The ultra-Orthodox Shas Party signaled on Monday that it will vote to bring down the government on Wednesday over the issue of military conscription for Haredi yeshivah students, who until recently were exempt from serving as long as they study full-time.
“As of now, if there is nothing we can bring before the rabbis that can be discussed, we will have to vote in favor of dissolving the Knesset,” Shas spokesman Asher Medina told Kol BaRama radio.
“We are disappointed with [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. We expected him to take action earlier and not just in the last few days,” Medina said, referring to the demand that legislation be passed to anchor the exemption in law.
Shas joins another ultra-Orthodox party, United Torah Judaism, which decided last week to leave the government over the Israeli army’s intention to send out more than 50,000 draft orders to yeshivah students.
Ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, men receive near-blanket exemptions from military service in what started as an exemption for about 400 Torah scholars at the state’s establishment. The Haredi population has since exploded, and deferments were expanded.
For years, the issue of Haredi deferment has caused bitterness within Israel’s larger society, most of whose members serve in the Israel Defense Forces. The matter grew still more divisive after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. IDF reservists, many with wives and children, were called up for months at a time with little respite.
Although the number of Haredi men studying in yeshivahs and eligible for IDF service is estimated at between 63,000 and 66,000, since Oct. 7, 2023, only 1,140 haredim have enlisted, of whom 600 were over the age of 26 and thus exempt for the draft, according to March 2024 numbers.
The government appeared stable up until a few months ago. But a process that began in June of last year when the High Court of Justice ruled that the government must conscript Haredim has caught up with it.
As a result of the court’s move, the Haredi parties, which for years made up the most stable element of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, have become its weakest link.
What also changed is that for the first time, voices from within the coalition are demanding high Haredi recruitment numbers.
“Until now it was opposition versus coalition; now parties in the right-wing government coalition are also demanding change. And that is why, even if the High Court demands that the ultra-Orthodox be drafted, it will not be criticized by parts of the coalition,” Ishay Cohen, political analyst at Kikar Hashabat, an ultra-Orthodox news site, told JNS in February.
Indeed, Shas’s spokesman on Monday blamed a prominent member of the coalition, the Likud’s Yuli Edelstein, chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, for the failure to reach a deal.
“When we see the absurd demands of Edelstein and his friends in the Likud, we cannot remain indifferent,” Medina said. “He is the obstacle—and each time he pulls out a proposal that is more humiliating than the last.”
Likud MK Dan Illouz blamed Shas leader Aryeh Deri, saying that Deri is the reason Israel ended up with the Oslo Accords, the deals signed between Israel and the PLO in 1993 and 1995.
“We got Oslo because of Deri. He brought down the [Yitzhak] Shamir government and joined [Labor’s Yitzhak] Rabin, all for the sake of budgets for his yeshivahs. That’s how we got Oslo, the terrorists with weapons, and in the end—the massacre of Oct. 7.
“Anyone who topples a right-wing government in time of war will be remembered forever in eternal disgrace,” Illouz said.
This Wednesday’s motion of no-confidence in the government was scheduled by opposition party leader Yair Lapid, chairman of the Yesh Atid Party.
“This Knesset is finished. It has nowhere to go,” Lapid said.