From the Liveblog of
Wednesday, April 2, 2025
Liberman says police must act against Haredi leaders encouraging draft evasion
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"
Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman calls on police to enforce laws prohibiting the encouragement of draft evasion against senior Haredi leaders, including former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef and Rabbi Dov Lando, the chairman of the Degel HaTorah party’s ruling Council of Torah Sages.
Alongside the Hasidic Agudat Yisrael, Degel Hatorah is one of two factions comprising the coalition’s United Torah Judaism party.
Lando, the 94-year old spiritual leader of the so-called Lithuanian stream of ultra-Orthodoxy, “ordered yeshiva students not to report to the recruitment offices” while Yosef “called for draft orders to be torn up and thrown down the toilet, [while] at the same time, dozens of demonstrations and calls for evasion are taking place,” Liberman tweets.
Citing clauses in the Israeli penal code stipulating that a person inciting others to evade service during wartime is liable to a prison term of 15 years, Liberman calls on law enforcement “to act in accordance with the law, and not to evade its enforcement.”
In response, UTJ MK Yaakov Asher suggests “that if difficulties arise for the Israel Police in enforcing the matter, it would be possible to use the good services of the KGB.”
The Times of Israel Community.