Last update - 00:00 05/01/2006
Raful's sleepless nights
By Roni Hadar
"At night, everything that happened in his life would come out, all the nightmares of his hard life. Nightmares that sought release after accumulating over many years in his bleeding soul - wars and struggles and bereavement, and mainly, his hard life. Outwardly, in everyday life, it was Raful the hero, with his hands folded over his big paunch, ostensibly impermeable and determined, a man's man. Inside, he suffered, he bled. This happened almost night after night, during all our years together. That was Raful's dark secret, the repressed secret."
A huge wave swept Rafael Eitan (Raful) into the sea at Ashdod two years ago, and he - almost totally deaf in both ears and thus incapable of hearing the rushing water that sneaked up behind him - didn't know how to swim and drowned. Next Wednesday, in the Yahalom Theater in Ramat Gan, there a special event will mark what would have been the 77th birthday of the man who served as the Israel Defense Force?s chief of staff during the Lebanon War, and as a senior minister and deputy prime minister.
His widow, Ofra Meyerson, reveals today that the private Raful was far removed from his image as a chief of staff and a politician. So far removed, that every night he woke up startled in the wake of his nightmares. He was a haunted man. His years on the battlefield exacted an emotional price that was too heavy to bear. During his final years he did not enjoy even one good night?s sleep. His nightmares gave him no rest. He was not willing to talk about it. Not with a psychologist, and certainly not in the media. He barely opened up to his wife.
Ofra Meyerson, what happened to Raful at night?
"Almost every night he would awaken and wake me with terrible shouts of pain coming from his throat, snippets of words, fragmented sentences, things that couldn't be understood. He would then rise up from some type of netherworld, from some hell, and from a bitter struggle that he conducted with people - with an Arab terrorist, or during the battle of San Simon [in Jerusalem] in the 1948 War of Independence. He returned to the battles and to the injuries he sustained during the retaliatory raids, in all the wars. In the middle of the night, in his bedroom, all the ghosts came out. Maybe that was his way of preserving his sanity. Who knows what else was going on in his soul?
"In his sleep he would fight and struggle with the pillow and the blanket, and would beat his fists in the air and hit me and the bedclothes and the mattress and anything near him, struggling against the nightmares. He occasionally punched me several times along the way. If I didn't move immediately and wake him, I would get beaten up, too.
"We had hard nights. None of his heroic friends from the army, from the wars and from the family knew about it - only me. Now he is lying without nightmares, and sleeping peacefully. Often when he woke up he was covered with a cold sweat. He was not always willing to tell me from which hell he was emerging and returning to me. Only over time did I learn to wake him up gently. And over time, I stopped asking."
What were his nightmares about?
"In most of the nightmares that were repeated every night, his two dead sons appeared. The younger one, Yonatan, who died of an illness as a young man, used to come to him in his nightmares and repeatedly call him, 'Dad, come here, look at me, I came to take our toys.' His son Yoram, the F-15 pilot who crashed with his plane in the 1980s at an air force base, spoke to him in his nightmares.
"In addition, he also saw in his nightmares all his good friends from all the wars he had experienced, who had died, beginning with the battle of San Simon. Everything came back to him. For example, his good friend who fell in Gaza during the acts of vengeance, the legendary officer Saadia Elkayam, whom Raful really worshiped. His old friend Danny Wolf (Rahav), a member of the commandos who died half a year before Raful, came to him in his nightmares. At Danny?s funeral Raful was a broken man, absolutely shattered. I had never seen him like that, really on the verge of tears, although I never saw him really cry his heart out. But his tortured soul cried and bubbled up from within him. There was another long series of people, an entire array of dozens of deceased friends, who came to him in the nightmares. After all, he already had more dead friends in the military cemeteries than living friends. And did he go to a psychologist? What did Raful have to do with psychologists? Don?t make me laugh."
'Eaten up inside'
What did he say to you when he awoke from the nightmares?
"During our first year together, he was really and truly afraid to share; he didn't know how I would take those nightmares, which simply drove him crazy. I repeatedly told him to go for therapy. But go talk to Raful. I'm certain that had he gone to a good therapist and opened up a little, he would have lived with much more inner emotional serenity, less eaten up inside."
Did he have nightmares about the Lebanon War too?
"He didn't actually talk about it directly, but I understood that those nightmares came from his entire life and from anxieties. For example, he dreamed a lot about the first battle he ever waged, as a 12-year-old, face to face with a gang of Arab rioters in the fields of Moshav Tel Adashim, when he held a rifle that his father had given him at night, leaving him alone to guard the fields. Everything came back. I think that that was the price that he apparently had to pay in order to preserve his normalcy - the price for the difficult and Spartan life he led."
Was he at peace about the Lebanon War?
