Fifty years ago on the cusp of Israel's 10th birthday, not its 60th,

. . Abba Eban, then Israel's ambassador to the United States, sat down for an interview with CBS.

By Jonathan Mark


http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0508/wallace_eban.php3

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"I'm Mike Wallace," says the newsman. "The cigarette is Parliament."


It was a time when journalists almost had to smoke, a haze drifted between the talking heads on an unadorned stage, draped in black.


The primitive black and white kinescopes of Wallace interviews from the late 1950s were recently made available by the University of Texas at Austin, where they've been archived.


The interview on that night takes us back to a simpler time, before settlers, before Israel's control of Jerusalem or the West Bank, a time when "little Israel" was David, not Goliath. It was the year "Exodus" was published. Israel was a teen idol, or so we remember. But the young Wallace (40 years old) was tough and Eban was, well, Eban.


Here, condensed, is some of their exchange. <snip>