The New Year Quote by Abba Eban

Eban’s line is diplomacy with the gloves off: a joke engineered to land like a brief. By inventing an absurd resolution - the earth is flat, and Israel is somehow responsible - he exposes what he saw as the UN’s habit of laundering political hostility into procedural respectability. The humor isn’t decorative; it’s prosecutorial. If the system can be made to endorse nonsense, then the “international consensus” it produces starts to look less like moral judgment and more like arithmetic.

The specific intent is twofold. First, to delegitimize a voting pattern that, in Eban’s telling, treats Israel as a standing agenda item rather than a case-by-case actor. Second, to rally allies and domestic audiences by reframing isolation as proof of bias, not wrongdoing. The fabricated vote tally is the masterstroke: it mimics the UN’s sterile roll-call theater, where complex conflicts are compressed into numbers that confer a veneer of inevitability.

The subtext is sharper than the punchline. Eban implies that the institution designed to arbitrate between nations can become a stage for blocs, resentments, and postcolonial alignment - and that Israel, small and symbolically overloaded, becomes the convenient vessel for other countries’ politics. Algeria isn’t random: in the late Cold War UN, Arab and Non-Aligned leadership often drove anti-Israel resolutions, while the Soviet bloc and many newly independent states supplied reliable margins.

Context matters: Eban, Israel’s eloquent foreign minister and UN ambassador, spent his career selling legitimacy in rooms primed to doubt it. This quip is a survival tactic - using wit to puncture sanctimony, and cynicism to warn that majority votes are not the same thing as truth.