"On that subject he would always talk from a defensive position, and justify the war, even if there wasn?t much to justify any more after so many years. I always attacked him and told him, 'What do you have to say about Sabra and Chatila, about what happened in Lebanon?' But he was uncomfortable when I asked him about the massacre in Sabra and Chatila. I attacked him, 'How could you enter Lebanon and Beirut without taking along Arabists who could actually have predicted what would happen there, the acts of slaughter carried out by Christian Phalangists against residents of the Sabra and Chatila camp?' And all during the years, Raful repeated that they had been accompanied by Arabists who advised him."
How did you calm him down when he awoke from his nightmares?
"You apparently didn't know Raful very well. This was not a man who needed me to calm him down. He would wake up, look around the room and recover. Sometimes he would get up and go to drink something and get back to himself. Somehow he would calm down, turn around on the other side and fall asleep a few minutes later. Most of us may dream all kinds of things, but when we wake up, everything is erased. For Raful the nightmares came back night after night, for years. And he remembered almost every detail of them."
When did you actually understand what he was really going through?
"During the first year, he still didn't really open himself up to me. But afterward I would wake him when he was waving his fists in the air, shake him a little, and he would get up. I find it strange that Talik - Major General Yisrael Tal - always used to tell me that Raful is our Bar Kochba. But I laughed. He didn't know the real Raful I knew, Raful of the nights, Raful of the terrible nightmares, Raful with his deceased friends. He always laughed and told me that his mother had taught him that decent people have to go to sleep with the roosters and get up with the roosters. I'm a night person. I like to read at night, for hours, into the morning. Sometimes I would stay awake until 4 A.M. with a good book, and then we would meet when he got up at 4, get dressed and set out for the Ashdod port, and I would turn out the light and go to sleep."
Your descriptions portray a man very different from his public image, an anxious and very sensitive type.
"Deep inside he was a very sensitive person, and a very worried person, a worrier and someone who was very, very concerned about his surroundings. The other side of this was that he really suffocated me with love and concern. Almost every five minutes he would call to ask how I was, whether some trip had been good and had I arrived all right. He would call to ask if I needed anything, or if maybe he had to bring things home from the supermarket. In the last years he was the one who used to go to the supermarket every night on his way home and buy everything, filling heavy baskets. Our refrigerator was bursting with food that he prepared and bought. He liked to walk around the supermarket and to feel the pulse of life, and to buy anything he came across, although he was Spartan when it came to food."
No talk of death
You said that he lived a Spartan life. Weren't you able to influence him on this matter?
"You have to understand, he really hated money and wealth and luxury and fancy restaurants. When I would drag him to some gourmet restaurant in Tel Aviv, and they would put the piece of meat and the small, fancy side dish onto a huge plate, he would say, 'Is this food? Give me a well-done steak and french fries.' His greatest pleasure was to stop at some shawarma or falafel place on the road, and get out and order pita with hummus. People who identified themselves as former soldiers in the 'Raful's Boys' track [disadvantaged soldiers who were drafted into the IDF within the framework of a program that Raful initiated] would say to him, 'You saved my life, take two free portions.' And Raful would say, 'No. You worked and sweated for this pita, it's your work and I'm paying."
Are there things about him that you discovered only after his death?
"Quite a number of writings that he left, limericks and a collection of letters and articles and children's stories in his handwriting. Yes, this silent Raful, who was so sparing with words, liked to express himself very much in writing - mainly for young children. I told you, he simply had the soul of a child. After the shivah (seven-day mourning period), I began to go over the bank account and the checkbooks that he had left, and then I discovered that during the last period of his life he had scattered checks right and left, as opposed to his usual economizing. I discovered that during the weeks preceding his death at sea, there was a large wave of dismissals of employees at the Jubilee Port that he had established, and he simply gave people money to live a little, for basic daily existence, and didn't ask them to return it. His attitude toward money was: no overdraft. When there isn't any, there isn't any. You manage without credit cards and without anything.
"In general, money had no meaning for him. He never understood why it was necessary to buy a new pair of shoes in the winter. He would wear the so-called biblical sandals in the summer. In fall and winter he would wear old shoes from the 1940s, I think that they were still from the Palmach (a pre-state militia). He used to say that until the sole tore, he wouldn't replace the shoes; why waste money, he would ask. He didn't want to hear about buying a new shirt or a pair of pants for Pesach. But slowly but surely I educated him in this. And it cost me a lot of sweat and a great deal of effort."
Did you drag him by force to buy clothes?
"At the start of our relationship, I was the one who would go to the men's clothing stores and buy and bring him things according to my taste; that's how I bought shoes for him, too. Afterward, when his paunch was already growing, I couldn't figure out his pants size, and I would drag him with me to a clothing store and dress him from head to foot. And it was a real ritual. Not to be believed. Because the moment we arrived at the store, people used to gather around. Raful would emerge from the dressing room with no shirt on and everyone would stand around, and he would stand like a model in profile, posing, and the people used to give advice and decide whether the pants matched the shirt or not. And he became addicted to this pleasure like a little kid. Slowly but surely, maybe around the age of 70, he somehow acquired some taste in clothes. He enjoyed this very, very much toward the end of his life. Like a little kid."
