From the Liveblog of
Thursday, June 25, 2026
Porush slams Smotrich, national-religious community over stance on Haredi draft
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"
United Torah Judaism MK Meir Porush slams Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, and the national-religious community as a whole, over their opposition to legislation exempting Haredi yeshiva students from military conscription.
Speaking to the ultra-Orthodox Kikar Hashabbat news site, Porush notes that many religious Zionist men go to Hesder yeshivas and serve less than the full 32-month service, and that many women in the community don’t serve in the army at all.
He argues that once left-wing opponents of the current government “finish with us, they will move on to them. The shame of Religious Zionism is that this is a party that barely scrapes the electoral threshold, yet it tries to dictate opinions to [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] and United Torah Judaism.”
Porush recalls the stance of a prominent Haredi anti-Zionist rabbi from the early days of the state who forbade his followers from collaborating with the national-religious movement because it “is the worst thing.”
“These people will tell you ‘we are with you’ and in the end, they hurt you,” he says. “What is bothering them? Are we harming anyone from the settlements? It hurts them that our mothers will get daycare subsidies? At every step, they hurt us — a party that barely scrapes the electoral threshold,” he argues.
Porush is an outspoken opponent of efforts to conscript Haredim. He recently appeared to call on police to refuse orders to arrest yeshiva students who disobey draft orders, and a 2025 Times of Israel investigation found that a telephone hotline linked to Porush, then a member of Netanyahu’s cabinet, was counseling callers to “just ignore” summonses to the IDF’s recruitment bureau.
The Times of Israel Community.