Despite harsh rhetoric, Shas still seeks to avoid dissolution of Knesset
Ultra-Orthodox party’s chairman, Aryeh Deri, hopes last-minute talks with Netanyahu and Edelstein will yield enough progress to convince rabbis ‘to request a postponement’
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
Despite publicly pledging to support a bill to dissolve the Knesset in the plenum, the Sephardic Shas party is working hard behind the scenes to postpone the vote and prevent the fall of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Shas and fellow ultra-Orthodox party United Torah Judaism have said that they will vote for the measure in its preliminary reading on Wednesday due to the coalition’s failure to pass legislation exempting yeshiva students from military service.
“We are not happy to bring down a right-wing government, but we are at the end of our rope. If there is no last-minute solution, we will dissolve the Knesset,” party spokesman Asher Medina told Channel 12 on Monday.
However, only a day after making its announcement, first cracks appeared in Shas’s resolve to follow through on its threat, with Rabbi Moshe Maya, a senior member of the party’s ruling Council of Torah Sages, writing that no final decision on the conscription bill being drafted in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee had been made.
In a letter released by the party on Tuesday morning, Maya wrote that in recent months he had “refrained from expressing a position on everything related to the draft law, due to the sensitivity of the matter” and that once the issue “comes to fruition, the matter will be discussed and a decision will be made at a meeting of the Council of Torah Sages.”
Rabbi Shlomo Machpud, another member of the council, also signed the letter, whose language hinted that no final determination had yet been made regarding either the legislation or the future of the coalition riding on its passage.
The pair’s letter regarding the practical political aspects of the issue differed greatly in tone from another letter released on Monday evening in which they insisted that no Haredim, even those not learning full-time in yeshiva, should be conscripted into the armed forces.
According to the Torah, “it is absolutely forbidden to agree to or promote a law that includes recruitment targets” for Haredim, the senior rabbis wrote (Hebrew).
Some interpreted Maya’s statement about a decision belonging to the council could be interpreted as a sign of differences between Shas’s rabbinic leadership and political representatives.
In a post on X, Ari Cohen, a reporter for the ultra-Orthodox news site Kikar Hashabbat, wrote that party leader Aryeh Deri’s associates had informed the rabbis that “supporting the law to dissolve the Knesset is a preliminary procedure” and that the council would convene only “if there are further developments.”
Maya’s hardline approach was also apparent in a recording published by Kikar Hashabbat on Tuesday evening, in which he sounded at odds with Deri’s more conciliatory approach, asserting that “there will be elections,” after which “we will be in a superior position” on the conscription issue.
Last-minute talks
At the heart of the current crisis is the ultra-Orthodox leadership’s frustration with Likud lawmaker Yuli Edelstein, who, as chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, has been blocking the passage of a government-backed bill enshrining the broad exclusion from IDF service for Haredim.
Instead, Edelstein has pledged that any law coming out of his committee would levy strong financial sanctions on draft dodgers.
According to reports, a still-unreleased revised draft of the bill by Edelstein’s committee includes a raft of harsh penalties, including the loss of property tax and public transportation discounts, the removal of tax benefits for working women married to dodgers, exclusion from the housing lottery, and the cancellation of daycare and academic subsidies.
The bill would also prevent draft dodgers up to the age of 29 from receiving driver’s licenses or traveling abroad and would open them up to the risk of arrest.
Edelstein’s unwillingness to back down from this position in last-ditch talks with the Haredim brokered by Netanyahu led the leaders of the Haredi parties to support dissolving the Knesset.
According to Channel 12, in the last round of talks, Edelstein expressed a willingness to back off the cancellation of property tax discounts and allow the Haredim to receive tax breaks on the purchase of their first apartments.
Nevertheless, significant gaps remain, with the veteran lawmaker continuing to insist that the sanctions be applied immediately, while the Haredim are pushing for any penalties to be delayed by up to a year, in an apparent effort to weaken the pressure on draft evaders.
On Tuesday, Netanyahu reportedly summoned Edelstein to a meeting to discuss the issue in a final bid to reach a compromise to head off Wednesday’s scheduled vote on dissolving the Knesset.
Breaking with UTJ?
Shas is banking on these negotiations to find a solution, and its leaders are actively trying to push off a vote by a week, said Yisroel Cohen, an ultra-Orthodox journalist with close ties to the Haredi parties.
According to Cohen, Shas is actively working to convince UTJ to back down, a claim disputed by a spokesman for UTJ chairman Yitzhak Goldknopf.
If UTJ votes for dissolution, Shas will be forced to follow suit, and “that’s precisely why they’re trying to delay,” he said.
A spokesman for Jerusalem Affairs Minister Meir Porush confirmed that Shas’s goal is to prevent the fall of Netanyahu’s coalition.
Former Shas MK Ariel Atias’s goal in the ongoing negotiations is to reach “at least a draft document of principles in the next 24 hours” so that party chairman Aryeh Deri can “presumably use this to pressure the Shas rabbis not to support the dissolution of the Knesset this week but to request a postponement.”
Should this happen, “United Torah Judaism will have no choice but to agree to the postponement,” he said, noting that with only seven Knesset seats, his party on its own does not have the ability to bring down the government — as Netanyahu’s coalition currently holds 68 out of the 120 parliamentary seats.
By law, if the vote fails, parties would have to wait six months before bringing another Knesset dissolution bill to the floor.
Speaking with The Times of Israel on Tuesday afternoon, UTJ lawmaker Yitzhak Pindrus denied that any gaps had opened between the two ultra-Orthodox parties, calling such reports “absurd” and “nonsense.”
“This decision to bring the elections forward is also a joint decision, and all the stories are spin and confusion,” he said, adding that “there can always be surprises in the Knesset, but from what I know…they’re voting together with us tomorrow.”
Shas is widely believed to have an interest in keeping the Knesset together, at least for now, as it is in the middle of a concerted push to appoint affiliated rabbis to municipal posts throughout the country, strengthening its political machine for the long haul.
A spokesman for Shas did not respond to a request for comment.
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