Israeli commander’s West Bank woes spotlight a military tied up in knots

 

By James M. Dorsey

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Major General Avi Bluth, the head of Israel’s Central Command, switched roles this weekend. Suddenly, Mr. Bluth, in occupied Hebron to protect Israeli worshippers and settlers during a controversial annual pilgrimage, was not the guardian of vigilante youth but their target.

Several dozen protesters, some of them masked, shouted “Traitor” and hurled stones at Israeli troops, including Mr. Bluth and border police.

The troops and police were managing tens of thousands of pilgrims, marking the yearly Torah reading of Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of the Patriarch in the heart of Hebron as a burial plot.

Palestinian shop owners salvage their merchandise at a Hebron market ransacked by settlers. Credit: Middle East Eye

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu condemned the protest. "All violence directed against IDF (Israel Defence Forces) officers and soldiers must be dealt with to the fullest extent of the law," Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

A hotbed of Palestinian nationalism and Jewish supremacism, Hebron is home to 700 settlers and 227,000 Palestinians, whose presence Mr. Bluth’s troops secure by segregating the communities in ways that disrupt the daily lives of the indigenous population.

Palestinians are restricted in their movements in the vicinity of the settler neighbourhood.

Main streets are off-limits, while settlers can go where they wish. The military has shut down hundreds of Palestinian stores and businesses in the area.

The pilgrimage is a frequent flashpoint with militant settlers attacking Palestinians, on whom the military imposes even more severe restrictions to secure the area during the religious event.

A checkpoint at entry to settler neighborhood in Hebron. Credit: Jewish Currents

In a twist of irony, the vigilantes, in targeting Mr. Bluth, one of Mr. Netanyahu’s former military secretaries, attacked a commander who views as legal settlements that are illegal under Israeli, not just international law. International law deems illegal all Israeli settlements in occupied territory.

Last year, Mr. Bluth gave his officers a book advertised on the Web as recounting “the history of buying land in the Land of Israel, starting from Our Father Abraham in the Biblical era, going on to Yehoshua Hankin in the early days of the return to Zion, and ending with those buying land in Judea and Samaria (the Biblical reference to the West Bank) since the Six-Day War up to the present day."

Mr. Bluth said the book would help his officers understand land status issues in the West Bank.

Mr. Bluth’s unit also produced a video depicting settlers as peaceful farmers living pastoral lives in dangerous circumstances.

The video describes the illegal outposts as “small and isolated places of settlement, each with a handful of residents, a few of them — or none at all — bearing arms, the means of defense meager or nonexistent.”

Contradicting the video, Jerusalem Post military correspondent Yonah Jeremy Bob said the “farms” were “a low-grade way to take over Palestinian land.”

Bnei David founders Rabbis Eli Sadan (left) and Yigal Levinstein Center) meet with then IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot (right) in 2016. Credit: Bnei David Academy

Mr. Bob went on to identify Mr. Bluth as “a religious Zionist” who grew up in Halamish, also known as Neveh Tzuf, a West Bank settlement north of Ramallah populated by religious Jews.

He attended Bnei David, the first of a slew of government-funded pre-military religious seminaries that have produced a critical mass of ultra-nationalist military officers.

Bnei David religious scholars have lectured students on the genetic inferiority of Palestinians and the need to enslave them, asserted that women have weak minds and reduced spirituality and that the Holocaust was God’s way of forcing Jews to leave the Diaspora.

At one point, a Bnei David wall featured a quote by one of its instructors, Rabbi Joseph Kalner, charging that “all secular Jews are traitors and the state can do anything to sanction them, including putting a bullet through their head.”

Credit: IDF

In 2022. Mr. Bluth was one of the architects of Operation Break the Wave, which was designed but failed to crush a burgeoning low-level armed insurgency on the West Bank as well as a major assault on the Jenin refugee camp in July of last year.

Even so, Mr. Bluth drew the irk of vigilante youth because he tightened restrictions on their movements within weeks of taking command in July of the West Bank and evicted settlers from an illegal outpost.

“We will not blink on the issue and will do what is good and right for the State of Israel. We will win and remain human, and we will show zero tolerance toward manifestations of violence of any kind,” Mr. Bluth said in his inaugural speech.

Mr. Bluth’s positioning and his targeting by vigilantes put a spotlight on tensions between Mr. Netanyahu, his ultra-nationalist coalition partners, and Israel’s security establishment, as well as the potential fallout of the increasing influence of religious nationalists in the military.

Mr. Netanyahu’s already strained relations with the country’s security chiefs deteriorated after he blamed the military and intelligence for the operational failures that enabled last year’s October 7 Hamas attack.

Declining to take any responsibility for the attack in which Hamas killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians and non-combatants, and kidnapped 250 others, Mr. Netanyahu has refused to launch an investigation that would likely hold him accountable.

Credit: Addameer

The vigilantes protested in Hebron a day after Defense Minister Israel Katz exempted West Bank settlers from administrative detention or the state’s ability to hold suspects indefinitely without charge.

The exemption means only Palestinians will be held in administrative detention, a legal holdover from the pre-state British mandate.

Israel currently holds 3,443 Palestinians and seven Israeli Jews in administrative detention.

“In a reality where the Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria is subject to serious Palestinian terror threats and unjustified international sanctions are taken against the settlers, it is not appropriate for the State of Israel to take such severe measures against the people of the settlements,” Mr. Katz said.

Mr. Katz was referring to sanctions imposed by the United States, Canada, Japan, France, and Britain against Israeli settlers.

Israel’s Shin Bet domestic intelligence service warned in June that exempting Israelis from administrative detention “will result in an immediate, severe, and serious harm to the security of the state” in cases where there is clear information that a suspect may carry out a violent attack.

Mr. Bluth and his predecessor, Major General Yehuda Fox, have spoken out publicly against the vigilantes.

However, like the top echelons of the Israeli military, they have failed to crackdown on the militants and segments of the military that support them by protecting them or looking the other way when they attack Palestinian civilians.

“There are easily double digits of cases that have been raised as unjustified settler violence or mistaken or improper killings by IDF soldiers, something that top defense officials do not deny in private,” said Mr. Bob, The Jerusalem Post military correspondent.

“These double-digit killings, along with a huge spike in other extremist violent Jewish actions against Palestinians, almost none of which are prosecuted, have put Israel in serious jeopardy globally… Top Israeli defense officials have acknowledged…that the IDF does not have a handle on the issue,” Mr. Bob added.

Compounding Mr. Bob’s analysis is Israel’s war conduct in Gaza that has earned Mr. Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

It has also put Israel in the dock of the International Court of Justice on allegations of plausible genocide.

Fourteen months into the Gaza war and stepped-up raids in the West Bank, Israel’s critics are almost unanimously convinced that the military command’s failure to get “a handle” and rigorously enforce its nominal code of conduct is by design rather than default.

Brutalised by more than half a century of occupation of Palestinian lands that is designed to humiliate, coerce, and intimidate, the military’s track record, particularly since the Gaza war erupted, does little to suggest otherwise.

On the contrary, the track record speaks to an environment that allows Israeli soldiers to celebrate on social media the death of innocent Palestinians and Gaza’s devastation.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.