Why US refuses to punish Netzah Yehuda, Israel's notorious military unit

The US has decided not to sanction Netzah Yehuda, the notorious Israeli military unit accused of egregious human rights violations against Palestinians amid the Zionist state’s brutal massacres of civilians in Gaza.

A State Department panel had recommended sanctions on the battalion dominated by Hilltop Youth, a radical right-wing settler movement, in accordance with a 1997 US legislation known as the Leahy law.

This law bans American aid and military assistance to foreign states whose security apparatus is accused of “gross violations of human rights”.

But Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, a Jewish American who believes that “security assistance to Israel is sacrosanct”, decided to give the benefit of the doubt to Netzah Yehuda, showing once again how Washington has found ways to look away from the ongoing carnage in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

Netzah Yehuda is packed with members of ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups, and their atrocities on Palestinians had made the panel consider sanctions on the unit in the first place.

Analysts, however, say that the US reluctance to act against the Israeli military is not unprecedented.

“We have to understand that US politicians have been accommodating because of the Zionist influence and the pro-Israeli forces within society, whether they are Jewish organisations or non-Jewish organisations, including members of Congress, particularly Republicans and hardcore Zionist Democrats,” Sami al Arian, a leading Palestinian professor, tells TRT World.

Due to the Zionist influence within the US administration, top bureaucrats like Blinken “have been siding with the Israeli government every single time against their own government”, according to Arian, the director of the Center for Islam and Global Affairs at the Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University.

The US’s “ironclad” support has emboldened Israel to carry out its genocidal war on Palestinians, and this makes the US “complicit” in all the atrocities taking place not only during the ongoing war but throughout the conflict, Arian says.

“Unfortunately, there has not been any kind of response that could deter the US from pursuing such complicitous policies, aiding and abetting in the torture and the killing and the murder of Palestinians by this unit, as well as the Israeli army,” says the professor, referring to Netzah Yehuda, which is now operating in Gaza after committing many atrocities in the occupied West Bank.

US complicity also frees Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister of Israel, and his far-right coalition partners to continue to commit war crimes against Palestinians.

“If anyone thinks they can impose sanctions on a unit of the [Israeli army] – I will fight it with all my strength,” a defiant Netanyahu had said recently despite mounting evidence of abuses by the unit.

American duplicity

To many, Blinken’s decision against sanctioning the battalion is unsurprising.

“The State Department has never made an independent determination of a gross violation of human rights by an Israeli unit. Ever,” Charles Blaha, the former director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights, was quoted as saying in a media report. Blaha was also a former member of the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum.

Another former State Department official concurred with Blaha’s assessment.

“Had the US used the leverage that Leahy laws provide over the years to encourage the IDF [Israeli army] to crack down on misbehaviour and to snuff out its current culture of impunity, we would have seen at the very least a much stronger unit discipline (than what we see in Gaza right now) at a tactical level,” Josh Paul, a former director in the State Department’s political-military affairs bureau, was quoted as saying by CNN.

A recent State Department statement claims that because the Israeli army “remediated” human rights “violations” of Netzah Yehuda, Blinken decided not to sanction it. However, it was not clear what kind of measures the Israeli army had taken to remedy the group. A recent report by the Israeli publication Haaretz has shown how Israeli soldiers are using Palestinians as human shields, an accusation Tel Aviv has repeatedly used against Hamas.

Some suggest that Blinken’s decision came after his “quiet” talks with Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant, who reportedly assured the American diplomat that the army would take punitive action against the battalion for its violations. The Israeli army had previously halted the activities of Sfar Hamidbar, another controversial unit dominated by extremist settlers.

However, an extensive media investigation has shown that the battalion’s former commanders were never punished for their past actions. Instead, they were promoted while most of its soldiers did not face any serious charges.

Rewarding atrocities

The Israeli battalion, formed in 1999 to accommodate demands of ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews who have long refused to serve in the army in a secular setting alongside female soldiers, has had a notorious record, with its members facing court-martial numerous times.

