Knesset advances bill to demote officers who encourage refusal to enlist in IDF

The Knesset votes 47-37 to advance in a preliminary reading a bill proposed by Likud MK Ariel Kallner that would penalize senior officers in the security services for encouraging refusal to enlist in the IDF, calling for reservists to halt volunteering, or “slandering” the security services.

Such officers would be stripped of their military rank and privileges.

An identical bill sponsored by Likud MK Osher Shekalim passes its preliminary reading 48-37.

The bill states that if the relevant minister finds that current or former officers in the IDF, Shin Bet, Mossad, Israel Police and other security agencies have engaged in such behavior, they may be demoted or lose their pensions or other benefits granted to veterans of the security services.

In its explanatory notes, the 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.”

Addressing the plenum ahead of the vote, Kallner and Shekalim single out several former senior officials by name, including former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon, who has claimed that Israel had carried out “ethnic cleansing” in the northern Gaza Strip, ex-IDF military advocate general Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, who admitted to leaking a video that purported to show troops severely abusing a Gazan detainee, and The Democrats chairman and former major general Yair Golan, who suggested that Israel was killing babies in Gaza “as a hobby.”

They “deserve to be demoted to the rank of private,” says Shekalim. “Israeli citizens should not be paying the salaries of those who slander them.”

After Kallner’s bill was approved by the Ministerial Committee for Legislation in July, Golan called it a “an unimportant law by an unimportant MK who wants to deny me rights.”