Attorney General’s Office, cabinet secretary squabble over Haredi enlistment policy

The Attorney General’s Office and Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs engage in their second dispute in two days, with the former accusing Fuchs of issuing a legal brief to enable government action when he lacks the authority to do so.

In a letter to Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon Monday, Fuchs wrote that the Attorney General’s Office’s intervention over who and how the IDF drafts ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students was unnecessary in light of what he said was the leeway the High Court gave to the government in its ruling on the matter.

Limon in a response says Fuchs’s missive is designed to allow the government to act against the law regarding enlistment to the IDF.

Limon refers to the rulings and orders of the High Court of Justice and the attorney general that the government must draft ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students into the army and must do so without preference to different subsets of that community.

The Defense Ministry and the IDF had initially sought to draft ultra-Orthodox students who are also employed as a way of not angering the community’s rabbinic leadership by drafting students in full-time study at elite yeshivas, but the attorney general ruled that such an approach would be discriminatory.

“The cabinet secretary is not authorized to issue legal briefs to the government, and the government cannot rely on such a legal brief,” writes Limon.

“As we have already made clear, the current legal circumstances require that enlistment orders are issued immediately and equitably,” he adds, and concludes by saying that Fuchs’s document has no legal relevance.

Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara made similar comments about Fuchs in a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today over a different issue.

The Prime Minister’s Office fires back quickly, saying that it is “mystifying” that within 48 hours “in the midst of security tensions,” the Attorney General’s Office has published two press statements “with empty claims about the professional work of the cabinet secretary.”

The PMO says Fuchs’s letter on enlistment to Limon “dealt with criticism over the unusual (and unauthorized) intervention of the Attorney General’s Office over the discretion of the IDF.”