A titan of Zionism died last week.

Abba Eban, 87, was the last of a generation that founded the modern state of Israel. He was a towering personality in the struggle for survival, the tragedy of isolation and the euphoria of victory in battle.

When I first arrived in Israel in 1973, he was foreign minister, Golda Meir was prime minister, Moshe Dayan, the hero of the 1967 war, was defense minister, Teddy Kollek was the mayor of Jerusalem - they all were heroes of the state's founding.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was living at his kibbutz, Sde Boker, in the Negev Desert. That desert was the place he wished that Jews would settle, not Judea and Samaria, or wretched Gaza, where Israeli settlements now proliferate.

Ben-Gurion died that year.

Abba Eban was the voice of Israel that brought eloquence to the vision. The United Nations was his forum.

Other Israelis who later were in the same positions Eban held as ambassadors to the United States and the United Nations, spoke English well, American really - with more of an edge and more anger: Benjamin Netanyahu and Moshe Arens, for example.

But Eban was raised in England, not America, and educated at Cambridge. He spoke the King's English, employing it in a way that was impressive and persuasive at crucial moments in Israel's history. Not the least of these was the battle to get the United Nations to agree to partition Palestine so a Jewish state would be created, to accept Israel as a member, to protect Israel from an onslaught of criticism after the misguided adventure against Egypt in 1956, and to stand firm in justifying Israel's stunningly successful 1967 war against Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

In that war, Israel captured all of the Sinai peninsula from Egypt and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Old City, and the Syrian Golan Heights.

"The threat to Israel was a menace to the very foundations of the international order," he told the United Nations, denouncing Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser for blocking Israel shipping in the Straits of Tiran and for whipping up the Arab world against Israel.

"The state thus threatened bore a name which stirred the deepest memories of civilized mankind, and the people of the threatened state were the surviving remnant of millions, who in living memory had been wiped out by a dictatorship more powerful, through scarcely more malicious, than Nasser's Egypt."

"From these dire moments Israel emerged in five heroic days from awful peril to successful and glorious resistance."

One of his favorite, and historically accurate, observations about the Palestinian leadership was that it never "lost a chance to miss an opportunity."

He could be brutally sarcastic, especially about the United Nations where the General Assembly often voted resolutions against Israel.

"If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the Earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it," he said, "it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions."

Another apt observation: "Better to be disliked than pitied."

Recognition of Israel's right to exist - a fundamental demand of the Arabs for the sake of moving ahead a peace process - was hardly enough as far as he was concerned.

"Nobody does Israel any service by proclaiming its 'right to exist,'" he wrote in The New York Times two decades ago.

"Israel's right to exist, like that of the United States, Saudi Arabia and 152 other states, is axiomatic and unreserved. Israel's legitimacy is not suspended in midair awaiting acknowledgement. ... There is certainly no other state, big or small, young or old, that would consider mere recognition of its 'right to exist' a favor, or a negotiable concession." Nonetheless, Eban, the quintessential diplomat, understood that, somehow, Israel would have to come to an agreement with the Arabs under Israeli occupation, preferably through Jordan, but if not, then directly with the Palestinians.

He was annoyed that Americans - especially media pundits - would urge Israel against trying to make peace with the Palestinians.

"Israel's friends in America, who are far from this tragic arena, should consult their conscience very sharply before they urge Israel to explore the dark horizon of rejectionism," he wrote in a letter to The New York Times in 1988.

Certainly when he wrote that, he did not anticipate a Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza, heavily armed and led by Yasser Arafat. Nor could he have anticipated the awful violence that besets the Israelis and the Palestinians today.

While Abba Eban's command of the English language was extraordinary, his command of Hebrew was not; at least his pronunciation was not.

In the rough-and-tumble of Israeli politics and the move toward the right of his own party, he sounded out of sync. The party dumped him in 1988, 40 years after the creation of the state of Israel, a creation that might have happened differently, or not at all, if he had not been there to push it through.

Even in being dumped, Eban lost neither his sense of humor nor his gift for gab.

"Democracy means you have the freedom to do unwise things as well as wise things," he said.