Israel Washes Away the Sins of Former Army Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan

By Delinda C. Hanley

"WHEN WE HAVE settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle."-Rafael Eitan, April 14, 1983

"We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel...Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours."-Rafael Eitan, April 13, 1983

Former Israeli Army Chief of Staff Rafael "Raful" Eitan, 75, died Nov. 23 when he was swept off a breakwater by a "giant wave" while working on a renewal project at Ashdod Port, south of Tel Aviv. Eitan was lost in the rough seas for more than an hour, before IAF helicopters and navy rescue ships found his body. Paramedics, who failed to resuscitate him, described cuts and bruises on his hands, likely caused by his attempts to grasp rocks off the breakwater.

The powerful wave that took Eitan's life also managed to wash away in Israeli minds and memories his many sins. When he emerged from the sea, the man whose racist remarks helped dehumanize Arabs for generations of Israelis was heralded as a man of principle.

"The man was courageous, a true leader, and embodied the true qualities of a fighter," according to former President Ezer Weizman, who as defense minister appointed Eitan to head the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). "He will always be remembered as a symbolic fighter that embodies the Jewish people's struggle in the Land of Israel," Weizman said.

Eitan, whom the Jerusalem Post described as personifying the "gruff boorish Sabra character of the new Israeli state," exuded hatred toward Arabs. Nevertheless, after his death his leather-clad tattooed friend and comrade-in-arms, Shlomo Kuba, told Jerusalem Post reporters: "He was a leader, teacher, educator," adding for good measure that his fellow paratrooper was "the salt of the earth and a pathfinder."

Eitan's second wife, Ofra Meyerson, described him as "analytical, balanced and a man of deeds," and a "humanist who worked for the good of all."

Thousands of Israelis came to bid farewell to the "warrior-farmer-politician, carpenter and builder, and sabra-Zionist" as his Israeli-flag draped coffin lay in state, the Jerusalem Post reported. Only Asaf Harel, host of an Israeli late-night talk show, dared to joke about the full military funeral and many eulogies when he quipped, "There are hundreds of soldiers who wanted to attend Raful's funeral, but they were stuck at Kiryat Shaul [in coffins at an Israeli military cemetery].

Eitan, one of Israel's founders, was born in the Moshav Tel Adashimm in northern Palestine in 1929. Drafted into the Palmach when he was 17, Eitan served in the Israeli military for 37 years and was army chief from 1978 to 1983.

He fought and was severely injured in the battle for Jerusalem in 1948. He became a paratrooper and was the first to parachute into the Mitla Pass during the Sinai invasion of 1956. During the 1967 Six-Day war Eitan again was critically injured, this time in the head, but survived to fight in the 1973 Yom Kippur war.

Eitan will be remembered as the mastermind of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the man who ordered the bombardment of Beirut. In fact, as Gideon Levy reminded Haaretz readers, Eitan suggested bombing from the air a packed stadium in Beirut. Thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians and 650 Israeli soldiers were killed during Israel's senseless 18-year occupation of its northern neighbor.

Along with the current Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Eitan was reprimanded by Israel's Kahan Commission for allowing the massacre by Israeli-allied Christian Phalangist militiamen of Palestinians in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. On the eve of that massacre, he promised, with ghoulish humor, that "the Phalange will organize tiny little houses for the Palestinians." On another day he said, "It's a pleasure to see how the Arabs are killing one another."

After leaving the Israeli army Eitan founded the hawkish ultranationalist Tzomet party, which later joined the Likud party of current Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The right-wing Tzomet party opposed the return of Palestinian land as well as peace talks, and even called for the expulsion of non-Jews from Palestine. Eitan advocated cutting off the Bedouin in the Negev from their sources of water and electricity and preventing them from marrying other Palestinians in the territories.

After losing an election he finally left political life in 1999, having served during his career as a member of parliament, agriculture and environment minister, and deputy prime minister.

Even in his last days, Eitan remained an unrepentant Arab-hater. After surviving four grievous wounds in battle he went to his watery grave unchanged. In an interview earlier this year with Tel Aviv Newspaper regarding his work at the port, Eitan took the opportunity to blast Sharon's "disengagement plan": "All these efforts will come to naught. With the Arabs it will never be possible to make peace," Eitan told the reporter. "This is a struggle between civilizations. We are a foreign culture, and in my opinion, Islam will never make peace with our foreign entity, and with the fact that it has political independence and even defeats them in wars...The Arabs wage negotiations with us in three ways: pretense, deception, and violence."

Sharon, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, former prime ministers Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak and Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu attended Eitan's internment ceremony, and extolled his heroic service to his country. Israelis carefully swept away Eitan's deeds and words and accorded him a new and sanitized biography.

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Delinda C. Hanley is news editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

This article was published in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. It is used here with permission.