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Monday, 08-Apr-2002 1:40PM      Story from AFP
Copyright 2002 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet) 

http://www.ptdprolog.net/webnews/wed/ab/Qisrael-politics-eitam.RbnK_CA8.html


JERUSALEM, April 8 (AFP) - Catapulted into the limelight with a nomination as a minister in Israel's government, former general Effi Eitam is a staunch defender of Israel's claim to its biblical-era borders -- which include the Palestinian territories.

Eitam was was voted head of the National Religious Party, the political arm of the controversial Jewish settlers in the Palestinian territories, on Sunday.

On Monday Prime Minister Ariel Sharon named him minister without portfolio and a member of his security cabinet, as his troops battled their way through West Bank cities.

The 49-year-old hardliner, who believes in the restoration of Eretz Israel -- the biblical Jewish state whose borders included what is now the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- is a tough-talking politician who does not conceal his ambition to one day become premier.

In a conference in 2000, he called the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat a "miserable assassin."

He cut short his army career in December 2000 when he was turned down a promotion to major general.

One of the few religious generals in the army, he later said he did not want to stay in an army taking orders from a leftist government, referring to then prime minister Ehud Barak, whom he accused of negotiating with "murderers and terrorists."

In the meantime he has set up a religious and Zionist organisation, Mayim (United Jewish movement), to promote the interests of a greater Israel and the central role of Judaism in Israeli institutions.

He plans to breathe a "new spirit" into the idea of a "Greater Israel" as the head on the NRP.

He has denounced Israel's tendency to become "a pale imitation of the United States, westernised, liberal, secular and democratic."

Instead he insists that "Israel must become a Jewish state."

He also rejects any possibility of a Palestinian state in the West bank or Gaza Strip, saying there is already a Palestinian state: Jordan.

As for Arab Israelis, he has called them "cancerous cells" and a "fifth column."

A supporter of the strong-arm method with the Palestinians, he said two weeks Israel must "declare war on Arafat," and called on the government to strike Iran and Iraq before they develop a nuclear capablity.

He said Israel had given up its power of dissuasion when Barak pulled it out of Lebanon in May 2000.

He told Barak at the time: "Don't pull the army out of Lebanon, you'll be leading Lebanon into Israeli territory."

He says now that the Palstinian uprising which has been raging for more than 18 months, costing in excess of 1,800 lives, has borne out his warning.

Born in the kibbutz, or collective village of Ein Gev, Eitam became seriously involved in religion after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, studying in a religious school, or yeshiva, of Rabbi Kook, the son of the founder of religious Zionism.

He then settled in Nov, one of the few religious Jewish settlements in the Golan, where he still lives.

Effi, who commanded Israeli forces in Lebanon and in the north of the country, also took part in the celebrated raid on Entebbe in 1976, when commandos freed Israelis taken hostage by hijackers in Uganda.

He was also decorated for his courage in the Yom Kippur war.

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