Abba Eban, a former Israeli foreign minister, U.N. ambassador and ambassador to this country who was a gifted writer and historian and an eloquent speaker who may have been the greatest diplomat to serve the state of Israel, died Nov. 17 at a hospital near Tel Aviv. The cause of death was not disclosed. He was 87.

In 1948, he became Israel’s first ambassador to the United Nations, adding the post of ambassador to the United States in 1950. He held both titles until returning to Israel and entering the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in 1959.

He entered the government that year, serving as minister without portfolio in 1959 and 1960 and then as minister of education and culture until 1963. He was deputy prime minister from 1963 to 1966 and then foreign minister until 1974. He remained in the Knesset until 1988, spending the last four of those years as chairman of its foreign affairs and security committee.

Eban was foreign minister during years of diplomatic and military upheaval, even by Israeli standards. His contributions to his nation’s cause during the June 1967 and October 1973 Arab-Israeli wars were in many ways as crucial and successful as those of the more famous Israeli military.

Eban, a suave diplomat of the old school, spoke 10 languages, including English with the accent of a Cambridge don, which he had been. He was always seen wearing impeccable three-piece suits and made little secret of his belief in his own abilities.

He was highly respected abroad, especially in the United States, for his diplomatic abilities, his intellectual attainments, and his academically acerbic wit.

None of this translated into real political popularity in Israel. Most of the successful Israeli politicians of his day were Eastern European immigrants who had been active in the struggle for independence or younger native-born Israelis, often military figures, who were proud of a certain lack of diplomatic polish.

Eban, South African born and British educated, was, famously, a “dove” in the Labor Party firmament. After the 1967 war, he championed the diplomatic solution: trading the conquered Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the West Bank for peace.

He was appalled by ideas of “settling” conquered territories, doubting peace could come of that and questioning whether Israel could even call itself a “Jewish state” with the increasing numbers of Arabs that would eventually live within its borders.

Eban, along with much of the international community, also deplored the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s by the Begin government. He doubted both the moral basis and political success of the operation.

He said that in refusing to trade land for peace, Israel was “tearing up its own birth certificate. Israel’s birth is intrinsically and intimately linked with the idea of sharing territory and sovereignty.”

Those stands did not meet with wide agreement among Israeli Jews. But he remained popular abroad.

Alfred Friendly, a former Washington Post editor and foreign correspondent, writing in The Post about Eban in 1977, said: “No man in that nation’s almost 40 years of history ever projected to the world its essence and its anguish, its vision and its spirit, in nobler and more exalted terms or won more credit doing it.”