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.