Report: PM offering Haredi parties boosted budgets to quell coalition rebellion over draft bill

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is engaged in negotiations with his coalition’s ultra-Orthodox parties, offering the Haredi sector increased budgets in an effort to head off the demand by senior rabbis that a bill exempting yeshiva students from military service be passed by the beginning of June, Channel 12 reports.

According to the report, Netanyahu is trying to buy time and keep his coalition partners happy, despite the failure to pass the controversial legislation, whose advancement has been stymied by Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Yuli Edelstein (Likud).

“Netanyahu is once again trying to buy political peace with a lot of money, the same method that has already led Israel to the most terrible disaster in the country’s history,” tweets Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman. “The same patterns of action, the same people, the same mismanagement. If we don’t stop them — the next disaster is only a matter of time.”

The ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism (UTJ) party has reportedly decided that it would pursue an independent course during the upcoming summer legislative session, which starts on May 4, if no progress is made on the bill.

“There are two ways to leave a coalition. There is the option to leave by slamming the door, and there is the option to leave little by little. We are choosing the second way,” a senior party official told the Maariv daily last week.

Edelstein, who has pledged that he will “only produce a real conscription law that will significantly increase the IDF’s conscription base,” said yesterday that his committee was nearing a final draft of the law, and that he would “not accept ultimatums from any side.”