The grandparents of A., a young man from Kiryat Arba, live a quiet, normative life in Elkana. One day, out of the blue, General Avi Bluth of the IDF Central Command issued an administrative order placing the young man under full house arrest for two months in his grandparents home. The order was not accompanied by any evidence and did not follow any structured legal process. The order cited only “regional security concerns” as justification and entirely disregarded the circumstances of the grandparents, who were never asked if this arrangement was agreeable or even feasible.
This incident is but one example of the excessive and undemocratic authority vested in the General of the Central Command, who is often merely a puppet receiving directions from the Israeli Shin Bet behind the scenes. Even General Tamir Yadai, who served in Bluth’s position between 2020-2021, once candidly compared his authority to that of Stalin.
As far as my research shows, Israel’s judicial system possesses no legal mechanism that could enable a situation comparable to the one described above. A court would assess alternatives to house arrest, would vet the guarantors and verify their capacity to supervise the suspect, and so forth. Certainly no judge would place an individual under house arrest in someone else's home without consulting the hosts.
Yet, in the case of administrative detention–a mechanism inherited from the British Mandate era and intended for use in emergency situations–standard criminal legal procedures are entirely bypassed. Here, the general acts as prosecutor, judge, and defense, relying solely on classified intelligence from the Shin Bet–in this case, the Shin Bet division focused on actions against Jews.
In theory, the General of Central Command could even decree that red-heads are barred from entering a grocery store in Har Bracha on certain days for "security reasons," provided the Attorney General goes along with it. Though things haven’t gone quite that far, General Bluth has gone so far as to place someone under house arrest in another person’s home without their consent.
This administrative order now joins the approximately 15 others General Bluth has signed since entering his new position. These include barring individuals from entering Judea and Samaria, prohibiting contact with specific people, imposing geographical restrictions to individuals’ hometowns, and even full house arrests, as in this case. The justification for these orders is typically framed as a "severe and significant threat posed by your prohibited activities," often accompanied by vague references to actions against “local Arab residents”.
Allow me, on this matter, to contradict the well-known quote of the historian Acton that “great men are almost always bad men…still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.” Avi Bluth is not a bad man. He is a person who, for years, has been prepared to put his life on the line for the sake of the nation of Israel, and he is certainly much better than his immediate predecessor by every measure, whether in his approach to national security or in his support for Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria.
Nevertheless, he remains a military authority entrusted with an extraordinary amount of power. And when it comes to the subject of administrative orders, due to pressure exerted on him by the Shin Bet Jewish division, he wields this power against young Jewish men who are no enemies of Israel. When friends are treated as foes, the consequences follow accordingly.
The truth is that General Bluth may be completely unaware that no one consulted the grandparents in question, and it’s unlikely the issue even crossed his mind. His schedule is undoubtedly extremely busy, and it’s reasonable to assume he doesn’t sign administrative orders against Jews with great enthusiasm. But that is precisely the problem: with a single stroke of his pen, the General upends the lives of civilians in a way that would be unthinkable in any other context in Israel.
Even senior Arab criminals from the notorious Bachri or Hariri families, Israeli citizens, would not be placed under administrative detention or even subjected to a geographical restriction– despite it being evident to the police and anyone on the ground that dozens of murders have been carried out under their orders. This is because there are rules of conduct in a democratic state. Meanwhile a Jewish “hilltop youth” can instantaneously find himself under a variety of restrictions on the sole basis of an administrative order. These restrictions can range from restraining orders and prohibitions on contacting friends to full house arrest and even imprisonment (imprisonment in a jail can only be carried out with the signature of the Minister of Defense).
Rather than operating within the framework of Israel’s legal system (which despite its flaws, still provides checks and balances), the General is granted nearly unlimited power to infringe upon the basic freedoms of civilians based on the unchecked assessments of the Shin Bet.
The flaws in this administrative system were starkly exposed in one of the rare cases where the Shin Bet’s method of identifying suspects was subjected to serious legal scrutiny. D., a young Jewish man from Yitzhar, was accused of burning Qurans in a mosque in the murderous village of Urif—hours after two terrorists from the village murdered four Israelis at the Eli gas station.
D. faced severe charges in the Lod district court and was imprisoned until the end of the trial. However, during the proceedings, it emerged that the key piece of evidence linking him to the crime–namely, his identification as the perpetrator–was the testimony of an agent from the Shin Bet Jewish division.
Before proceeding, let us note that the judge assigned to this case was Dana Marshak-Marom, a judge with a notably hostile track record toward Jewish settlers and settlements. She is an alumna of the New Israel Fund law program, and her history suggests she would be unlikely to show leniency toward a young man from Yitzhar accused of harming Arabs.
And yet, even she could not overlook the fact that during the cross-examination by lawyer Moshe Polski from the organization Honenu, the testimony of the Shin Bet agent known as “A.”, a visual intelligence agent in the Jewish division, completely unraveled.
