The IDF Is the Face of the Israeli Settlers’ Defense Forces - Opinion - Haaretz.com
To understand the insanity in the West Bank, it’s not enough to talk about Bezalel Smotrich and the hilltop youth. You also have to talk about the IDF.
It is the sovereign by definition, of what is being held as military territory. It’s less convenient, certainly amid a patriotic protest with a prominent military theme (Brothers in Arms, stopping reserve duty, the draft law), but there’s no avoiding it. And such a discussion requires talking about the Judea and Samaria Division commander, Brig. Gen. Avi Bluth.
The Judea and Samaria Division is the formation that runs all the military activity in the occupied territories. Under Bluth, who will be completing two years in the post soon, it is becoming the settlers’ division.
It’s important to note that the settlers frequently slander the head of the IDF Central Command, Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs. They blame him for the “deterioration of their personal safety” and charge him with “leftism” and “lack of aggression.” About his subordinate Bluth they don’t have a bad word to say; he’s one of their own. He was raised in the settlement Neveh Tzuf and went to the Eli yeshiva. He wears a kippa, lives in a religious community and is a father of six. His thinking and behavior reflect a complete fusion of his religious-settler mentality and his military approach.
In essays he published on military and strategic issues he often links his ideas to Bible stories, to figures like Our Patriarch Abraham and King David, and to enemies such as Amalek. It’s not clear if he is aware that he’s dealing with myths and fiction.
Once in a while he prays at the site Judaism identifies as Joseph’s Tomb. Only last month he led a mass prayer there together with the weakling Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai and head of the Samaria Regional Council Yossi Dagan, who today is the settlers’ political spearhead into Likud. Those pagan night raids to Joseph’s Tomb, in the heart of Nablus, have long been a military operation to all intents and purposes, always ending in confrontation and sometimes with slain Palestinians as well.
A military commander is supposed to have a strategic interest in preventing such occurrences. But for Bluth it’s an ideological imperative.
In his previous positions he served as Prime Minister Netanyahu’s military secretary. When Netanyahu flew to Saudi Arabia in 2020 with Mossad chief Yossi Cohen behind the IDF chief of staff’s back, Bluth was on the plane without bothering to notify his direct commander. In his present post there’s no longer fear of conflicting loyalties and contradictory values.
A Jewish settler woman, next to an Israeli soldier, throws stones at Palestinians in the Qazazin mosque during noon prayers in the West Bank city of Hebron in 2002.Credit: REUTERS
It’s hard to ignore his forces’ foot-dragging and dysfunction in the course of the pogrom in Hawara. And during the “conflict” on Saturday in Burqa, the soldiers didn’t even show up. Something strange is happening in the Judea and Samaria Division on the intelligence level and the speed of response to pogroms against Palestinians.
But this seemingly sleepy, stammering army undergoes a complete transformation when it comes to friction with the Palestinians, as well as with Israeli human rights activists. The forces’ aggressiveness toward them rises sky-high. The number of Palestinian fatalities, and the considerable rate of children among them, is spiking dramatically.
It cannot all be blamed on the “breakdown in authority,” and in any case the senior commander in the sector is expected to act to calm things down. Isn’t this the same commander who only two years ago stressed, in an essay in “Ma’arachot,” the difference between the strategist and the tactician (with a Biblical example, of course – David’s order to his successor Solomon to execute chief of staff Yoav Ben Zruya).
The trigger happiness, the hilltop terrorists’ use of IDF clothing and weapons, the dozens of rogue outposts that the army isn’t evacuating, the guard posts decorated with revenge posters and fundamentalist slogans are all part of the complete blurring of borders between the army of a state of law and a settlers’ militia. Bluth is merely a mirror image of the present and future of the IDF ground forces. And whoever doesn’t want him in the Judea and Samaria Division will get him in the chief of staff’s office.