Benny Gantz: Haredi draft-exemptions bill ‘spits in the faces of those who serve’

Blue and White chairman and former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz joins the chorus of voices slamming Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense’s revised version of the government’s bill regulating the conscription of yeshiva students, likening it to an “autoimmune disease” in which the state is “attacking its own security.”

The bill “spits in the faces of those who serve, while improving the situation of those who evade service. The absurdity in which there is an overwhelming majority in the public and in the Knesset for a service framework, and yet, for a few more months in power, Likud is selling out Israel’s security — must end. Israel needs a broad, Zionist government that will fix this injustice and many others that extremists are imposing on the state,” Gantz tweets.

Yoaz Hendel, chairman of the new Reservists Party, declares that Bismuth’s bill “is very flexible regarding the time of conscription and the objectives, except that the State of Israel has no time. The wording is further proof that governments that rely on non-Zionist parties are being blackmailed into making non-Zionist decisions.”

In a statement, the Movement for Quality Government calls the bill “absolute hypocrisy” whose purpose “is not to recruit Haredim, but to legalize evasion and bypass the Supreme Court’s ruling.”

“It is important to emphasize: the High Court of Justice explicitly ruled that there is no authority for a blanket exemption, and that equality of burden must be maintained. A plan that eliminates the need to recruit combat soldiers and allows for non-military service as a solution to the shortage of soldiers is illegal, immoral, and harms the security of the state. We are preparing to stop this planned unconstitutional law with all existing legal tools. Equality of burden is not a slogan – it is the order of the day.”