Former Likud minister and Reservists Party Chairman Yoaz Hendel told 103FM on Monday that Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionist Party leadership is abandoning Zionist values and enabling mass draft evasion, one day after the party held its primaries.
In an interview with Amichai Atali and Ilil Shahar, Hendel sharply criticized the party’s leaders for prioritizing their partnership with the haredi parties. He also outlined his vision for a broad Zionist government that would not depend on either haredi or Arab parties.
“This is a list whose leaders have never experienced the army in their lives,” Hendel said. “They never stood eight hours on, eight hours off in a pillbox, at a post or in a defensive position, and that is the truth. The most painful truth is that, at the moment of truth, during wartime, they chose to support the haredi parties and political operatives.”
According to Hendel, that support was reflected in the distribution of government positions and the transfer of budgets that encourage avoidance of military service. He also criticized legislation advanced by the coalition, which he described as “a draft-evasion law and a law that disgraces the Torah.”
“In politics, apparently, everything is permitted, but in the moral, ethical and Jewish world, it cannot be that someone who calls himself ‘Religious Zionism’ encourages mass draft evasion,” he said. “The Religious Zionist Party, the party, not the admirable community, is causing a catastrophe and a disgrace during wartime. They support anti-Zionist legislation and are preventing us from winning the war.”
A Zionist government without haredi or Arab parties
Hendel, who said he had completed more than 560 days of reserve duty, argued that Zionist values were not limited to settlement in the West Bank.
Zionism, he said, also meant “settlement in Kiryat Shmona, in the North, in the Gaza border communities and in the Jordan Valley,” alongside a commitment to prevent reservists from across the country from being “ground down for hundreds of days.”
He warned that continued political dependence on the haredi parties could eventually damage the fabric of life in Israel.
“We will reach a situation in which there is a non-Zionist majority, and we will break apart into autonomous regions,” he said.
Hendel later presented his party’s platform, emphasizing that it combines right-wing positions on settlement and the judicial system with a demand for shared national service.
“We support settlement, reforms to the judicial system and, at the same time, enlistment in the army,” he said. “The most basic thing is that every Israeli citizen, Jewish, Arab, haredi (ultra-Orthodox), secular, left-wing or right-wing, should do something for his country.”
Hendel also criticized the involvement of elected officials who do not serve in the military in decisions concerning wartime operations.
“It does not seem reasonable to me that Goldknopf sits there and makes decisions about whether I will risk my life, when he does not know what it means to fear a phone call in the middle of the night,” he said.
Asked about the political deadlock reflected in opinion polls and the difficulty of forming a coalition without the Likud under Netanyahu or without Arab parties, Hendel rejected renewed reliance on Ra’am, despite having previously served in a government in which the party was a coalition partner.
“In the government I saw up close with Mansour Abbas, the moment a military operation began, Ra’am suspended its participation in the coalition for several days,” he said. “I do not think a coalition can be formed with non-Zionist parties, Arab or haredi. It did not work, it does not work during wartime, and it will not work.”
Hendel was equally unequivocal regarding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Netanyahu needs to go home,” he said.
According to Hendel, the way out of Israel’s political impasse is to create a new Zionist political force capable of holding the balance of power.
“We are the solution to the reality in which we are stuck, and we will recommend a candidate for prime minister who can bring together as many Zionist mandates as possible,” he concluded. “Without us, we will reach another stalemate, because that is what happened in the last five elections.”