It started in April and May, when Israeli “settler” gangs, backed by the IDF, targeted a Palestinian village, Al-Mughayyir, and its 4,000 residents. Threats, violence, and killings have occurred ever since. All of its surrounding land has been seized. At one point in May, the gangs torched the village. Then, last week, a settler, who was driving his all-terrain vehicle across the stolen land, was slightly wounded by gunfire from one villager.
The head of the IDF’s Central Command, Major Gen. Avi Bluth, declared that the village must pay a heavy price. He ordered that the area’s 3,100 trees be destroyed, most of them the villagers’ prized, cultivated olive trees. He declared that his “redesign operations” meant that “everyone will be deterred, any village that tries to raise a hand against any of the residents”—that is, against any of the illegal settlers. The village itself has been there since the 16th century.
Gideon Levy’s outraged opinion piece, “The General of Bloodshed in the West Bank Is Israel’s Moral Face,” ran in Haaretz today, drawing immediate fire from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Levy wrote: “Bluth ordered his soldiers to engage in collective punishment, which is a war crime. If so, then Bluth is a war criminal who should be extradited to the International Criminal Court in the Hague.... Bluth has enabled 10 wildcat outposts to be erected on every side of the village, and he has allowed violent settlers to impose a reign of terror on the residents, to the point that they are afraid to go out to work their land. Now, he’s allowing the thugs to pave illegal roads to their outposts to make it easier for them to attack the village. Under Bluth’s command, two pogroms ended in Palestinians being killed by army gunfire. Nobody has stood trial for this.”
Levy then hit a nerve. Bluth, unlike previous Central Command heads whom “the settlers have intimidated ... it’s easier when the post is held by a graduate of the pre-army yeshiva,” one raised up in the illegal settlements himself. Bluth learned there “that Jews are the lords of the land. The settlers are allowed to burn down, destroy, uproot and murder to their heart’s content. The subhuman Palestinians aren’t allowed to do anything—not to leave their villages, not to work in Israel, not to harvest their olives, sometimes not even to breathe. That is Bluth’s Zionism. And that’s the Zionism of the army of which Bluth is the face.”
“The surname Bluth means ‘blood’ in German. This general of bloodshed has now become the face of the West Bank and the moral image of the entire country. Maybe he’ll be appointed to command the next genocide, after Gaza.”
Today, Netanyahu denounced Haaretz and Levy for their “antisemitic blood libels characteristic of our enemies around the world.” Within hours, Netanyahu’s office issued a statement: “The prime minister expresses his full support for and strengthens Major General Bluth and the IDF soldiers who operate day by day to eradicate terror in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]. They do so with determination and with uncompromising morality, and we all salute them.”
