Israel’s Eloquent Dove : PERSONAL WITNESS: Israel Through My Eyes, <i> By Abba Eban (Putnam: $29.95; 672 pp.)</i>

As a rule, the species writer is very different from the species mover-and-shaker. Edward Gibbon shares few traits with the Emperor Constantine. Occasionally, however, historian and history maker are one. This book proves again that Abba Eban is a magnificently multiple personality. The creation of Israel would have been more laborious without him. He was one of the heroes of an astounding birth. He is also the poet of its pains and joys.

I’m tempted to call him a circumcised Churchill. Actually he is both less and more. Unlike Sir Winston, he has never held ultimate power; nor did he ever command quite the clout that was Churchill’s even when out of office. Eban lacks the killer’s flair, the charisma of the anointed beast. I suspect that he failed to develop such attributes because they are not compatible with another gift: an extraordinary double vision that lets him see both sides of the coin.

For a politician it can be the talent that cripples. But it’s an unqualified blessing--as “Personal Witness” shows--for a chronicler looking back on his major career in statecraft.

From the very beginning, that career shimmered with contrasts. In 1916, Abba Solomon Eban was born in humble circumstances of a Jewish family in Capetown. His father died when he was 2, shortly after the Ebans had emigrated to England. The widow found work with the Jewish Agency in London. Though a simple secretary, she was a linguist. One night in 1917 she was summoned to translate the Balfour Declaration into French and Russian a few hours after it was issued. Some years later, Abba’s maternal grandfather provided another link with Jewish destiny. Each weekend he abducted the little boy to his “very modest” home, where he shared with Abba his poverty and his vast Hebrew erudition.

In someone else, such an upbringing might have produced a Talmudist. But Abba Eban, the contrarian, turned to a WASP Valhalla. He entered Cambridge at its elitist apex in the ‘30s. There Nobel laureate Lord Rutherford presided over the physics department; John Maynard Keynes lectured on economics, P. E. Leavis held forth on literature, A. E. Houseman taught the Latin classics, J. B. S. Haldane, biology. C. P. Snow was a don at Christ College, while Ludwig Wittgenstein, sponsored by Bertrand Russell, succeeded E. G. Moore in the chair of philosophy.

With the exception of Wittgenstein, this was an Anglo-Saxon galaxy of nonpareils. Yet among them Eban rose as a star, junior only in years. The Cambridge Review, reporting on student debates in the Cambridge Union, noted again and again Eban’s brilliant phrasings and his “great perorations.”

It would have been very comfortable for Eban to spend his adult life in the loftiest Cantabrigian reaches of genteel, if not Gentile, accomplishment. But that other side of the coin, the one with Hebrew lettering, called out to him. In 1938, he took a leave of absence from his Cambridge college. Instead of glittering in academe, he joined the Zionist movement at a comparatively prosaic level. He went to the Jewish Agency as one of Chaim Weitzmann’s assistants.

When the war broke out, British Intelligence enlisted him. True to the Eban leitmotif, his assignment abounded in contradiction. He was appointed liaison officer between Hagana, the Jewish underground army, and British forces in a Palestine soon threatened by the German Afrika Korps . The paradox of Eban’s mission lay in the fact that the England fighting shoulder to shoulder with Jews against Hitler was also the England opposed to Jewish aspirations in the Middle East. Eban came to incarnate the dichotomy. In 1945 he was a British major polemicizing against British repression under the pseudonym “Politicus” in the Palestine Post. The following year he handed in his military papers and flew to London to occupy a desk in the information department of the Jewish Agency.

The rest is history, personalized in three pages with aphoristic eloquence. As the British Mandate in Palestine metamorphosed dramatically into Israel, Eban was made the fledgling state’s ambassador to the United Nations and the United States. He then rose to education minister and deputy prime minister. Finally, in 1966, he became foreign minister and deputy prime minister. For the next eight years he spoke Israel’s cause with a pith and glow that had the London Times Literary Supplement liken his speeches to those of Cicero and Burke. “The Jewish people,” said his colleague and sometime rival Shimon Peres, “never had a voice that reverberated from one end of the world to another with such a resonance as this.”

The resonance has continued after his resignation. Its luster is verbal but its strength is moral. It reflects Eban’s unflagging vision of the other side of the coin.

As Cambridge prodigy he had remained rooted in Jewishness. As Jewish leader he was stringently sensitive to the Arab predicament. Quite early in his Zionist career he concluded: “To assert that thousands of years of Jewish connection totally eliminated thirteen centuries of later Arab-Muslim history would be to apply a discriminatory standard to historic experience. My contemplation of the land strengthened my belief that it enshrines two histories that must share their future in reciprocal acknowledgment of each other.”

It was a perilous sentiment for a young man moving toward the top echelons of Zionist leadership. That Eban got there nonetheless proves that no matter how he grated on Israel’s hawks, he was an indispensably able dove. Only his skills could have piloted Israel’s admission into the United Nations so surely past so many tricky shoals. What other foreign minister would have mastered, as he did, the diplomatic ramifications of the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War? This book documents mesmerizingly the Eban achievement. Historic headlines transmute into private experience, related by an insider who discerns the contrary not only in politics and ideas but in the soul.

That’s why Eban’s descriptions of world figures never obey stereotype. He always sees them against the grain. Here we have De Gaulle’s “shambling, disordered movement of a tall body . . . his constantly blinking eyes.” Here is the United Nations’ bogyman Andrei Gromyko speaking “with subtle understanding about the aspirations of the Jewish people to a state of their own.” Here is President Truman’s repeated, compulsive, apropos-of-nothing assertion “that his decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan caused him no anguish or discomfort. From this I deduced that his anguish and discomfort must have been intense.”

Here are haunting snapshots of the “tormented look” in Lyndon Johnson’s eyes. As for Menachem Begin, whose “virulent cunning and intimidation” made him one of Eban’s most formidable domestic foes, Eban pictures him “sensitive to form. His public persona . . . based on a strange convergence of Polish aristocratic mannerisms and British parliamentary dignity.”

Only one rounded figure is missing: the author himself. There is too little of the interior Abba Eban, even allowing for the fact that “Personal Witness” is primarily a political account and that Eban has already written an autobiography. But in a book where all other principals are painted with such unfailingly live strokes, one longs to know the man who holds the brush.

Eban doesn’t quite satisfy that longing. Yet I’m grateful that he has given us an epic memoir, so individualized, electrifying, instructive.