Defense committee postpones talks on Haredi conscription bill until next week as legal adviser works on new version

By Sam Sokol 20 October 2025, 6:54 pm

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Sam 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"

Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Boaz Bismuth (Likud) announces that he is postponing a series of scheduled discussions of the government’s controversial conscription bill in order to provide his panel’s legal adviser with the opportunity to formulate an updated version of the bill.

“In light of the fact that the legal adviser requires additional time to prepare a draft of the conscription bill for discussion based on the summary document that was submitted, the committee chair has decided to postpone the discussions that were planned for the coming week, in order to ensure that the next stage of deliberations will take place only on the basis of a consolidated legal draft as part of an efficient and focused legislative process,” a spokesman for the committee says in a statement.

Last Thursday, Bismuth submitted a document outlining the principles of a potential ultra-Orthodox draft bill to committee legal adviser Miri Frenkel Shor.

The Likud lawmaker’s office said that “based on the document, a draft law will be formulated in the coming days that will guide the committee in the continuation of the legislative process to regulate the issue of conscription.”

According to Hebrew-language news reports, the document stipulates that within five years, 50 percent of the annual Haredi draft cohort will be conscripted, and the age of exemption will remain at 26. Yeshiva budgets will only be cut for failing to meet enlistment quotas after a year, and personal sanctions will only go into effect after two years if the overall enlistment goal is not met.

Moreover, those sanctioned will not lose their driver’s licenses, although restrictions on issuing licenses to draft evaders will apply under the new proposal.

Bismuth’s proposal immediately drew harsh criticism from opposition politicians, with former prime minister Naftali Bennett accusing Netanyahu of engaging in a “stinking trick, really trading in blood.”

Addressing the Knesset this evening, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that in the new Knesset session, the government will pass a bill to draft 10,000 Haredim into the military within two years.