The strange death of Rafael Eitan

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

s expected, Fateh nominated Mahmoud Abbas last night as its candidate for president of the Palestinian Authority, with some grumbling in the background as the younger generation complained that Marwan Barghouti should have been considered more seriously. The Tanzim, considered Fateh’s youth movement, was to meet this afternoon in ‘emergency session,’ but it was unclear whether it was to let off steam against the older generation’s choice of Abbas or to challenge the choice.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon didn’t call Abbas to congratulate him, but he did send a message, to the PLO chairman through U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, telling the outgoing secretary that Israel is ready to not only ease conditions to enable the Palestinian election take place but to coordinate the disengagement from Gaza and the northern West Bank with the PA, ‘if a responsible leadership’ emerges after the elections. By responsible leadership, Sharon means a PA ready to take steps to put an end to anti-Israeli terrorism.

Sharon’s original plan for disengagement from Gaza was meant, in his words, ‘to punish’ the Palestinians. But as he progressed with it politically inside Israel, international suspicion of his intentions and the plan gradually gave way to enthusiastic acceptance, as the international community insisted on seeing it just the way the opposition to it from the Right inside Israel saw it: the first step toward more withdrawals in the West Bank. Sharon did not go out of his way to dissuade anyone in the international community of that view, though his former chief of staff and constant legal advisor Dov Weisglass did try to dissuade Israelis of that view, arguing that disengagement was meant to prevent the establishment of the Palestinian state.

But that was before Yasser Arafat passed away, opening a floodgate of optimism and talk about new opportunities for a breakthrough in the peace process, largely because of the ascendancy of a generation of Palestinian leaders far more familiar with Israelis than Arafat, and if not more accommodating, at least more organized and conventional than the founding father of the Palestinian nation. Suddenly, Sharon was no longer calling it ‘the plan for unilateral disengagement’ from the Gaza Strip. Dropping the term unilateral opens the way for direct talks with the Palestinians and yesterday, Sharon said that initial contacts were already underway at the ‘technical-security’ level to plan for the elections slated now for January 9th. And he promised that Israel would lower its levels of military activity in response to lowered levels of Palestinian terror.

hile it is obvious that the Palestinians need Israel to step aside to enable elections, it is not clear, however, that the Palestinians want to coordinate with Israel on the withdrawal slated for next summer. Mohammed Dahlan told Israeli newsmen this week that as far as he is concerned, it would be best if Israel went ahead with its unilateral withdrawal plan on its own – ‘because if Israel involves us they will make demands of us.’

In any case, the Israeli press at least was reporting that the U.S. and Israel continue to see eye to eye what the Palestinians must do: take steps to make sure terror against Israel stops. Sharon has conceded that it might be difficult for Abbas to send troops after armed gangs right away, but at the very least he should call in Palestinian media and put an end to the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic ‘incitement’ in the PA media. PA officials meanwhile told Powell that they could not control reactions in the street to Israeli military strikes against targets inside PA areas – and IDF operations in the territories do continue, with arrests of wanted men suspected of terror involvement.

But the Powell visit and the delicate dance underway between Israel and the PA was far less interesting this morning to Israelis than the indictment of an IDF Givati Brigade captain who shot a 13-year-old Palestinian girl to death in the empty field outside the Girit military outpost in the Phildelphi corridor south of Gaza. Last night, Channel 2 carried a videotape of the radio communications between the captain and his soldiers during the event, and it clear showed that the girl was no threat to the soldiers, who nonetheless fired innumerable bullets at her before the captain charged, delivering a coup de grace and then added a burst of bullets ‘to verify the kill.’ Also seen on the program was a videotape of him trying to explain his actions to Military Police interrogators. Over and over the decorated officer explained that he was trained to ‘eliminate the threat’ and that is what he thought he did, not understanding that something is intrinsically wrong if he regarded an unarmed 13-year-old girl as a ‘threat.’

But even that story was overshadowed this morning by the strange death of former IDF chief of staff Rafael Eitan, who drowned in Ashdod port when a large wave swept him off the breakwater. The controversial ex-general turned Right wing politician left politics after the Netanyahu administration, and had been working as director of a construction project at the port. Eitan, better known as ‘Raful’ to Israelis, was a legendary IDF farmer-paratrooper whom Menachem Begin made chief of staff in 1978 and after retiring from the army in the wake of the botched Lebanon War, he went into politics, founding a Rightist party called Tzomet that amazingly won eight seats in the Knesset in the late 1980s on an uncompromisingly hawkish platform combined with resentment against the ultra-Orthodox community’s refusal to go to the army. But by the mid-1990s, Eitan was sick of politics – especially after his party declined dramatically in size in the 1996 elections. He quit politics after a brief stint in the Netanyahu government and pretty much disappeared from the public eye, returning to it this morning under the strange circumstances of his drowning.