Lapid accuses Katz of pushing law to enshrine ultra-Orthodox draft evasion

Addressing Israel Katz in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid claims that the defense minister’s proposed ultra-Orthodox enlistment plan would turn him into a symbol of “insubordination and evasion.”

“You could have been the architect of the reconstruction of Israeli security, and instead you are condemning yourself here, for the second week in a row, to be the minister of evasion and refusal,” Lapid tells Katz. “What you have presented here is not a conscription law. What you have presented here is a fraud.”

“What you have presented here says one thing in many words: no Haredi will enlist. Our children will continue to die, the families of the reservists will continue to collapse, and no Haredi will enlist. A plan that is spread over seven years is a fraud. A plan in which no one understands the enforcement mechanism is a fraud. A plan whose goal is the conscription of only 50 percent of young Haredi men is a fraud. I have two boys, I don’t remember them telling us that only one of them had to enlist,” he says.

Katz’s proposal legitimizes “mass refusal” to serve, Lapid says, as it does not provide for the “real sanctions, criminal and economic,” that he says the army called for applying to draft dodgers.