Internal Israeli disputes over security policy resurfaced last week after Israel’s Defense Minister, Israel Katz, and the Israeli army’s Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, made their differences public over the appointment of the head of the army’s central command overseeing the West Bank.
But what looks like a personnel dispute represents a deeper clash between two security doctrines in Israel, each with a different understanding of the role of Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Both visions have been competing across the Israeli political-military system, and those contradictions are now redefining Israel’s security approach and even its very self-identification.
The clash became public on Sunday when Katz announced on a live broadcast of Israel’s Channel 14, known for its right-wing, pro-Netanyahu editorial line, that he will dismiss the army’s current Central Command leader, Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth. Katz said Bluth would be replaced by Maj. Gen. Dado Bar Kalifa.
Katz’s announcement came amid a larger controversy over Bluth’s decision to arrest an Israeli settler accused of brutalizing a Palestinian farmer in Khirbet Humsa, a village near Tubas in the northeastern West Bank. The rare move to arrest the settler under administrative detention, a practice usually reserved for Palestinians arrested without charge or trial, sparked a wave of criticism among Israeli settler groups and pro-settler members of Knesset, such as Limor Son Har-Melech, from the far-right Jewish Power Party led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. In November 2024, Katz ended administrative detentions for Israeli settlers.
The Israeli army responded to Katz’s on-air announcement with a statement saying Bluth would stay in his post, calling Katz’s decision “non-coordinated” because the Defense Minister doesn’t have the authority to make such a replacement unilaterally. Katz later tried to walk back his statement.
Katz has appeared multiple times in the past weeks on Israeli TV, including Channel 14, to promote the fact that the Israeli army has, under his orders, destroyed 70% of the Gaza Strip. This is widely seen as part of an effort to rally support ahead of the upcoming Israeli elections, which are less than 100 days away. Israeli opposition leader and Netanyahu’s main opponent, Gadi Eisenkot, slammed Katz’s announcement, asserting that the army “is not a private tool in the primaries of politicians who have lost their way,” referencing the Likud’s internal party elections for the Knesset electoral list.
Two security doctrines
On Monday, the Israeli news site Walla reported that, according to unnamed sources, the heart of the dispute between Katz and Bluth went beyond Bluth’s attempts to restrain settler violence and extended to both men’s approaches to handling the West Bank as a whole. Katz has been pushing for a large-scale operation in the territory, particularly against refugee camps, while Bluth has been critical of settler violence, reportedly stating that it was a “miracle” a third Intifada hadn’t broken out and cautioning that Palestinians wouldn’t remain “indifferent” forever. Chief of Staff Zamir has also reportedly refused to replace Bluth during this “sensitive period” in the West Bank.
“The clash between Katz and Bluth expresses a wider struggle over the independence of the army as an institution in Israel,” Razi Nabulse, a researcher at the Institute for Palestine Studies specialized in Israeli affairs, told Mondoweiss. Nabulse points out that, unlike in the U.S., the structure of Israel’s key institutions doesn’t change with every election, since institutions tend to remain more independent from each new government. “What Netanyahu’s government has been trying to do is to make key state institutions more subordinate to the political agenda of the government, which has stirred a lot of internal conflict in Israel,” he said.
“We can compare this new dispute between the Defense Minister and the army’s leadership to the previous dispute over the independence of the high court during Netanyahu’s 2023 judicial overhaul, or the dispute over the control of the police with Ben-Gvir,” he added, stressing that the dispute doesn’t mean Maj. Gen. Bluth is less favorable to settlers, as he supports the expansionism of settler groups. “His approach, however, is this: it is the state and the army who should run settlement policy, and he sees settlement outposts, for example, as a tool of state policy, not the engine driving it.”
This crucial difference is what Khaled Odetallah, the founder of Palestine’s Popular University project and co-editor of Al-Janub: The Palestinian Journal of Liberation Studies, sees as the dividing line between two visions driving the struggle over the army’s control.
In an interview with the Arabic-speaking al-Sharq Youth podcast, Odetallah explained that the struggle to control key state institutions in Israel corresponds to a decades-old social divide between a more dogmatic, religious Zionist current and a secular, pragmatic one. The latter, most popular among Western Israeli elites, has historically supplied the people who hold key positions, regardless of the government’s political composition. Odetallah gave the example of the Israeli High Court and the large protests in Israel against Netanyahu’s reforms, aiming to strengthen the government’s control over it.
“Those who became heads of the High Court all came from the same social sector, not by law, but because the way they were chosen reproduced the same people,” Odetallah pointed out. “They,” referring to religious Zionists, “said no, we want the government to have a role in choosing them, and the government having a role means its social base having a role,” he went on.
This is the social base of the Religious Zionist current, which sees settlement as the forefront of Israel’s security, and which is drawn mainly from West Bank settlers. In its ideology, settlements are central to Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish state, Odetallah noted.
This helps explain the difference between the Israeli army’s approach to controlling settler groups carrying out attacks on Palestinians and the government’s approach (expressed by Israel Katz) to put the army totally in the service of the settler movement. It is a struggle between a vision of a state of institutions controlling its colonial project in an occupied territory, and a vision of a colonial expansion movement driving the state apparatus behind it and leading its policy instead.
But there is a nuance to this distinction.
“Avi Bluth, the head of the Israeli army’s central command, is himself a right-wing supporter of settlers,” Razi Nabulse explained. “He was defended by right-wing settlers after Katz announced he was dismissing him, including the head of the settlement councils of Nablus, and this speaks a lot about him.” Nabulse notes that the real struggle is over control of the army’s institutions and who dictates its policy.
Beyond individual ideological stands and individual figures, Israeli institutions are at the center of a rift between different tendencies, which resurfaces during elections. A rift with multiple, intertwined and overlapping layers of ideology, social divisions, institutional power struggles, and electoral opportunists. One thing at least is common ground between all sides of the divide: the grab of Palestinian land, and the disregard of the rights of Palestinians.
Qassam Muaddi
Qassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter/X at @QassaMMuaddi.
