While deadly terror attacks continue across Judea and Samaria, Central Command chief Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth delivered a speech Thursday that focused squarely on what he called settler violence—drawing sharp criticism for ignoring the ongoing wave of Islamic terrorism.
Bluth spoke at “Beyond the Fence,” a political conference organized by the group “For Settlement – Against Violence,” held in Alon Shvut. In his remarks, he aligned himself with the campaign against ‘settler violence’ while making no mention of two terror attacks that had occurred just in the previous 24 hours.
“It’s important to say that these incidents blacken the State of Israel,” Bluth said. “They harm the legitimacy effort that’s critical not just for the Central Command. When you harm the legitimacy effort of IDF soldiers, you harm IDF soldiers on all fronts. And if you’re fighting on seven fronts, what do you need more right now than that legitimacy effort? Especially in these days when we’re fighting shoulder to shoulder with the United States.”
He continued: “The other thing is the diversion of attention. We’re canceling arrests, canceling weapons searches to deal with this. Why? Because we know that if we don’t deal with this, who knows what follows. And so on this matter, beyond the damage to Israel’s good name and legitimacy trust, it also diverts attention and harms our fundamental mission, which is thwarting terror and protecting residents.”
Bluth warned: “We are one step away from a serious disaster. By the way, it could be from this side or that side. In many cases we’re a moment before—if we’re a bit late and don’t manage to get the family out of that house that was set on fire, you can imagine for yourselves what will happen to the Central Command. You can imagine for yourselves what the reverberations of an incident of this type would be, as happened at the time with Duma several years ago.”
He concluded: “But also from the other side, if tomorrow those youths who came to burn a house, regardless of what we think of them, if they’re caught by guard committees in that village, and they lynch them or even kidnap the bodies—we saw what happened after the murder of Binyamin Achimeir in those grazing areas—we can imagine for ourselves where this thing can take the entire Central Command theater and the State of Israel. It would be a very significant diversion of attention.”