Bennett spars with Deri after Shas chair tells yeshiva students to avoid military conscription

Former prime minister Naftali Bennett lambastes Shas chair Aryeh Deri over his recent statement urging yeshiva students not to even think about abandoning their studies to enlist in the army and contribute militarily to the current war in Gaza.

“He who calls for draft refusal cannot send soldiers to battle,” he tweets, attaching a video of Deri’s remarks, which he says “are like a knife in the heart.”

In remarks made late last month at the Shaar HaMelech yeshiva in Jerusalem and aired by the i24 news network, Deri could be heard discouraging the students from enlisting, stating “God forbid it should occur to anyone here in a moment of weakness that maybe at a time like this when the people of Israel are in a state of war…that anybody should, God forbid, perhaps think…maybe we really need to do something different, maybe we need to contribute. God forbid.”

The Shas party, in response, slams Bennett as a “swindler” who “stuck a knife in the heart” of the voters when he took “the votes of the right and transferred them to the left.”

Deri has sat for 30 years in the security cabinet “and works day and night for Israel’s security, and in doing so has saved thousands of fighters and civilians” while Bennett “formed a government with the Muslim Brotherhood and the left, a government that did not dare to act against terrorism and eliminate the leaders of Hamas, for fear that [the Islamist] Ra’am would topple the government.”

“How does this man even dare to show his face in public?” asks Shas.

Asked about Deri’s call to evade service during a rare press conference this evening, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a reporter: “I didn’t hear it, but he told me he denied these words. I don’t know. I didn’t see it and they told me he didn’t say it.”