The whole world will know: Israel is standing behind its war-criminal army officers
Smoke rises following an explosion in the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, 1 January 2025
Gideon Levy writes in Haaretz on 2 January 2025:
If the military police don’t immediately open an investigation into the conduct of Brig. Gen. Yehuda Vach, if Vach isn’t immediately suspended from his post as commander of the 252nd Division and detained for questioning, if the army doesn’t immediately renounce his actions and the government doesn’t do the same, then Israelis, the International Criminal Court and the world will all know that the Israel Defense Forces has a division commander suspected of committing war crimes on a massive scale, yet he remains in his job and continues living his life as if nothing had happened.
Every day that Yehuda Vach remains in his job is another day’s worth of evidence – not only of the war crimes the army is committing, but also of the fact that Israel stands behind them. Vach, who of course grew up in the settlement of Kiryat Arba and attended the Eli premilitary academy, isn’t some unusual wild horse that must be reined in. Vach is the IDF, and the IDF is Israel.
The debate is about whether Israel has or has not perpetrated ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip. The debate is even about whether the IDF is perpetrating genocide.
If there’s a division commander in Gaza who tells his officers that in his view, there are no innocents in Gaza – not as a personal opinion, but as a combat doctrine – then genocide is the spirit of the commander. If there’s a division commander who reprimands his officers for “not achieving the goal,” and the goal is expelling roughly 250,000 residents from their homes, then ethnic cleansing is the IDF’s declared policy.
And if, under the command of this division commander, an Israeli version of Russia’s Wagner Group is roaming around – a violent band of soldiers and civilians, most of them religious settlers – and no one knows from where or whom it derives its authority, aside from the fact that its commander is the division commander’s brother, and if it is systematically demolishing and flattening house after house in Gaza, with the goal of destroying Gaza and making sure that no Palestinian will be able to go back home, then in addition to committing war crimes, the army is also corrupt and rotting from within.
Yaniv Kubovich’s jaw-dropping investigative report into Vach’s actions can’t be dismissed with the idea that he is just “one more exception” to the norm for officers. The well-spoken, kindly-looking leaders of the army chose him to command first the officers’ training school and then a division. They believe in him and his course. They identify with it.
Gaza has been destroyed due to Vach and his ilk, and due to all the people who didn’t stop them. Pladot Heavy Engineering Equipment, the force commanded by the division commander’s brother (what a coincidence), destroyed Gaza not in a partisan operation by people hungry for revenge, but in the army’s name and on its behalf. “Only by losing land will the Palestinians learn the necessary lesson,” Vach told his subordinates.
The army isn’t a debating society. The army of occupation is in Gaza to carry out its missions. And Vach is the one who defined those missions. Hearing about what he did makes me nostalgic for Meir Har-Zion, a commando in Unit 101, who murdered five Bedouins in revenge for the murder of his sister in 1954. What is the wimpy Har-Zion, with his murder of five people, compared to Vach, with his plan to expel 250,000 people and his unconcealed dream of killing every person in Gaza, since they’re all terrorists?
The war crimes in Gaza have been ratcheted up a notch since the relatively innocent, compassionate, humane era of Unit 101. Now, the death and destruction are on a massive scale and the crimes are wholesale. Vach is also contemptuous of the lives of his own soldiers. Maybe that will rouse Israelis to understand who the commanders of this war actually are.
But for all the grief over the loss of the eight soldiers who were killed because of Vach’s negligence and indifference, the hundreds of Palestinians slain in the killing zone known as the Netzarim corridor cry out even louder.
Former IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan once wrote that in his view, Har-Zion was the best soldier the IDF had ever produced. Now that murderer has an heir. And in March, he and his division are supposed to return to the Netzarim corridor.
If there’s a division commander who reprimands his officers for ‘not achieving the goal’ of expelling some 250,000 Gazans from their homes, then ethnic cleansing is the IDF’s declared policy.
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