Sason, Eliyahu

Sason was born in 1902 in Damascus , Syria (then the Ottoman Empire ). He studied at a school in Damascus and graduated from the University of Saint Joseph in Beirut. In his youth, starting in 1918, he worked in the Arab newspaper Al-Hayat . At the same time he was engaged in the Zionist movement. He has written many articles on this subject published in Hebrew in Israel. In 1919-1920 he was involved in the creation and editing of the newspaper Al-Sharq (East), a Zionist newspaper published in Damascus for a short period.

In 1920 he moved to Eretz Yisrael . He worked as a laborer in Israel, was a public lecturer in Middle Eastern affairs, which led him to interact with the Jewish Agency. From 1933 to 1948, he headed the Arab department of the agency. After the formation of the state of Israel, he was appointed director of the Department of the Middle East at the Foreign Ministry . Before that, he was a member of the Israeli delegation to the United Nations (1947-1948). In 1948 and in 1949 he was a member of the Israeli delegation to reach an armistice agreement at the end of the war of independence with Egypt and Lebanon. He was a member of the Israeli delegation at the , and later led the delegation (1949).

He was the head of the Special Bureau of the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Paris for Arab Relations, the Israeli representative in Turkey (1950-1952), the Israeli ambassador to Italy (1953-1960) and in Switzerland (1960-1961).

In 1961 he returned to Israel to join the government of David Ben-Gurion as Minister of Communications. He also held this position in the government of Levi Eshkol , until 1967, when he was appointed Minister of Homeland Security. During his tenure, the government was also elected to the Knesset and was a deputy of the sixth and seventh convocation .

Sason died in October 1978 after a serious illness, due to which he was bedridden for several years, and was forced to resign. He was buried in the Ghar a-Menuhot cemetery in Jerusalem. ^[2]