Did you speak about death?
"Never. We spoke about almost everything during the years we were together, [but] when I spoke to him about death, it was like a taboo. After all, he was surrounded by death, bereavement, friends who fell. On this subject he would freeze on the spot. That same moment he would withdraw into himself. And this is Raful the hero, who went through fire and the spray of bullets with such genuine belief that every bullet has 'an address.' He asked that we not speak about death."
And he died at the age of 75, one misty morning in August, suddenly, for no reason.
"That is perhaps the death that he could have wished for. This may be a secret, but Raful simply never knew how to swim. And he was almost deaf, but was vehemently opposed to wearing a hearing aide. It was simply contrary to his facade as a man. And what is a man? It's someone who overcomes life. And Raful did not hear the wave that sneaked up behind him, and he was dragged into a stormy sea. Did you expect Raful to wear a hearing aid?
"You know what? There were portents of his death. He had already lost three cars during the last year and a half of his life, during which he was responsible for the building of the port. He drove with them in the mornings onto the pier in Ashdod, and they were swept away and hit by the waves. I'm sure that he died in the place where, had he been asked, he would have wanted to die. In the place that he thought would be his life?s work: the building of a Hebrew port. He said that that was the most important thing today for Zionism, that's why he pursued the challenge. From that point of view, the pier and the port, and the Jubilee Port that was named after him are the most wonderful monuments he could have wanted for himself."
Childish tricks
What was his attitude toward Ariel Sharon?
"Raful was in despair about all the politicians during his last year, and shocked by the social gaps. He said that knowing Arik Sharon - and he knew him well - he would give back the territories, and how. And that caused him terrible heartache. His relationship with Arik was very, very complex, and had its ups and downs. When Arik was already prime minister and Raful saw what was happening in the country, he came to me after reading a newspaper and said, 'Ofra, see what corruption there is - the country has simply gone down the drain.' He was very worried about what was happening here and about the social situation, and mainly about the worship of the 'golden calf.'"
What was his attitude toward the construction of the port?
"You'll probably say that his term as chief of staff was the high point of his life. Not at all. The high point, he told me a few days before the wave swept him off the breakwater in Ashdod, was the construction of the port. The construction of a Hebrew port, he said, is the essence of the Zionism that is left for us to fulfill here. Raful built himself the most beautiful and magnificent monument possible.
"Already at 4 A.M., after the nightmares, he would get up and leave the house in Herzliya and head toward the Ashdod port, as was his custom; he would show up every morning at 5:30 on the breakwater, to see how it was keeping the sea away. At the port he would stand and prepare salad for the workers, and he knew each and every one. He helped them to bring their families to Israel; they were mostly foreign workers, Romanians. He was for them the way he was in the army, like a father. He worried about them and of course served as a kind of officer supervising their work conditions, who helped their children find a place in schools in Ashdod, and took care of their living conditions in the mobile homes."
Are there other things that we don?t know about Raful?
"Of course. All his childish tricks. On the one hand, he was terribly pedantic about small details. But at the same time, he had the soul of a child who never grew up. Something unprocessed within his soul. He loved to sneak up behind me and scare me. If I was absorbed with reading a book, he would sneak up and grab me and say 'Baaaa,' and after that he would be pleased as punch for a long time, like a little boy. 'Look how I scared you, Ofra.' And immediately he would hug me. He was very concerned for my welfare, as well as that of all his relatives. Apparently that was a result of the death of his two sons.
"Do you know that Raful kept all the writings of Churchill in his big library in the house and read them maybe 25 times? He remembered select passages from them, and greatly admired Churchill's courage. Do you know what great literature he used to read? What classics? And at what level? There wasn't a single military history book, or one worthwhile biography documenting war heroes and experts of the past 1,000 years, that Raful didn't read. I think that historians of the period, who of course will want to learn the truth about Raful, will have a very difficult problem: how to decipher his real character. There is an egregious contrast between his rough image and his declaration about the Palestinians being 'like drugged cockroaches in a bottle,' and the soul of the patriotic and pure-hearted young man that was deep inside him all his life. And I had the honor and the pleasure, perhaps more than anyone else, of knowing him up close."
Do you miss him?
"I don't miss him on the everyday level, because we gave each other space and a great deal of room for both of us in our special relationship. I miss him because he was a very attentive person. You know what? He often brought me in his car to a demonstration against the government that was being held opposite the Prime Minister's Office - like that same Four Mothers demonstration when we fought against remaining in the Lebanese swamp. It really reached an absurd point. Just like in an Italian film. He used to let me off right in the demonstration area, get out and open the trunk, take out some of the signs that I had made at home, and drag them after me straight to the demonstration. He didn't leave me before he had placed the signs in my hand, and from there he wished me a good day and gave me a kiss, and continued naturally to the cabinet meeting with Bibi [Benjamin Netanyahu]. And I was really touched."