‘A slip of the tongue’: Shas retracts threat to blow up coalition over Haredi draft bill

The ultra-Orthodox Shas party on Wednesday backed down from a threat to bring down the government unless it passes a bill exempting yeshiva students from military service, with faction chair Aryeh Deri reportedly conveying a message to the coalition that his ultimatum to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the previous day was a “slip of the tongue.”

In an interview with ultra-Orthodox radio station Kol Berama on Tuesday, Deri gave Netanyahu two months to resolve the status of yeshiva students, warning that if the matter is “not resolved, we’ll go to elections.”

Following Deri’s statement, Shas MK Erez Malul said in an interview with Kan radio on Tuesday evening that Netanyahu did not have the votes to pass a budget without his party.

“United Torah Judaism will not vote in favor of the budget, Ben Gvir is in the opposition. How will this pass? This is not a threat, this is an ultimatum,” he said.

The 2025 state budget must be passed by the end of March or the government will automatically fall, triggering early elections.

But speaking with Channel 12 news on Wednesday evening, Shas spokesman Asher Medina walked the statement back, saying that the party “will not topple the right-wing government. There is no threat and no ultimatum.”

According to the pro-government Channel 14, Netanyahu had warned the leaders of the coalition’s ultra-Orthodox parties that “this is not the time for threats or inflammatory rhetoric.”

The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee is currently debating a bill dealing with the issue of ultra-Orthodox enlistment.

Both Shas and fellow ultra-Orthodox party UTJ have been heavily pressuring Netanyahu to pass a law that would see most of the community’s young men exempted. UTJ’s Hasidic Agudat Yisrael faction has also threatened to vote against the budget over the draft issue.

While the Agudat Yisrael faction of the UTJ party has previously also linked threats to the budget to the draft issue, the party’s non-Hasidic Degel HaTorah faction appeared to reject such a move on Wednesday.

Addressing a conference in the southern city of Eilat on Wednesday afternoon, Deputy Transportation Minister Uri Maklev stated that the government is “stable” and will not fall because “there is no other alternative.”

The Haaretz daily reported that after his apparent ultimatum, Deri clarified that he had rather intended to convey that the coalition could fall apart if the Haredi draft issue is not resolved — given threats from both Housing Minister Yitzchak Goldknopf, the chairman of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, head of the far-right Religious Zionism to leave the government.

The Shas threat was the latest to Netanyahu’s right-wing, mostly religious coalition after far-right former national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir resigned and pulled his Otzma Yehudit party out of the government over the approval of the ongoing hostage-ceasefire deal with Hamas. Smotrich has also threatened to resign if Israel does not return to fighting the Palestinian terror group in Gaza after the 42-day first phase of the agreement.

According to the report, Deri meant that those issues could bring down the government and that Shas had no intention of breaking up the coalition.

“If Aryeh wants to say something to Netanyahu, he knows how to do it — and it wouldn’t be in an interview in a high-pitched voice, with all due respect,” Haaretz quoted a source close to the Shas chair as saying.

Smotrich, for his part, speaking Wednesday before Shas rolled back the ultimatum, railed against concessions on the issue of ultra-Orthodox conscription.

Haredim are needed in the army, Smotrich declared from the Knesset rostrum. “It is simply an existential national security necessity,”

He called on the Haredim to at least pass the budget before dissolving the Knesset if an agreement cannot be reached: “You cannot leave a country at war without a budget.”

The ultra-Orthodox parties have threatened to bring down the government several times in the past few years, without following through even when their demands weren’t met or were met only partially.

The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee earlier this week restarted substantive discussions on the bill, which has been stuck in limbo for months.

Many ultra-Orthodox Jews believe that military service is incompatible with their way of life, and fear that those who enlist will be secularized. Israelis who do serve, however, say the decades-long arrangement of mass exemptions unfairly burdens them, a sentiment that has intensified since the October 7 onslaught and the ensuing war.