From the Liveblog of
Thursday, August 7, 2025
Lawmakers blast Haredi papers for declaring war over IDF conscription
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"
Secular and national-religious lawmakers slam ultra-Orthodox newspaper Yated Neeman over this morning’s banner headline declaring war on government efforts to enforce the military draft.
“Update for the readers of Yated Neeman: Indeed, there is a war in Israel, but it is in a different place, and people are actually being killed in it,” tweets Opposition Leader Yair Lapid.
The banner headline on the front page of the Degel HaTorah party paper simply reads “war” in large white letters against a black background. Degel Torah makes up half of the United Torah Judaism political alliance.
Yisrael Beytenu MK Oded Forer also points at a bombastic headline in Shas mouthpiece HaDerech reading “A war for God: The Torah world is preparing for a determined and unprecedented struggle.”
Yated Neeman and HaDerech’s choice of language is a “desecration of God’s name,” Forer declares, citing the Biblical verse “Shall your brothers go to war while you sit here?”
“No one pours gasoline on the bonfire of hatred and polarization against the Haredi community more than the editor of Yated Ne’eman, Yisrael Friedman,” Religious Zionism MK Zvi Sukkot writes in a post on X.
“He knows very well that there are currently countless people in the State of Israel paying the price of the terrible, real war happening outside” and “chooses to deliberately poke a finger in the eye” of those who “have lost what is most precious to them,” Sukkot declares, calling on members of the Haredi community to cancel their subscriptions.
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