From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, June 25, 2024
Haredi UTJ party slams High Court ruling on ultra-Orthodox draft: ‘Expected and very unfortunate’
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. 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 ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party slams the High Court of Justice over its ruling that there is no legal basis for excluding ultra-Orthodox men from the IDF draft and that those who are eligible for service must be drafted.
The court’s decision was “expected and very unfortunate,” UTJ chairman and Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf tweets. “The State of Israel was established in order to be a home for the Jewish people whose Torah is the bedrock of its existence. The Holy Torah will prevail.”
Senior UTJ lawmaker Moshe Gafni simply tweets “as I said,” referring to an earlier post anticipating the ruling in which he alleged that “there has never been a ruling by the High Court in favor of yeshiva students and in the interest of the ultra-Orthodox public.”
“There is not a single judge there who understands the value of studying the Torah and [yeshiva students’] contribution to the people of Israel in all generations,” Gafni stated.
Jerusalem Affairs Minister Meir Porush states that the ruling “inevitably leads to two states” — one being “the country that is being run as it is now” and another in which yeshiva students “will continue to study Torah as they used to in the country that Ben Gurion declared.”
“There is no power in the world that can force a person whose soul longs to study Torah to refrain from it,” he says.
