MK says Shas supports Haredi draft exemption bill, then backtracks and says no decision made

By Sam Sokol 12 November 2025, 12:33 pm

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Sam 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"

Shas MK Ya'akov Margi at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, on January 30, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/ Flash90/ File)

Shas supports Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Boaz Bismuth’s Haredi draft exemption bill, MK Yaakov Margi announces, prompting pushback within the ultra-Orthodox party, whose ruling Council of Torah Sages has not yet publicly made a decision on the issue.

“There’s the outline, what they call the Bismuth outline, that we agree to,” he told the Knesset Channel yesterday evening. He pushed back on critics’ claims that the latest draft of the controversial legislation was written by Shas negotiator Ariel Attias, saying it was “actually written through joint discussions, and it’s not an easy outline for anyone familiar with previous enlistment laws.”

According to Margi, Shas is waiting for fellow ultra-Orthodox party Degel HaTorah’s rabbinic leadership to weigh in, stating that one of its two major rabbis has already agreed while another “is supposed to give his answer within a day or two.” This has been interpreted in the Haredi press as referring to Rabbi Dov Lando, the party’s spiritual leader, who has yet to give a definitive ruling on how his MKs should vote.

In response to criticism within the party, Margi later clarified that the matter was being considered by Shas’s rabbinic leadership, without whom no final decision will be made.

“I regret statements that were made and that were based on incorrect and misleading information,” he says.