide in Rwanda, the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, it’s clear the world has still not absorbed the lessons of the holocaust. And yet, here too the holocaust gives us lessons for the future. The Nuremberg trials that tried Nazis under the new concept of crimes against humanity are being used this very day for war crime tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda. And I believe that the concept will be used in Iraq to try Saddam and his henchmen. This concept can act as a protection, a prophylactic, a warning, to those who may plan future genocides - they will be tried as well as other war criminals.

 

A third path to "Zechor" is to honor the survivors of the holocaust by helping the living and their families. The holocaust was not only the history's greatest genocide, it was history's greatest theft. The confiscation of bank accounts and art, property and personal affects, insurance policies, along with brutal uncompensated slave labor. With the initiative of leaders like Edgar Bronfman and others and the strong support of President Clinton and his team, the issue of justice were long forgotten, holocaust survivors were forced back on to the world agenda. Thousands of pieces of the Jewish communal property, synagogues and schools, community centers and cemeteries are now being returned to the re-emerging Jewish communities in Eastern Europe after the end of the cold war, so they could rebuild their shattered lives. Tens of thousands of Swiss and French bank accounts are being returned and some eight billion dollars was recovered from private Swiss, German, Austrian and French companies and their governments for the benefit of survivors.

 

There is still much to be done. Far too many elderly survivors from south Florida to Eastern Europe to Israel remain destitute without access to life sustaining medicine and pharmaceutical aid. The kinds of payments that we made in the commissions we created I believe will be important. They're being used in Sarajevo and the Balkans, and I believe that they will be used in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Instead of the right of return and the return of property, which is both unrealistic and unhistoric, the payment of compensation into a historic compensation fund, a humanitarian fund, I believe as we've done in Hungary, and Czech Republic will be used.

 

Another way to remember is to protect Jews wherever they're threatened and to help defend the Jewish homeland in Israel. Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel's Independence Day, comes right after Yom Hashoa. Just as Israel was born out of the ashes of the holocaust. To neglect one is to forget the memory of the other. I think that the world Jewish community acting with Israel, has learned the lesson never again, helping to gain freedom for Jews in Arab countries, the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, helping Jews in need from the former Soviet Union to Argentina, and acting worldwide in unstinting support for the State of Israel.

 

Let me be very blunt as I think, if I may say so, Abba Eban might have been. It’s become painfully evident that anti-Semitism did not end with the holocaust, and that a new virulent anti-Semitism has arisen. Aimed at Israel, and aimed at its supporters. We should be clear, Israel, like any other country is not exempt from criticism. I suspect, without being presumptuous that Abba Eban might have said and had a few words to say about the settlement policy and perhaps the direction of defense. But there is a difference between criticism and imbalanced (invitupretive?) reactions, which we are seeing now. It involves criticism of the very concept of Israel as a Jewish state, and it amounts to a collective anti-Semitism. It was visibly portrayed just within the last few weeks, By the standing ovation Arab leaders, many of them are erstwhile American allies, recently gave at the organization of the Islamic conference to Malaysian Prime Minister Mahatir Muhamad crude canard that, and I quote, "after the European can kill six million Jews out of twelve million, today the Jews rule the world by proxy and get others to fight and die for them." There has been an upsurge of anti Semitic actions by Muslim youth throughout Europe against Jews and Jewish religious property. Ilan Chet knows first hand, as do many of the scientists here, because they've seen the results of it, the potential boycott by European professors of Israeli universities. And I've seen letters that Ilan has shared with me of professors around the world who refuse to participate in scientific exchanges.

 

There is pressure today in the United States for U.S universities to disinvest from Israel, and in the face of this, there remains a deafening silence by too many world leaders in the face of these outrages. Only within the last week, the last week, a recent Euro barometer pole found that nearly 60% of the European public believes Israel to be a threat to world peace, and in the ranking of all countries, Israel is ranked by the European public number one as a threat to world peace, ahead of Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Syria, and other countries who are indeed a genuine risk. This of course is terribly troubling. My former boss Larry Summers, now the President of Harvard (I was his deputy when he was a treasury secretary) has himself said that he never believed, and he said this just within the last couple of days, "I never believed that the issue of anti-Semitism would be something to be seriously worried about. In my lifetime", he said, "anti-Semitism has been remote, and the holocaust - a matter of history, not a personal memory. And yet," he says, "when anti-Semitism had been the redound of only poorly educated, right-winged populists, and today profoundly anti-Israel views are found in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic," he says, "and they're a fact, if not their intent." And he praised for the idea that the rise of anti-Semitism will prove to be a self-denying prophecy, a prediction carrying the seeds of its own falsification. And Larry said that just a couple of days ago at Harvard prayer service.

 

There is reason to believe that there are good people trying to do something about this. We should take heart from the fact that with U.S government leadership the organization for security and cooperation in Europe with 54 member states has just decided to take up the issue of anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic violence for regular monitoring as a human rights issue, and the European Union, embarrassed by its silence, has recently strongly condemned both the statement by Mahatir and the various results of the survey I mentioned. President Prodi, the President of the European Union just said: "I'm very concerned about the results of this survey, they point to the continued existence of a bias that must be condemned out of hand, to the extent that this may indicate a deeper, more general, prejudice against the Jewish world, our repugnance is even more radical." He said, “in conclusion in the Europe born in reaction to the horrors of war and the Shoa, there is no place for anti-Semitism, and it cannot be tolerated.” The survey revealed signs that we must all consider carefully the right responses, and in a meeting that he just held literally at the end of last week in New York, with the conference the Presidents, agreed to begin holding seminars on this. So this is an issue, but it is an issue that is being elevated.

 

Let me close by one last way to remember, and that is plainly and simply, and I think I can say this because Abba Eban spent so much time in the United States and was such a voice for the west as well, by assuring our continuity as Jews in America and in the west. The fact is very plain. The great openness and acceptance of Jews in modern day America and Europe has cost too many of us to use our freedom, to assimilate and abandon our religion and culture, to check our Judaism at the doors of the institutions that now accept us, to inter-marry without conversion of the non-Jewish spells, to abandon our millennia old religious practices, we are a declining population in America and in the west. Only in Israel and, ironically, in Germany, is the Jewish population growing. So the most fitting memory for holocaust survivors, the most fitting memory for Abba Eban, is to redouble our dedication to Jewish identity, to Jewish education, to Jews in need, to Jewish institutions like the Weizmann Institute, and to the Jewish State of Israel. If we can simply use his blessed memory to reinvigorate and inspire us, then indeed he will have lived for a greater purpose, even than we can imagine.

 

So, Suzy, with those remarks and as Chairman, may I simply say to you, to your family, and to Weizmann, may you all go from strength to strength.

 

Thank you.