Army is culpable for settler violence, says former colonel

Retired colonel Doron Meinrath says the IDF’s goal is to help settlers. He tells BEN LYNFIELD the army is failing to defend Palestinians or pursue lawbreakers.

Last month, IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevy vigorously condemned the “nationalist terror” of settlers after they set fire to homes, cars and fields in Turmus Aya, Luban Sharqiya and other villages in the occupied West Bank. He tried to give the impression that the settlers were entirely to blame for the vigilante violence that followed the killing by Hamas gunmen of four settlers outside the Eli settlement.

Not everyone is buying that line. Perhaps the biggest sceptic is Colonel (retired) Doron Meinrath, who was a commander of troops in the West Bank (1987-91) and later became director of planning in the IDF general staff (2002-06). He argued during an interview last week with The Jewish Independent that the army is responsible for the continuation and escalation of settler attacks.

“They don’t carry out pogroms but they enable the violence of the settlers,” said Meinrath, who predicted in advance on a WhatsApp group that settlers would carry out “pogroms” in villages near Eli. “They won’t say the policy is not to defend Palestinians but in practice that’s what happens.”

“The IDF’s goal is to assist the settlers. And the declared goal of the settlers is to take control of area C,” said Meinrath, who completed his military service in 2010, started protecting Palestinian olive farmers in 2015 and has been an activist in the left-wing group Looking the Occupation in the Eyes for the past 18 months.

Area C is  the mostly rural part of the West Bank that most of the international community says should become the heartland of a future Palestinian state but where Israel seeks to settle half a million more Jews. To advance the settler goal of turning the West Bank into an integral part of Israel, the army has in recent weeks been greenlighting a slew of new settler outposts, illegal according to both Israeli and international law.

“The IDF does what the settlers want and this makes the lives of the Palestinians more and more difficult,” said Meinrath, who regularly escorts Palestinian herders in the West Bank to protect them from settler attack.

About the onslaught of hundreds of settlers in Turmus Ayya, which drew international condemnation, Meinrath said it was “predictable” and that the IDF “didn’t really want to prevent it”.

“Why don’t they arrest the people? There were cameras, testimonies, a million films, they weren’t masked, they came in cars with visible licence plates, the area is full of IDF cameras,” he said. Meinrath added that the fact that several administrative detention orders were issued was just a way of “closing the story” without bringing the brunt of the marauding settlers to justice.

“If the Chief of Staff is serious, he has to order that [settlers who break the law] be arrested, then indicted, tried and put in jail.”

The IDF spokesman’s office rejected the allegations of a lack of will to take action against Jewish vigilantes, saying “IDF soldiers operate as needed against attempts to harm all civilians both Palestinian and Israeli”.

But politics and Jewish kinship may be playing a role. Former National Security Council chairman Yaakov Amidror, a retired major-general, implied in response to a question by The Jewish Independent Media that there have not been more arrests in connection with the Turmus Ayya assault because this would have upset settlers victimised by the Eli shootings. “The settlers were very frustrated at the murder of their friends and came and complained that the army is not doing enough to stop terror,” he explained.

Amidror added that just as the army is unable to achieve perfect results in combatting Palestinian terrorism, it cannot achieve perfect results in stopping settler violence. The IDF has to prioritise Palestinian attacks against settlers over combatting settler violence because many settlers have been killed, he said. “The settlers don’t just make pogroms, they make pogroms after Jews are killed,” he said. “At the end of the day, the Palestinians are more dangerous and that’s why the army puts its efforts there.”

But Meinrath says the Palestinian civilian population is paying very heavily what he claims is the IDF’s enabling of settlers to achieve their aim of land takeover. As an example, he points to the case of the West Bank’s Ein Samiya village, whose residents were forced to leave their lands in May, amid repeated settler attacks. “I blame the IDF for this. The Palestinians left Ein Samiya because the IDF did not defend them. Time after time the settlers went in there and no call for help or complaint helped.”

The IDF did not respond to a request for comment.

The Israeli human rights group B’tselem said building demolitions and other army practices had also driven the Palestinians out. It claimed in a media statement in May that Israel was guilty of the war crime of forcible transfer in Ein Samiya.

Meinrath alleges that settlers are trying to erase other hamlets in the area while the IDF and Israel police are not fulfilling their duty to protect Palestinian civilians. As it stands now, they often arrest Palestinians who complain about settler attacks rather than the settlers themselves, he says.

Last Saturday, settlers attacked shepherds and tried to burn down a tent in Ein Rashash village. The army arrested no settlers but did arrest three Palestinians, who were freed on bail four days later, Meinrath said. The IDF did not respond to a request for comment.

Meinrath says the army sees its objective as helping the settlers “partly because of their political power”.

“But part of it is simply the banality of evil,” he says. “What I mean is that [the army leadership] won’t give the commander anything if he takes on settlers. Only bad things will come out of it for him. It’s very hard to take them on politically and very hard psychologically. You came to the army to face up to enemies.

“It’s hard to do [accept] that your enemies aren’t Arabs, aren’t what are called terrorists but are settlers. If you do [move against settlers] you are exposed to criticism from the highest levels and you’ll be attacked. And even if the army does come and arrest [settlers] the police will end up freeing them or the judge will free them.

“To get into a situation where you are really taking care of it is very complicated and not in the consensus. So it’s better to deal with things that are in the consensus,” he says.

“The truth is you have to be really conscience-driven to do it. But if you are conscience-driven, you wouldn’t be serving there,” Meinrath said.

Another reason settler crimes are tolerated is that a lot of the commanders are ideological settlers themselves, Meinrath adds. From what he sees and hears, the army has not improved at all when it comes to preventing settler violence, even after the Turmus Ayya assault. “I hoped for change but there is no change. The violence increases all the time. The audacity increases all the time. As for the IDF, any change is for the worse.”

Meinrath believes that real international pressure, “not just words”, might improve the situation. And he thinks change may come if Israelis are persuaded to accept that the problem is the army, not just the settlers.

"Within the protest movement, there is a consensus that the pogroms are intolerable. But people say we can rely on the IDF to take care of this. This mindset has to be broken.”

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ANALYSIS
Netanyahu Is Annexing Israel to the Settler State (Aluf Benn, Haaretz)  

Israel can't be both a Jewish state and a liberal democracy (Gershon Baskin,Jerusalem Post)
Israel has never been, nor can it ever be, a liberal democratic Jewish state because it is built on the idea of Jewish supremacy over Palestinians.

Photo: A Palestinian man stands inside a burned building after an attack by Israeli settlers near Ramallah on June 21 (REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman)