Between Raful and Arik
By Israel Harel
A few hours after Rafael Eitan was swept to his death - fell in battle with the waves, as his wife Ofra Meirson put it - Mahmoud Abbas told the Palestinian parliament: "We promise you, Abu Ammar, that we will not rest, we will not be silent, until we achieve for our people the right of return and end the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees."
And since it is not possible to achieve this right in peaceful ways - and no one knows this better than Abbas, who was told by no less than Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin that even the left would not be able to grant him the right of return - it is clear where this "man of peace" is heading.
Not a single major political personage reacted to the statement, in real time. It is reasonable to assume that even Raful, were he alive, would not have responded to it. But for a diametrically opposite reason than that which prompted the leaders of Israel to disregard it: he simply knows that these words, and not the other smooth-talking tongue that Abbas uses for public relations purposes, are in fact his and the Palestinian people's inner truth.
As opposed to the Israeli political leadership, when it comes to matters of withdrawals, concessions and uprooting, Abbas and his friends say what they think, and have no intention of conceding on the precepts of their belief, dream and objective: The right of return and a Palestinian state that will in the end extend over the territory of the State of Israel.
Raful never had any illusions of an Arab leader ever giving up these precepts. Only Jewish politicians whose national roots are shaky can delude themselves and their people that the hearts of the Arabs are as weak as the hearts of the Jews.
A large share of Israelis can no longer live with the central belief with which Raful lived: As long as it is in their power, the Arabs would not come to terms with a Jewish presence in the region. This would only change if we routed them with the sort of defeat with which the Allies routed the Germans and the Japanese in World War II. Conversely, in the prolonged War of Attrition - because we don't have the courage to put an end to it - they will wear us down. In the Yom Kippur War, the first war in which he could influence national strategy, Raful spoke of decisive victory, not only of blocking the enemy, which was the object of the government in the first days of the war.
When his division - in a heroic war in which he was the main hero, including the role model that he provided - changed the face of the war from near defeat to a chase after the enemy, Raful demanded that he be allowed to advance to the outskirts of Damascus and to trounce the Syrians with whose army he, as well as many Israelis, had a long and unsettled account.
This approach, that the Arabs had to be resoundingly defeated strategically, militarily and consciously, is a position that was presumably at the foundation of his initial support for the objectives of defense minister Ariel Sharon in the Lebanon War. But Raful's lessons from Lebanon were different from those of most of his colleagues in the army and later in the political world.
They internalized the criticism that it was wrong to set out on a war of choice. In other words, the people of Israel must never initiate a war to solve problems that in the long run threaten its very existence in its own state. Raful believed that the weakness of the politicians, and of some of his comrades-in-arms, and their inability to withstand pressures from without but especially from within, denied the realization of the major, although played-down, strategic ideas of the Lebanon War: the establishment of a Palestinian state in Jordan instead of Judea and Samaria. If the operation were better planned politically, Raful felt that its outcome would have given Israel at least a few decades of breathing space to further establish its society, economy and status in the region.
Those of his comrades in arms who went into politics thought fundamentally like him. But instead of adhering to the truth, while adopting a moderate language for tactical-political purposes, they abandoned it as well. As Yitzhak Rabin said when he adopted Oslo, you have to give the people hope. But the vain hopes blew up only a few months later with the first bus bombing on Dizengoff Street, but Rabin and his colleagues could no longer return to the path of truth. They were wrapped up in the illusions and wishful thinking of White House lawns, Nobel Prizes and bear hugs of the Israeli and global media.
In recent years, when he understood that no one, including Arik with whom he fought arm in arm on many battlefields, was interested in hearing his admonitions, Raful went off to do what he loved best: build.
Ever since meeting Sharon, and especially since the battle at Mitla in the Sinai Campaign of 1956, Raful had a "respect him and suspect him" attitude toward him. Most of the time the "respect him" was ascendant, but in the past four years it was more "suspect him."
He was not surprised, then, by what he called Sharon's somersault. Raful had also done quite a few somersaults in his time, but he was always guided by the "primitive" basic truth. Current events prove, through the shedding of our own blood, that his truth is the truth, and everything else - like those who pin their hopes on Arafat's successors - is wishful thinking. Raful was guided by that truth until his final day.
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