Lapid: Rational members of coalition won’t support new Haredi draft exemption bill

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"

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid addresses a meeting of his Yesh Atid faction in the Knesset, September 9, 2024. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Opposition Leader Yair Lapid addresses a meeting of his Yesh Atid faction in the Knesset, September 9, 2024. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

“The rational” members of the coalition, including from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, will refuse to support a new draft exemption bill for the ultra-Orthodox, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid declares.

Addressing the annual conference of IDEA: The Center for Liberal Democracy, Lapid says he fails to see how the coalition can “pass a law that exempts the ultra-Orthodox from conscription when we already have more than 700 dead soldiers and close to 10,000 wounded.”

“We are talking about it quietly with the rational ones in Likud, and not only in Likud. They won’t support this,” he says.

According to Hebrew media reports, Netanyahu promised Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf, the head of the coalition’s United Torah Judaism party, yesterday that he would expedite a planned law facilitating sweeping exemptions for the ultra-Orthodox community from mandatory military service.

Netanyahu pledged to push to fast-track the exemption when the Knesset reconvenes later this month, apparently responding to Goldknopf’s threat not to support the 2025 state budget, whose failure to pass would bring down the government.

“When the discussion of the conscription law began, the army chief of staff said that the IDF lacked 12 to 15 battalions. What has happened since then is that the IDF has lost another 12 battalions of wounded and dead. Under these conditions, it is impossible to give up recruiting the ultra-Orthodox,” Lapid says, predicting the fall of the government in the coming months.

An exemption bill currently being debated by lawmakers has failed to advanced significantly in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, where chairman Yuli Edelstein (Likud) has promised to advance legislation only “with broad agreement.”

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