From the Liveblog of
Thursday, February 5, 2026
Bennett says Smotrich working with Deri to ‘betray our soldiers’ with Haredi draft exemption law
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleSam Sokol is a former political correspondent at The Times of Israel. 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"
Former prime minister Naftali Bennett launches a scathing attack on Religious Zionism chairman Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, accusing him and Shas chief Aryeh Deri of “fighting together to pass the evasion law and exerting enormous pressure on the MKs to betray our soldiers.”
In a lengthy post on X, Bennett alleges that this is “only part of the betrayal,” citing claims by reservist organizations that the far-right minister was running an influence operation in support of the bill by way of “the same advertising agency that Smotrich had recently worked with.”
“If Smotrich and his people are indeed behind this campaign (and he does not deny it) — it is a double injustice: both selling out the reservists to Deri, and also using public funds to defame those reservists and their wives, as happened now with the exclusion of Noa Mevorach from the religious Zionist conference in Eilat,” he says.
Mevorach is a member of Partnership for Service, which advocates for Haredi conscription and opposes the government’s bill to exempt Haredi men from military service. She was uninvited from the conference following a report on the pro-government Channel 14 claiming ties between her organization and the anti-government Kaplan protests.
The report was shared online by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, which alleged that Partnership for Service was using its campaign against the bill as cover for an incitement campaign “by left-wing organizations inside the national camp” with the goal of “toppling the right-wing government and establishing a left-wing government together with the Arab parties.”
Smotrich, a former political partner of Bennett, sparred with Shas this week, after the Haredi party yesterday blocked a vote splitting the annual Arrangements Law from a package of economic reforms being pushed by the finance minister in order to protest the lack of speed at which the draft exemption law is advancing.
The Times of Israel Community.