Last night, Defense Minister Israel Katz, live on television, apparently fired the Chief of the Israeli Defense Forces Central Command, Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, according to the Times of Israel, and announced his replacement. The IDF immediately released a no-nonsense rejoinder that Bluth would go nowhere and that Katz had no authority to unilaterally fire him.
At issue is that some settlers in the West Bank, to quote TOI, “allegedly stripped a Palestinian victim, zip-tied his genitals, and paraded him around the village” of Khirbet Humsa in March. One violent settler, Tal Yinon Dardik, who is suspected in the attack but not arrested, was under a restraining order to stay away from his illegal farming outpost. Later, he was jailed for violating the order, and Katz recently visited him in jail. Then the restraining order on Dardik was lifted on some technicality last week, and Katz told Bluth not to reissue the restraining order. Last night, Katz said that Bluth and the Military Advocate General’s Corps had filed an appeal to the court against the release of Dardik, “contrary to my policy. They did it against my position.” So, he declared on TV that Bluth was gone.
Bluth is no hero. The West Bank is under his authority, and he’s done quite a bit to let the settlers have their will in harassing and driving out the Palestinians who live there. And nothing in the legal battle is about justice for the Palestinian victim or even an arrest of one of his attackers. Both Katz and Bluth want to push Palestinians out of the West Bank.
However, there was a storm of protest in Israel over interference with the IDF. Former Defense Minister Benny Gantz posted that Katz’s action “hurts the nation’s security. The politicization of the IDF is not governance, it’s a real danger.” Former Likud Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who Katz replaced, said that the move to remove Bluth on live TV “is a contemptible act that crosses another red line…. Undermining the authority of commanders shakes the foundations of the army and bringing the IDF into the political arena is a perilous game that endangers the state of Israel.” And the leading candidate to replace Netanyahu, former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, called Katz’s move “an unprecedented low point in relations between the political and military echelons,” and said that the current government “is not fit to safeguard the security of the state.”
So, today, Katz claimed he never called for Bluth’s dismissal, despite it being televised, and that, of course, any claims to the contrary were “a complete lie,” and “part of a political campaign directed against the government.”
