From the Liveblog of
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
Lapid: Netanyahu is playing ‘shameful’ political games while soldiers die
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"
Opposition Leader Yair Lapid slams Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for promoting legislation to lower yeshiva students’ age of exemption from military service.
Condemning Netanyahu for engaging in a “shameful wartime political exercise while soldiers are being killed every day,” Lapid promises that the opposition “will oppose him with all their strength.”
“Netanyahu continues to act as if October 7 did not happen. October 7 did happen. On his watch,” Lapid declares, inveighing against “discrimination between blood and blood.”
“We will not accept the Haredim continuing to shout ‘we will die and not enlist’ while our children continue to die because [the Haredim] did not enlist.”
After failing to come to an agreement with his Haredi coalition partners on legislation to enlist members of the ultra-Orthodox community into the Israel Defense Forces, Netanyahu on Wednesday morning announced that he would revive the 2022 bill, first advanced by then-defense minister Benny Gantz during the short-lived Bennett-Lapid government.
Netanyahu’s announcement drew immediate condemnation from Gantz, who insisted that “the law you are bringing is not the [military] service outline that I [advanced] in the previous government.”
When promoting the bill two years ago, Gantz insisted that it needed to be accompanied by efforts to extend the national service requirement to both Haredi and Arab Israelis.
The Times of Israel Community.