Bismuth says legislation regulating Haredi enlistment is ready for committee vote

Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman MK Boaz Bismuth (Likud) announces that his parliamentary panel has finished discussing all clauses of the government’s controversial bill regulating ultra-Orthodox enlistment and that its members will soon vote on advancing it to its final two readings in the Knesset plenum.

“I am excited to announce that the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee has completed reading all sections of the conscription law. We are reaching the finish line [and] will soon vote in the committee on the law [advancing to its] second and third reading,” says Bismuth.

“What dragged on for years, what got stuck over and over again in endless discussions, moved forward on my watch because there was a clear goal: a law,” Bismuth claims, adding that the legislation is now moving on “to the next stage.”

“Now it is the role of the entire Knesset to continue the path until the law is approved by the Knesset plenum, a historic conscription law that will strengthen the IDF and Israeli society as a whole.”

The bill — which introduces measures aimed at increasing military conscription among members of the Haredi community but ultimately enshrines continued exemptions for full-time yeshiva students — has garnered opposition both among the opposition and members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own coalition.

During a discussion in the committee earlier today, Likud MK Yuli Edelstein cited recent statements by Haredi rabbinic leaders boasting that the controversial legislation will not lead to an increase in enlistment as proof that the bill was not a serious effort to boost conscription.