Netzah Yehuda, which means Judah’s Victory, is part of the Kfir Brigade, the largest infantry brigade in the Israeli army.

The brigade’s deputy commander is Mati Shevach, who had led Netzah Yehuda until August 2022. During his tenure, 78-year-old Palestinian-American Omar Assad died in the custody of his soldiers in January 2022.

An Israeli army investigation concluded that Assad died due to “a moral failure and poor decision-making on the part of the soldiers” of Netzah Yehuda, claiming that it would bar Shevach, the battalion commander, from commanding positions. However, in contrast to the army’s pledge, he was promoted to a leading role in the largest infantry brigade.

Soldiers complicit in Assad’s death also faced no criminal charges. Shevach now trains soldiers for combat missions in Gaza, according to an Israeli army statement.

Shevach is not the only one to get promotions in exchange for his battalion’s atrocities. Lt. Col. Nitai Okashi, who led the notorious Netzah Yehuda between 2018 and 2020, was also rewarded. Under Okashi’s leadership, his soldiers assaulted a Palestinian father and son in early 2019 and launched racist attacks on Bedouin men at a gas station in late 2019 in the occupied West Bank.

Apart from a brief detention of 14 soldiers, the unit faced no serious action.

Like Shevach, Okashi was also promoted to higher roles, including commander of the Jerusalem Brigade, which has operated across Gaza since the beginning of the ongoing war. In March, he got “a further promotion,” according to CNN.

Why is ‘collective punishment’ used?

But why have the battalion members, who claim to follow Judaism’s holy book Torah’s instructions much better than other Jews, suffered “moral failure”, as the Israeli army investigators put it?

One of the former members of the battalion, who witnessed a lot of cruelty and “collective punishment of Palestinians” in his time in Netzah Yehuda, has an answer to this question.

“A lot of us probably did not see Arabs, Palestinians in particular, as someone with rights – okay, like they’re really the occupier of some of the land, and they need to be moved,” the former soldier told a media outlet. The whistleblower did not want to be named due to fears of revenge attacks.

According to Arian, ultra-Orthodox Jews are very extremist factions of Judaism who believe that non-Jews (like Palestinians) are not of equal status with them.

“Unfortunately, their teachings, whether religious or otherwise, are very extremist in which they deal with the so-called goyim (or goy/gentile), which means non-Jews, as people as if they are non-humans,” Arian says.

These Israeli Jews use some religious texts to justify abuse, killings, torture and rape of non-Jews, he says. In the wake of the Gaza war, these teachings have become more "frequent" now in the practices of the Israeli army units like Netzah Yehuda, he adds.

“They are willing to commit all these atrocities, all these despicable acts with these kinds of teachings and permissions by their rabbis. There are many, many rabbis (who), for many decades, have been giving permissions for these people to commit whatever they can against the Palestinians,” he says.

In the early stages of the Israeli war on Gaza, Netanyahu quoted verses from the Old Testament to justify Israel’s war on Palestinians whom he resembled Amalek, a determined national enemy of ancient Israelis, says Arian.

“Remember what Amalek did to you'”, Netanyahu warned his “thousand-year-old nation of Israel”. Then, he connected the current Israeli army with the Bible’s ancient Jewish religious, political and military figures, some of whose existence can not even be documented.

“All of you are a descendant of the chain of heroes who did not hesitate and did not retreat - Yehoshua ben Nun, Deborah the prophetess, King David, Yehuda the Maccabee, Bar Kochba, Joseph Trumpeldor, the underground fighters, the IDF and the security forces. They took hold of the shield sword for Israel's eternity, and you follow in their footsteps,” he wrote on X.

“He's trying to equate the Amalek with the Palestinians” whose children, livestock and other belongings can be destroyed according to those religious texts, aiming to justify his army’s acts across Gaza and other occupied areas, says Arian.