Israel's Top Commander in the West Bank Is No 'Moralist.' He's Just Another Hypocrite - Opinion - Haaretz.com
Like everything in the Israeli military, generals can be divided into three groups. The largest is that of faceless individuals whose names, much less opinions, are unknown to most Israelis. They rise through the ranks, retire, go to work for a defense company and that's it. The other two are minority groups: the right-wingers, the settlers, the religious, the militants, and the "moralists," the "leftists," the ones who "shoot and cry" and retire with a resounding rebuke. This is usually the worst and most hypocritical group, and it is the one to which the outgoing chief of the IDF Central Command, Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, belongs.
During his three-year assignment, Fuchs was built up into an enemy of the settlers, supposedly. The most cynical and extortionist group in Israeli society, which could teach the ultra-Orthodox a thing or two about blackmail, knows its job: The settlers attack in order to terrorize. Anyone with any doubts about Fuchs' true attitude to the settlers would do well to listen to his retirement speech.
In his eyes, the vast majority of them are law-abiding citizens. Nothing more needs to be said about Fuchs. Not a single settler abides by the law, certainly not international law – which, astonishingly enough, also applies to Israel – and most of them are proud of their rioters, who make Minister Orit Strock's "miracle" happen. Fuchs was a friend of the settlers, like all the Central Command chiefs from Rehavam Ze'evi (1968-72) to himself, all of them the submissive slaves of the "hilltop people."
But the head of the Central Command is first of all the subjugator of the Palestinian population. Fuchs' term in the West Bank was among the cruelest for the Palestinians. That's how it usually is with the enlightened generals. Fuchs leaves behind a West Bank in ruins – bleeding, crushed, jobless, threatening to explode, obstructed and poor as it hasn't been since the Second Intifada.
No principled officer could be responsible for such cruelty – even if Ben Caspit, an authentic representative of the militaristic and ultranationalist center that he believes to be enlightened, writes on X: "Fuchs is a principled officer of values, an Israeli patriot, who did not run from difficult questions. … Thank you, Yehuda."
What's there to thank him for? For turning the West Bank into ruins? For the fact that under his command, 539 Palestinians, 131 of them children, were killed in nine months? It's nice that the settlers demonstrated against him – the Palestinians cannot – but look at what he leaves behind, the officer with morals in the eyes of Caspit and his ilk. Fuchs introduced into the West Bank the armed drones that kill more people, and restored the checkpoints in a way that almost makes you miss the Intifada.
Jewish settlers pray in the Eviatar outpost in the West Bank, on Sunday.Credit: Ohad Zwigenberg / AP
Caspit apparently doesn't know about this, or care. But Fuchs knows exactly what he did to Palestinian society. It's impossible to plan anything in the West Bank today. Now it's open, any minute there will be a roadblock – abuse for the sake of abuse. Look at the behavior of the soldiers at the checkpoints.
Did you punish anyone, general? Huge traffic jams simply because the soldiers feel like it, every day, everywhere. Fuchs should see what his soldiers left behind in the refugee camps of Tul Karm and Jenin: destruction of near-Gazan proportions. Let him try to drive to Tul Karm on a road that no longer exists. The "enemy of the settlers" permitted the establishment of the criminal outpost of Evyatar, for which eight Palestinians paid with their lives. His soldiers killed them for no reason. Fuchs let Daniella Weiss erect this scourge, as he allowed the creation of dozens of wildcat outposts in the past several weeks, all of them violent.
You can't wail over the violent settlers when Fuchs was supposed to stop them. Did he see how his soldiers behaved in the pogroms in Hawara and other spots? What will the principled officer say to this?
Fuchs will be succeeded by Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, a settler who grew from the poisoned soil of Neveh Tzuf and the premilitary yeshiva in Eli. It's not hard to guess his views. For the Palestinians, for humanity, for the law and for justice it will change nothing. The enlightened Fuchs, like the right-wing Bluth, will never see the Palestinians as human beings.