Did Abba Eban really say "If Algeria introduced a [UN] resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it..."? ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, December 16, 2024

Did Abba Eban really say "If Algeria introduced a [UN] resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it..."?

Abba Eban, who was Israel's Foreign Minister as well as Ambassador to the UN and Ambassador to the US, was known as a brilliant orator as well as for his wit.

He famously said that Arabs "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." (That is usually misquoted as "Palestinians.") He also said, "History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives." After the Six Day war he said, "I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender."

But one of the most famous quotes attributed to Eban is this one: "If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions."

When I looked for the source, however, I came up empty.

The earliest I found a similar quote from him was from a Toronto Star article from 1968:

While United Nations delegates quarrelled in the rhetorical aftermath of the Arab-Israeli war last June, Israel’s grandiloquent Foreign Minister Abba Eban delivered a wry semantic solo: "If the Arab League made a motion at the UN assembly that the world was flat they would get 40 votes for it”.

I saw a couple of sources in 1970 change the quote slightly: "If the Arabs table a resolution tomorrow that the earth is flat, they can count on at least 40 votes."

The closest quote I have found came not from Abba Eban but from Chaim Herzog, Israel's UN ambassador. The Los Angeles Times mentioned his version of Eban's quote in 1975:

Former Foreign Minister Abba Eban of Israel once observed that the Arabs could automatically muster 40 votes for a declaration that the world was flat.

Israel's new U.N. ambassador, Chaim Herzog, has updated the illustration to say that if Saudi Arabia sponsored the flat-earth proposal, the vote would be "100 in favor, Israel, Costa Rica and the United States against, and 35 abstentions."

The earliest I can find the "Algeria" quote comes from an op-ed by Israel's Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom in The Guardian in 2004:

The general assembly request recalls the famous observation of Abba Eban that "if Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions".

Since Eban died in 2002, this version of the quote sounds apocryphal, but the Guardian piece is used as the source by others.

It is certainly possible that within Israel's diplomatic community, the quote kept being modified in internal discussions, so for all we know Abba Eban or someone else may have refined it beyond Herzog's version. Perhaps Shalom was quoting from internal lore where the quote kept morphing within the Foreign Ministry.

But I cannot find any evidence that Eban himself said this quote.