Rafael Eitan: In 1982 Rafael "Raful" Eitan, who has drowned aged 75, was the Israel Defence Force (IDF) chief of staff.
It was in that year that he and the then Israeli defence minister Ariel Sharon conceived of a plan to dislodge the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) from southern Lebanon. For years, PLO militias had periodically shelled 63 northern Israeli towns and villages; the IDF retaliated with bombings.
Presented to Prime Minister Menachem Begin's Likud cabinet as a limited, 48-hour operation, Sharon and Eitan's Peace For Galilee plan initially enjoyed general support in Israel. Battle commenced on June 6th, 1982, and Israel made swift initial military gains.
However, it later seemed that Eitan and Sharon had not been explicit about their goals. Rather than stopping at a point 40km into Lebanon, they envisaged sea landings, advances up the Beirut-Damascus highway, and confronting Syrian forces if need be.
Moreover, suggest many academics, the duo ultimately intended to help right-wing Christian Phalangists crush Muslim rivals, and to establish a pro-Israeli satrapy over all of Lebanon. Eitan negotiated with the Maronite Phalangist leader, Bashir Gemayel, in May, and sent Israeli troops into Beirut in July, well beyond the agreed 40km limit.
Two days later Israeli forces allowed Phalangist gunmen to enter west Beirut's Sabra and Chatila refugee camps, resulting in a massacre of from 800 to 2,000 mostly unarmed camp dwellers. Up to 400,000 Israelis took to the streets in protest.
Sharon and Eitan denied direct responsibility. Yet, the Kahan inquiry concluded that Eitan was guilty of breach of duty for not giving appropriate instructions to avert the danger of acts of bloodshed, and for not stopping the Phalange after they had started the killing. Severely sanctioned, Eitan completed his remaining weeks as chief of staff and retired to his moshav (collective farm village).
Eitan evokes wildly contrasting memories. There was the fighter who epitomised the old Zionist esprit de corps, leading from the front and befriending foot soldiers. Religious settlers remember a dedicated ally, notwithstanding his secular views.
Leftist Israelis condemn him for masterminding that 1982 invasion and for dashing peace hopes as a minister in the 1990s. And Palestinians will never forget how Eitan once likened them to "drugged cockroaches scurrying in a bottle".
Eitan was born Rafael Kaminsky in the moshav of Tel Adashim near Nazareth. Like Sharon, he gravitated from the socialist fold to the far right. Both men were soldiers-turned-farmers, sharing a vision of a Greater Israel, and both believed that only military might could bring peace with the Arabs.
Aged 16, Kaminsky joined the Palmah, the socialist Zionist Haganah militia's elite strike force, and adopted the surname Eitan ("strength"). He was the first Israeli on the US Marines command school programme.
In the 1967 six-day war, his paratroopers overwhelmed dogged Egyptian resistance in southern Gaza. He rebuffed a massive Syrian attack on the Golan Heights during the 1973 Yom Kippur war. He received four major battlefield wounds during his military career.
In 1978 he became IDF chief of staff and his rightist politics outstripped even those of Begin's new Likud government. Eitan advocated arming settler militias, and he dismantled the IDF singing troupes after they performed the mildly subversive Song of Peace. In 1980 he told his fellow officers: "We have to do everything to make [ Palestinians] so miserable they will leave." In 1981 Eitan directed Israel's aerial destruction of Iraq's French-built nuclear plant.
In 1983 Eitan founded the Movement for Zionist Renewal, or Tzomet. In 1984 he entered the Knesset, was re-elected in 1988 and in 1990 became agriculture minister in Yizhak Shamir's coalition cabinet. He resigned in 1991 after criticising Israeli concessions at the Madrid peace conference.
In opposition, after the 1992 elections, Eitan denounced the Oslo accords. So dominant was he as leader that Tzomet was dubbed "Raful and the seven dwarfs". By 1994 the party split, partly over revelations that he had diverted campaign funding to his mistress's charity.
In 1996 Sharon persuaded Eitan to shelve his candidacy in Israel's first direct prime ministerial elections. Tzomet temporarily merged with Likud, and Eitan found himself as deputy prime minister to the victorious Benjamin Netanyahu. But in 1999 Tzomet failed to return a single seat.
Eitan left politics in 2001, concentrating on carpentry - he loved to carve rocking horses. He divorced his first wife, Myriam, and married Ofra Meirson. The couple moved to Jerusalem in 1997, where Ofra became a leftist councillor. Remarkably, he never discouraged her from protesting against Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon. Around that time Eitan revealed that his mother was a member of the Christian Subotnik sect, and a descendant of the Russian tsar's bodyguards. Thus the Jewish ultra-nationalist, according to Rabbinic law, might not have been Jewish.
Predeceased by two sons, he is survived by his wife, and three daughters.
Rafael Eitan (Kaminsky): soldier and politician, born 1929; died November 23rd, 2004