Kazim AlamIsraeli Defence Minister Israel Katz announced on live TV on Sunday that he was replacing Major General Avi Bluth, the army’s top general in the occupied West Bank.
The reason Katz criticised Bluth was that the general sought to renew an administrative restraining order against an extremist settler in the occupied territory.
The minister also declared his intention to appoint Major General Dado Bar Kalifa to the key military post.
The Israeli army took no time in publicly rejecting the decision announced by the defence minister on live TV.
It said Katz lacked unilateral authority to dismiss a senior general, as Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir had not been consulted.
Not only would Bluth remain in place, but also no new senior appointments would be made until early 2027.
At the centre of the controversy is Tal Yinon Dardik, an Israeli settler involved in a March attack in the Palestinian village of Khirbet Humsa, where he stripped a Palestinian victim, zip-tied his genitals, and paraded him around the village.
Katz did not want the restraining order renewed. But Bluth acted differently, bruising Katz’s ego.
Katz framed the independent act by the general as defiance of government policy.
A ‘stunt’ for intra-party gains
Nimrod Goren, president and founder of the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies (Mitvim), tells TRT World that the conduct of the defence minister is “unprecedented”.
He says Katz pulled the “stunt” to improve his popularity within Likud – the ruling party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – in the run-up to the primaries, an internal process that determines which candidates will contest the upcoming general election in October.
Katz had previously taken many steps to demonstrate to the public that he held the “upper hand over Zamir”.
“This is unacceptable to the majority of Israelis who… do not want the army to be politicised or manipulated for intra-party gains,” Goren says.
The public sparring fits a historical pattern of friction between governments led by Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister, and the military leadership.
Differences between the military and Netanyahu were “almost always present”, says Goren.
“Historically, Netanyahu tends to perceive (the military’s) senior officials as potential rivals and seeks to undermine them,” he says, adding that signs of Netanyahu’s differences with the generals became evident in his first term in office in the late 1990s.
Security officials have often criticised Netanyahu’s decision-making process and his preference for “political considerations over national security ones”, Goren says.
Israel’s security establishment tried to warn Netanyahu about the possibility of surprise attacks, while he was busy with his so-called judicial overhaul before October 7, 2023. “But Netanyahu dismissed this,” he says.
Tensions intensified after Hamas’s blitz as Netanyahu quickly distanced himself from the security failure, while blaming military officials, Goren says.
Disagreements between the government and the security establishment also arose over opportunities to stop the Gaza war and secure a swift return of Israeli hostages – decisions that military officials sought, but Netanyahu refused to take.
“There was also a sense that Netanyahu seeks to prolong warfare for political reasons, in contrast to the position of security experts,” Goren says, adding that Netanyahu is courting the ultra-orthodox parties by allowing their communities continued exemption from military service.
Israel is a national-security state with a conscription-based army. The military enjoys a disproportionate role in everyday life, with security personnel allowed to carry service weapons in public even during off-duty hours.
In 2024, the Israeli army chief expressed dissatisfaction with Netanyahu’s war policy and publicly criticised him for lacking a “day-after strategy” for Gaza.
More recently, hundreds of former generals urged US President Donald Trump to stop Netanyahu from igniting a “third intifada in the West Bank” in order to remain in power.
‘An army with a country’
Yair Amitai, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Liberty and Responsibility at Reichman University in Tel Aviv, says the Israeli army has always been “unusually large and influential” relative to the size of the state.
“There was even a saying that Israel is not a country that has an army, but an army that has a country,” he tells TRT World.
Many Israeli generals have joined politics in the past. Three of them – Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon – even rose to become Israel’s prime ministers.
In recent decades, however, the military’s relative influence has gradually declined as the economy expanded and power alternated between the left and the right, he says.
Even so, the military enjoys the “highest levels of public trust” among Israeli citizens, Amitai adds.
But the composition of the senior officer corps has gradually changed, with more commanders emerging from the political right, particularly the religious Zionist community – some of whose members are settlers in the occupied West Bank.
This context helps explain the recent confrontation, even though the intensity of the clash was “highly unusual”, he says.
“The minister’s primary motivation appears to have been domestic political considerations,” he adds.
In Likud’s primary elections, candidates compete for the support of party members who generally hold more hawkish positions than the broader Israeli electorate, Amitai notes.
“(Bluth) had taken a firm stance against violence by extremist settlers, while the settler movement enjoys significant influence within the Likud primary electorate,” he says.
Katz later tried to walk back the impression that he had summarily dismissed Bluth, insisting the general was performing well and that no disagreement existed.
But the initial live announcement, a lack of coordination with the military chief, and the subsequent freeze on key appointments leave little doubt about the depth of the civil-military divide in Israel.
Goren says that the Israeli military is historically trusted by the public, largely because of compulsory service.
Trust in Netanyahu’s leadership, however, has taken a serious hit since the judicial overhaul attempt in 2023 and throughout the Gaza war.
Recent pre-election public polls also show that more Israelis see former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot as a better candidate than Netanyahu for premiership.
Historical tensions between governments and the military existed, but they were mostly “legitimate differences” on national security and were handled “behind closed doors”, Goren says.
“The recent Katz-Zamir incident relates to a governmental attempt to restrain (military) actions against settler violence in the (Occupied) West Bank,” he says.
