Israel is a national-security state with a conscription-based army. The military enjoys a disproportionate role in everyday life, with security personnel allowed to carry service weapons in public even during off-duty hours.
In 2024, the Israeli army chief expressed dissatisfaction with Netanyahu’s war policy and publicly criticised him for lacking a “day-after strategy” for Gaza.
More recently, hundreds of former generals urged US President Donald Trump to stop Netanyahu from igniting a “third intifada in the West Bank” in order to remain in power.
‘An army with a country’
Yair Amitai, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Liberty and Responsibility at Reichman University in Tel Aviv, says the Israeli army has always been “unusually large and influential” relative to the size of the state.
“There was even a saying that Israel is not a country that has an army, but an army that has a country,” he tells TRT World.
Many Israeli generals have joined politics in the past. Three of them – Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon – even rose to become Israel’s prime ministers.
In recent decades, however, the military’s relative influence has gradually declined as the economy expanded and power alternated between the left and the right, he says.
Even so, the military enjoys the “highest levels of public trust” among Israeli citizens, Amitai adds.
But the composition of the senior officer corps has gradually changed, with more commanders emerging from the political right, particularly the religious Zionist community – some of whose members are settlers in the occupied West Bank.
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This context helps explain the recent confrontation, even though the intensity of the clash was “highly unusual”, he says.
“The minister’s primary motivation appears to have been domestic political considerations,” he adds.
In Likud’s primary elections, candidates compete for the support of party members who generally hold more hawkish positions than the broader Israeli electorate, Amitai notes.
“(Bluth) had taken a firm stance against violence by extremist settlers, while the settler movement enjoys significant influence within the Likud primary electorate,” he says.
Katz later tried to walk back the impression that he had summarily dismissed Bluth, insisting the general was performing well and that no disagreement existed.
But the initial live announcement, a lack of coordination with the military chief, and the subsequent freeze on key appointments leave little doubt about the depth of the civil-military divide in Israel.
Goren says that the Israeli military is historically trusted by the public, largely because of compulsory service.
Trust in Netanyahu’s leadership, however, has taken a serious hit since the judicial overhaul attempt in 2023 and throughout the Gaza war.
Recent pre-election public polls also show that more Israelis see former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot as a better candidate than Netanyahu for premiership.
Historical tensions between governments and the military existed, but they were mostly “legitimate differences” on national security and were handled “behind closed doors”, Goren says.
“The recent Katz-Zamir incident relates to a governmental attempt to restrain (military) actions against settler violence in the (Occupied) West Bank,” he says.
