The ultra-Orthodox (haredi) parties are exploiting the dissolution of the Knesset and the upcoming elections to extort as much as they can from the dying government. And whether it be the timing of the elections, which have still not been set, or dangerous legislation, they seem to have a willing ally – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Defense Minister Israel Katz on Sunday called to advance a proposal that would temporarily freeze the arrests of haredi draft evaders, as the Knesset advanced contentious legislation to enshrine Torah study in a Basic Law after the haredi parties had threatened to boycott coalition votes.
The bill to freeze the arrests of draft evaders contains a section stipulating that from the decided date of commencement until the end of 90 days, no arrest, investigation, or enforcement proceedings will be conducted for failure to serve.
The Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, headed by Likud MK Boaz Bismuth, met on Tuesday to advance the proposal.
Government Secretary Yossi Fuchs, in a letter to Bismuth expressing Netanyahu’s view, argued that arresting yeshiva students who evade military service has undermined efforts to encourage broader enlistment among haredi men.
United Torah Judaism (UTJ) announced on Monday that it would boycott coalition voting in the Knesset, after accusing the coalition of failing to advance legislation promised to the haredi parties quickly enough.
The announcement marks another attempt to pressure Netanyahu’s coalition to kowtow to their demands – ones that would support haredi draft evaders even as the IDF warns all who will listen that it is on the cusp of a severe manpower crisis.
Instead of standing up to the extortion demands and calling them unacceptable, the prime minister went too far in siding with his coalition partners during his impromptu press conference on Saturday night, in which he announced he would try to form a broad coalition if he were elected to form the next government.
Picking up the outlandish claims of UTJ head Yitzhak Goldknopf and adopting them as his own, Netanyahu stated that police were entering yeshivas and arresting draft dodgers.
'Young haredi men want to enlist,' Netanyahu claims
“Young haredi men want to enlist. But when arrests are carried out in places of Torah study, it produces the opposite result,” he claimed, though there have been no such reported arrest operations.
“If I told you that in some country in Europe, police were entering yeshivas, taking young men studying Torah, and putting them in prison, you would be shocked,” he said.
The words could have come straight out of Goldknopf’s mouth. That’s the view, at least, from Rabbi Yonatan Reiss, the founder of the Hedvata network of haredi hesder yeshivas.
“I assume the prime minister received his message from Goldknopf,” Reiss told Ynet on Sunday. “We delivered a completely different message, the same message we have been voicing for three years.
Reiss said the focus on arrests misses the central problem: the lack of suitable frameworks that would allow young haredi men who want to enlist to do so without abandoning their identity and way of life.
Reiss said that he sent Netanyahu letters repeatedly through Fuchs – who he claims has ignored them – that said: “Stop dealing with arrests. It does not help. Start dealing with haredi enlistment.”
“If the Israeli government had dealt with haredi enlistment since then through a serious government decision, as it has done in the past in other areas, and had called on entrepreneurs to establish frameworks, not rabbis but entrepreneurs, we would already be seeing imaginary numbers,” he said.
“There are many haredim who want to integrate. They simply do not have the bridge.”
However, that sensible approach has no place in the current political alignment in Israel in which the haredi parties call the shots.
Netanyahu – reliant on them to build a future coalition – has no choice but to obey, while the rest of the country suffers and is placed in danger ahead of the future IDF manpower crisis.
Netanyahu is acting irresponsibly by making the false claims about arrests in yeshivas; the haredi parties are acting irresponsibly by ignoring the obligations their followers need to observe as citizens of the country, and most of the ruling coalition is aiding and abetting the travesty.
The end of this bankrupt government, running on threats and coercion, couldn’t come soon enough.