Golan slams bill allowing demotion of officers who encourage refusing to enlist in IDF

Yair Golan, chair of the left-wing Democrats party, denounces the “persecution of patriotic officers and soldiers” after lawmakers advance a bill allowing government ministers to demote current and former senior officers in the security services for encouraging refusal to enlist in the IDF.

Such officers would also be penalized for calling for reservists to halt volunteering, or for “slandering” the security services.

The Knesset this afternoon voted to advance in a preliminary reading identical bills by Likud MKs Ariel Kallner and Osher Shekalim, which stipulate that such officers would be stripped of their military rank and privileges, losing their pensions or other benefits granted to veterans of the security services.

“In the upcoming elections we will decide: whether Israel is a Zionist and democratic state of those who serve and fight, or a state of the corrupt and evaders,” Golan posts on X, referring to the government’s efforts to pass a bill exempting yeshiva students from military service.

“We will no longer allow the persecution of patriotic officers and soldiers while the government rewards those who burn draft orders and sanctifies evasion of service. The time has come for a decisive choice between a Zionism of sacrifice and service, and corruption and political wheeling-and-dealing that undermine the country’s security,” he adds.

In its explanatory notes, Kallner’s bill calls out what it describes as “a phenomenon of crossing lines by a handful of former senior officials in the defense establishment,” whom it accuses of “exploiting their status, rank and role as a lever of pressure on the government, while severely harming Israel’s security.”

Both Kallner and Shekalim have explicitly linked the bill to Golan, who suggested that Israel was killing babies in Gaza “as a hobby,” a statement he later said was criticism “directed against the government, not the IDF.”