Shoot Palestinians, not settlers: Israeli general exposes double standard
A Palestinian woman ushers her children away from a group of Israeli soldiers during a weekly settlers’ tour in Hebron, in the Israeli‑occupied West Bank
Simon Speakman Cordall writes in Al Jazeera on 6 May 2026:
Major-General Avi Bluth, the Israeli commander with responsibility for the occupied West Bank, had not known his comments would be leaked when he boasted of the success of Israel’s policies in the occupied territory.
The army, he claimed in undated comments published by the Israeli liberal daily Haaretz last week, was “killing like we haven’t killed since 1967″.
Israel, Bluth added, was “turning villages into conflict zones”. Critically, he also admitted to his audience what many had long known: that Israel was practising a two-tier firing policy, actively avoiding firing at Israeli settlers throwing stones at Israeli forces, while freely firing at Palestinians doing the same.
“This [stone throwing] is terrorism, not popular or grassroots terrorism – there’s only popular [‘folk’] dancing,” Bluth said, adding that the military had killed 42 Palestinian stone-throwers in 2025. Firing at Israeli settlers, however, was to be avoided, he said, due to what he described as the “profound societal consequences” of doing so.
Al Jazeera approached Bluth, via the Israeli authorities, for comment, but did not receive a reply at the time of writing.
Ratcheting rhetoric
That double standard is unlikely to come as a surprise to anyone who lives in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, or the rights groups that campaign on their behalf. However, within an Israeli society described by analysts as veering sharply to the right and increasingly nationalistic, comments such as Bluth’s were increasingly becoming a point of pride, irrespective of the human cost.
In a landscape where government ministers, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, celebrate the passage of a death penalty law targeting Palestinians with noose-decorated cakes, or Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich can describe an Israeli government with Palestinian members as a thousand times worse than the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, Bluth’s comments are hardly shocking.