It turned out that the expert witness presented by the Shin Bet failed to meet the legal qualifications for an “expert witness” and was not even familiar with the legal definition of the term. He had passed no special training beyond the basic internal training of the Shin Bet and held no certificate of accreditation. He testified that he knew the accused “as well as I know my wife who wakes up next to me in the morning”, yet also admitted that he was unaware of the age of the accused.
He admitted to recognizing D. only based on general traits: a heavyset man with a thick black beard and mustache." When Polski inquired what the probability was that among the approximately 150 people who were at the place of the crime at the time there would be a number of people who were heavyset with a black beard and mustache, the witness had no answer.
6 months ago, and after 11 months in prison, D. was acquitted due to insufficient evidence. Judge Marshak-Marom acquitted him due to the lack of reliable, specific features tying D. to the crime, and stated that the testimony of the Shin Bet agent could not be relied upon.
“The witness failed to establish any reasonable degree of certainty regarding the identification of the accused, and it remains unclear what standards of verification were applied. The witness was unable to provide the accused’s age, and the defense’s argument must be accepted, as the identification features provided were too vague, with the witness unable to specify any unique identifiers of the accused.”
Honenu lawyer Nati Rom recently exposed a similar incident in a recent meeting of the Knesset Constitution Committee. In his testimony to the committee, he explained that the sole individual responsible for assessing the dangerousness of a given suspect within the Shin Bet’s Jewish division, the person upon whose evaluation the agency bases its recommendations for administrative orders, lacks any relevant expertise or credentials in the field.
“There is one man who assesses a subject’s dangerousness on behalf of the Shin Bet, a man who has not undergone any kind of training. I asked him, ‘Did you study sociology, psychology, or criminology? Do you have any kind of training or expertise in how to evaluate dangerousness?’ His answer was, ‘No.’,” related Rom.
Ultimately, the secretive nature of the Shin Bet’s operations–sometimes marked by unprofessional conduct and, at times, by personal or political motivations–remains entirely unchecked and unsupervised, leading to serious miscarriages of justice. Another case in point involves yet another young Jewish detainee, M., who spent months in administrative detention for allegedly setting fire to a church in Jerusalem, only to be released when someone else confessed to the crime. It was revealed that the intelligence used to detain him, which appeared to be based on either a mistaken identification from surveillance footage or untruthful testimony from an agent, was entirely false. To date, M. has not received any compensation for his wrongful imprisonment.
Anyone who believed these methods of operation would remain confined to hilltop youth, received a harsh wake-up call a few weeks ago with the debacle surrounding the Sinwar documents that were concealed from the Prime Minister.
This time, it was Eli Feldstein, the Prime Minister’s spokesperson and former spokesperson for the IDF Judea and Samaria Division (i.e., led by none other than Commander Avi Bluth at the time), who found himself subjected to intense Shin Bet interrogations, denied access to legal counsel, and placed under conditions typically reserved for convicted terrorists.
As a journalist, I had numerous interactions with Eli myself, engaging in many conversations about the authorities’ approach to hilltop youth. It was staggering to see how someone who had been “on the system’s side” was now subjected to the very same Shin Bet methods that have been used against hilltop youth for years, including the appearance of a “senior security official” to persuade the judge of the necessity of the arrest. When the Shin Bet seeks a scapegoat to go after the Prime Minister, even highly respected IDF commanders can find themselves crushed under the ruthless wheels of its machinery.
For years, whether as a journalist for HaKol HaYehudi or as the spokesperson for Honenu, I sounded the alarm: the methods wielded against hilltop youth and settlers would eventually be turned against everyone else. Yet, if I’m honest, a part of me never fully believed it. After all, we are the fringe–the second-class citizens. Who would dare use such measures against prominent, mainstream figures? And yet, here we are. What we warned about has come to pass.
Shai Nitzan (formerly Israel’s Attorney General), who spent years targeting settlers using draconian tactics, later turned those same lawless, mafia-like methods against Prime Minister Netanyahu. Now, the Shin Bet demonstrates just how deeply politicized it has become, working hand-in-hand with the IDF Chief of Staff to target the Prime Minister and his inner circle, with no holds barred.
This is the inevitable outcome when an organization is given unchecked power. It begins subtly, almost imperceptibly, and then snowballs into something far more dangerous. It starts with a hilltop youth being placed under house arrest at his grandparents’ home, without even bothering to ask for their consent, and escalates to the point where the the former spokesperson for the IDF Judea and Samaria division attempts suicide as a result of harsh Shin Bet interrogations.
It is time for General Avi Bluth to halt this growing snowball, to summon the courage to stand up and tell the Shin Bet’s Jewish Division: enough is enough.
“In the case in question, an administrative order was issued placing the detainee under house arrest at the residence of his relatives, based on evidence substantiating the individual’s dangerousness. The address specified in the order was previously used during a court-approved house arrest with the homeowner’s consent.”
Our rebuttal to the IDF Spokesperson’s response: The grandparents did host their grandson for a brief period previously, in compliance with a court order issued in the course of a normal legal process. However the current two-month administrative detention in their home was imposed without their consent or consultation.
