Israeli Despair Opens Door for Hard-Liner

He has been in the Israeli Cabinet for less than three months, but Effi Eitam says his influence is easy to see: Just look to the tanks rolling back into West Bank towns and villages.

What many regard as the final blow to the battered 1993 Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization is for Eitam moral vindication.

Until recently, the 50-year-old retired general, an Orthodox Jew, was regarded here as a charismatic but marginal figure, a far-right ideologue with messianic impulses. A career soldier and respected battlefield commander, he quit the army in 1999 because, he said, he understood that his political views and religious convictions made further promotion impossible.

But as Israel’s security crisis has deepened, Eitam has moved from the fringe to the center of the political debate with his calls for the government to destroy the Palestinian Authority, expel its leaders and reoccupy the West Bank.

And Eitam has moved to the heart of political power.

Three months ago, he was named head of the National Religious Party, a Zionist Orthodox party whose base lies with the Jewish settlers living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. From there, he catapulted into the government as a minister without portfolio--and into the prestigious security Cabinet, the small grouping of senior ministers who set defense policy with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Eitam says his mission has been to bring “moral clarity” to Israel’s battle with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and his administration, to fashion a response to the Palestinian leadership based on his belief that they are “coming from the darkest part of evil on Earth.”

In the Cabinet, Eitam’s has been a consistent voice urging an escalation of the conflict with the Palestinians. He has advocated the retaking of the entire West Bank and the arrest and trial of Arafat and senior Palestinian officials. He has warned that Israel’s Arab minority is a “ticking bomb” threatening to destroy Israeli democracy.

His hard-line constituency had chafed at Sharon’s unwillingness to follow Eitam’s prescription for achieving military victory over the Palestinians. “Where is Effi?” graffiti taunted, an allusion to his perceived inability to be heard.

But a rising tide of Palestinian suicide bombings has moved Sharon--and most of the government--closer to Eitam’s views.

The security Cabinet recently announced that Israel will reoccupy large swaths of the West Bank “until terror stops.” Eitam quickly claimed credit for the decision.

“Sharon has understood that in the next year there is no other way to defend the state of Israel and its citizens without taking security control of all of the territories,” Eitam told Nahum Barnea, a respected political analyst with the mass-circulation Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot. “I convinced him.”

Soon, Eitam said in the interview, Arafat will be banished to the Gaza Strip, where he can establish what Eitam called “Arafatistan” behind the security fence that Israel has built. Israel, he said, will retain control of the West Bank, captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War.

The mainstreaming of Eitam’s hard-line views reflects the despair that Israelis feel after nearly two years of bloody battle with the Palestinians.

Eulogizing an Israeli woman and her 5-year-old granddaughter killed in a Jerusalem suicide attack this month, Eitam issued a near-biblical call for revenge that captured the sense among Israelis that they are living through the latest chapter in the ancient Jewish struggle for existence.

“I look up at you [Arabs] on the hilltop,” Eitam said, “and I see your large houses and your closed shutters--we know that behind those shutters, you are now happy ... [but it is] the happiness of Philistines, the joy of the uncircumcised, the merriment of little people.”

You “are experts of impurity, cursedness and evil,” he said. “But we are the blessed.” The Jews, he said, “have returned home for our rendezvous with the Lion of the World and the Lioness that is our Nation.”

He warned: “And when we pounce on you, and it will happen--when we come with vengeance against your terrible evil, woe will be unto you--we will make a reckoning with you.”

Eitam’s critics on the left view him as one of the far right’s most dangerous politicians. Yossi Sarid, leader of the Meretz Party, dubbed him a “false messiah,” and others have likened him to the far-right French presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen.

“That you have somebody like him in the government is a deep blemish on our society,” said Rabbi Michael Melchior of the Meimad Party, a dovish Orthodox party. “I just totally disagree with him about what is Jewish morality, what are Jewish values.”

But as Israel’s security situation deteriorates, Melchior said, Eitam’s influence is likely to grow. “There is a danger from people who are charismatic and have very populistic, simplistic answers to our problems,” he said. “It is the danger of a situation where you can find people ready to buy practically anything if they believe it will bring peace and security.”

Even an old friend, left-wing activist Raya Harnik, who fought for Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon after her son was killed there during the 1982 invasion, said she is afraid that Eitam will eventually attain his stated ambition of becoming prime minister.

Harnik said her unusual friendship with Eitam began when they met at a memorial service for the fallen of her son’s army unit 15 years ago. Eitam, her son’s first commander, said he had wanted to console her when he died but feared that their political differences were so deep that “he would only cause me pain,” Harnik recalled. “I said: ‘I would speak to Yasser Arafat--why can’t I speak to you?’ ”

Eitam visited her in Jerusalem, Harnik said, and the two soon found that they had little in common politically but much in common in their emotional attachment to the Jewish state. They have maintained the friendship since.

Still, Harnik said, she worries that Eitam has entered politics at a time when Israelis are receptive to extremist solutions.

“He speaks of bringing morality back to politics, but I’m sure that Stalin also thought he was restoring morality,” Harnik said. Political analysts say that for the moment, Eitam’s chances of becoming prime minister are minuscule. He leads a party that holds just five seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. But Eitam is widely expected to lead the NRP into an alliance with Sharon’s Likud Party after the next national elections.

With support for Likud soaring in polls, the party is expected to have a good chance of forming the next government. If the NRP increases its parliamentary seats, analysts say, Eitam could reasonably expect to be named defense minister in a Likud government, a post that would position him to battle for the leadership of the Likud once Sharon retires.

Eitam, soft-spoken and intense, rejects the notion that he is proposing simplistic or dangerous solutions to Israel’s troubles. On the contrary, he said in an interview with The Times, he is proposing realistic solutions for both sides.

Wearing the skullcap and long beard of a religiously observant Jew, Eitam asked politely that he not be portrayed “as a crazy person” in this article.

“I believe that the Palestinian people deserve a state of their own,” he said. “But I don’t believe that anybody can think of the Gaza Strip and 90% of Judea and Samaria [the biblical terms for the West Bank] as a state. Dividing the West Bank into two satisfied, sovereign states is impossible.”

Since Israel signed the Oslo accords, the territories ceded to the Palestinians have become “a base of terror,” and the Palestinian Authority leaders “made their own people become crazy, lunatic people committed to death and to a dark ritual of killing,” Eitam said. There is no possibility, he said, that Israel will divide rule over the West Bank with such an entity.

His solution is a “regional solution” that will call on Jordan and Egypt to cede territory to the Palestinians that will then become a divided Palestinian state on the east side of the Jordan River and in the northern Sinai desert. Only such a redivision of territory, Eitam said, can ensure regional stability by leaving all four peoples with viable states.

Critics have pointed out that neither Egypt nor Jordan seems likely to participate in such a solution to the problem, which the Arab states believe can only be resolved by deep Israeli territorial concessions.

Born to left-wing parents, Eitam grew up on Kibbutz Ein Gev, on the edge of the Sea of Galilee. He was secular until the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when he lived through the near collapse of Israel in the face of a surprise attack by Arab armies. The experience led him to a spiritual rebirth and to move to Moshav Nov on the Golan Heights with his wife, Ilit. They have raised eight children.

Eitam said he feels he has a mission in politics: to serve as an example for other nationalistic, religiously observant young people and lead them into bastions of power traditionally dominated by secular Zionists of the center left.

“I want to pave the way for a new generation of leaders who will not be afraid of combining politics and ideology, who will show that politics and integrity can come together,” he said.