When the Right falls victim to the primaries

The public execution carried out by Defense Minister Israel Katz against Major General Avi Blut is a good opportunity to draw a very clear dividing line within the Right: ideological Right versus populist Right. Blut could give Katz private lessons in right-wing ideology. His biography is a cliché of a member of Religious Zionism who grew up in a settlement. His parents moved to Neve Tzuf from Jerusalem in the midst of the First Intifada. Do you hear, Katz? This is how the ideological Right operates: there is a complex security situation, and they jump into the fire.

Ephraim and Shoshana Blut raised seven sons. All of them are combat soldiers, one is a pilot, and only one, a fighter in an elite unit, did not go to officers' training. All of them fought, some were wounded, in the current war. A typical landscape of the settler public. Blut took upon himself the complex and thankless role of GOC Central Command during the war and managed to do the impossible. He fought terror with the maximum tools given to him by the political echelon and then some. He brought IDF forces into the refugee camps and established order in them that had never existed before. Years of security lawlessness, a large part of them under the rule of a populist Right, came to an end under the watch of an officer who is a son of a family of ideological Right. During Blut's watch, the farm project in Judea and Samaria received the maximum support that reality allowed, and quite a bit more.

So what did Blut sin in the eyes of Katz? By not agreeing to allow the chaos. Blut was not prepared to turn a blind eye to the violence of a fraction of a percent of the settler public that harms innocent Palestinians. Katz is now in the primary season, and in this season every lunatic becomes a king. Any idiot can set an agenda and shake the consciousness of the Defense Minister. Those among the 'hilltop youth' who want to trample every shred of proper conduct are demonstrating in front of Katz's house and demanding to take his hands off their friends who harmed innocents, and this puts Katz under pressure. Avi Blut, a man with a brain, a man devoid of base political considerations, a responsible man, for whom what happens in the territories of Judea and Samaria is truly his responsibility, could not have a hand in this. In the absence of almost any other tools that allow him to fight Jewish anarchists, Blut insists on imposing an administrative detention order on one of the rioters. Such an ideological Right contradicts the primary considerations of Israel Katz. So he cuts off Blut's head last night in a live broadcast on Channel 14 - exactly as one can expect from a populist Right.

And maybe, Blut, maybe you are guilty. You grew up in a settlement, you dedicated your life to the security of the settlement enterprise, you navigated within an impossible reality, you stretched the boundaries to the edge and beyond to allow the expansion of the so important farms. You are guilty because you are a man of the ideological Right. If only you were a populist Right man. You are a son of the wrong family, everyone in your family is busy with education, settlement, or state security, there isn't even one brother who is a big party operative in Likud, and therefore your head can be cut off in front of the cameras. One thing should be clear to every right-winger whose mind still manages him: there is no officer in the world who will be better for the settlement enterprise than Blut. But that is really not what interests Katz: inside his populist head there is only the primaries in Likud.