From the Liveblog of
Monday, August 4, 2025
Lapid urges incoming defense panel head Bismuth to reject Haredi draft exemptions
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"
Likud MK Boaz Bismuth, who is slated to replace Yuli Edelstein as chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee today, has a stark choice between “going down in history as someone who sacrificed Israel’s security for cheap and self-serving politics” or standing his ground and refusing to sell out soldiers, declares Opposition Leader Yair Lapid.
Addressing a meeting of his Yesh Atid faction in the Knesset ahead of a committee vote on appointing Bismuth to head the powerful parliamentary panel, Lapid slams the coalition for replacing Edelstein “in the middle of a bloody war” in order to “promote a disgraceful draft evasion law that is a complete betrayal of our fighters.”
Edelstein is being removed from the past after he refused to advance a bill aimed at regulating IDF draft exemptions for members of the ultra-Orthodox community, even as the army struggles with manpower issues amid the war in Gaza.
The Haredim ensured Bismuth’s appointment “so that they could evade military service” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “in his weakness, once again put politics over Israel’s security,” Lapid alleges.
Lapid appeals to the conservative lawmaker as “a Zionist who… cares about the state.”
“Boaz knows that if he passes a draft evasion law, if he signs a law in which there are no real and immediate sanctions on anyone who does not enlist, it is a betrayal of all the values he has ever believed in. It is a betrayal of our fighters, who are killed and injured every day. It will endanger our security and the very Jewish concept of mutual responsibility,” Lapid says.
“I want to believe that when he examines the facts, he will say… ‘precisely because I am a right-winger, I will not be a rubber stamp for mass refusal under the auspices of the Torah,'” he says of Bismuth. “He must choose. Will he go down in history as someone who sacrificed Israel’s security for cheap and self-serving politics? Or will he go down in history as someone who stood his ground and said, ‘I will not sell our fighters and I will not sell my principles and values for anyone’?”
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