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Sunday, May 24, 2026
Haredi parties reportedly reject latest military exemption bill
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleSam 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"
The Knesset’s Haredi parties have rejected the latest draft of the coalition’s Haredi conscription exemption bill, calling the future of the controversial legislation into question, Channel 12 reports.
This likely means that the Haredim will continue pushing for early elections during the middle of the High Holidays, likely on September 15.
“Rabbi Lando’s general instruction to the Degel HaTorah MKs is not to advance the bill at this time,” a spokesman for the party’s spiritual leader tells The Times of Israel.
The Times of Israel understands that Rabbi Lando does not believe that the exemption law will actually end up being passed and that the recent push to advance it through the Knesset is part of a larger electoral maneuver on the part of Netanyahu. He further believes that the leaders of the coalition are playing games with him.
The coalition’s draft exemption bill — which would ostensibly increase military conscription in the Haredi community, but ultimately enables continued exemptions for full-time yeshiva students — is widely seen as legally iffy and loophole-laden. It has also generated intense resistance even among members of Netanyahu’s coalition.
Several weeks ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Haredi MKs that the coalition did not have the votes to pass the draft exemption legislation, and reportedly asked them to agree to shelve the bill until after the elections, prompting them to push to dissolve the coalition.
In an effort to win the Haredim over and to avoid the September election that the Haredim are widely believed to favor, Netanyahu placed the bill back on the parliamentary agenda, but the move was rejected by Rabbi Dov Lando, the spiritual leader of the UTJ subfaction Degel Hatorah, who instructed lawmakers last week “not to get drawn into political games and to support the dissolution of the Knesset.”
The leadership of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee is preparing to distribute an updated draft of the coalition’s controversial Haredi draft exemption bill to lawmakers, Hebrew media outlets reported this evening.
Asked to confirm that members of the committee are expecting an updated draft, member Tally Gotliv (Likud) told The Times of Israel that she found it “unlikely that it would advance to the plenum,” while opposition member Moshe Tur-Paz (Yesh Atid) said that he did not believe a new version would be submitted.
The Times of Israel Community.