Edelstein: Haredi enlistment bill will include individual sanctions on draft dodgers
‘The effectiveness of the sanctions are what will make this law real or not,’ deputy AG tells key Knesset committee deliberating law
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"
Any ultra-Orthodox enlistment bill currently wending its way through the legislative process will provide for individual sanctions on Haredi draft dodgers, Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Yuli Edelstein declared Tuesday during a debate on the controversial legislation.
“There is a demand by the [Finance Ministry] Budget Department for personal sanctions. They even issued a letter on the subject. So I am announcing [that] there will be personal and institutional sanctions. We want to bring soldiers to the IDF, and therefore, the law that comes out of this committee will include a comprehensive and inclusive answer,” he said.
In a position paper sent to the committee last week, the head of the Budget Department insisted that conscripting large numbers of ultra-Orthodox Israelis for military service depends on the implementation of hard-hitting, long-term sanctions on draft dodgers.
In his letter, Yogev Gardos wrote that sanctions will only be effective if they have a significant impact on household income, continue “over a long period of time,” and cannot be bypassed through alternative funding channels.
According to Gardos, benefits that could be cut under a sanctions regime for draft dodgers include daycare subsidies, yeshiva stipends, discounts on National Insurance Institute payments, housing subsidies and property tax discounts.
During Tuesday’s committee meeting, lawmakers debated a provision of the proposed law mandating the reduction of yeshiva budgets based on failure to meet annual enlistment targets.
The bill states that the reduction will gradually increase, starting at 20 percent over the first two years and rising to 80% in the seventh.
The committee’s legal adviser argued that the rate of increase in sanctions did not take into account how close or far yeshivas are from meeting the enlistment targets.
Her skepticism was echoed by Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon, who emphasized that “the effectiveness of the sanctions are what will make this law real or not.”
“A law can look very good, but if there are no tools to achieve the goals of the law, it will become a dead letter in the law book. In order for it to be effective, sanctions must meet the individual,” said Limon, who has previously criticized the bill as insufficient to meet the IDF’s manpower needs.
“If this law goes into effect, then we are effectively returning the full budget to the yeshivas,” he said in an apparent reference to the cuts to yeshiva budgets implemented following the High Court of Justice’s 2024 ruling that ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students were obligated to perform military service after a previous law allowing blanket military exemptions expired.
In the same ruling, the court determined that the state cannot fund such students if they do not enlist. In the wake of the ruling, the government ceased paying stipends to Haredi yeshivas for students who reached enlistment age after the expiration of the law granting their exemptions last year.
Rather than discussing institutions, the committee would do better to focus on consequences for individuals, Limon said, arguing that any ultra-Orthodox man who fails to show up for enlistment should face the same personal legal penalties as members of the wider population.
“We think that the model of community recruitment obligations is a model without an effective basis; if there is a wording that includes personal sanctions, in our opinion, they should be discussed first,” he said.
Under current law, draft dodgers are subject to arrest and are prohibited from traveling abroad, restrictions that are “insufficient” for dealing with widespread refusal, argued Uri Kedar, head of the Be Free Israel advocacy group for religious freedom.
Speaking with The Times of Israel following the debate, Kedar, whose organization has repeatedly petitioned the High Court on the issue of cutting benefits for draft dodgers, said the current penalties for evasion “don’t scale.”
“There needs to be implications to evading the draft. There needs to be zero budgeting for people and for institutions who are helping those people evade the draft. We should level the playing field,” he said.
