Defense Minister Israel Katz went on Channel 14 late on Sunday and said he had decided to appoint Maj. Gen. Dado Bar Kalifa, head of the IDF Personnel Directorate, as head of Central Command. The post was occupied. Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth holds it, and the military answered within the hour that Bluth would remain, and that a defense minister cannot dismiss a senior officer on his own.
The quarrel behind it is small and specific. Bluth had sought to renew an administrative restraining order against Tal Yinon Dardik, a settler with a record of violence. Katz had told him not to, and said afterwards that Bluth had acted against his policy. Under standing procedure the chief of staff selects candidates for senior commands and the minister approves them, which places the announcement outside the process rather than at the end of it.
By Monday Katz was describing the account of a dismissal as a complete lie and part of a political campaign, and arguing that he was only advancing an appointment Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir had recommended months earlier. Zamir answered with a decision rather than a statement: senior appointments are frozen until after the ballot on 27 October. Bluth stays where he is, and by the ordinary length of the post that is roughly another three years.
The reaction divided along an unusual line. Four former defense ministers or chiefs of staff, Benny Gantz, Yoav Gallant, Avigdor Liberman and Gadi Eisenkot, condemned it, and Yair Golan and Elazar Stern went further, with Stern calling on the prime minister to dismiss Katz. Settler leaders defended Bluth too. The Yesha Council called him the best head of Central Command it had known, and the Beit El council chief called the removal shameful. Coalition members said close to nothing, which with a Likud primary approaching is its own kind of answer.