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Sunday, January 4, 2026
Shas threatens to oppose 2026 budget unless coalition passes Haredi draft exemption bill
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"
The ultra-Orthodox Shas party will not vote for the 2026 state budget without the prior passage of the coalition’s bill regulating Haredi conscription and exemptions, party speaker Asher Medina tells Radio Kol Barama. The budget must pass by March 31 or the government will break up, triggering early elections.
“From the perspective of the Haredi public, the draft law is as far-reaching as one could possibly imagine. With God’s help, we will support the law because it is the only thing that will save the world of Torah. The only thing that will stop the arrests is not demonstrations, but legislation,” Medina says to the Haredi-focused station.
Addressing the issue in a meeting called to discuss funds for Haredi education, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells representatives of Shas and the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox party, United Torah Judaism, as well as members of his cabinet, that lawmakers must significantly speed up the passage of the controversial legislation.
“We need to accelerate the completion of the conscription law legislation, everything depends on it,” the Ynet news site quotes Netanyahu as saying, in reference to the 2026 budget.
Some 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men aged between 18 and 24 are currently believed to be eligible for military service, but have not enlisted, causing widespread resentment among non-Haredi Israeli Jews. The Israel Defense Forces has said it urgently needs 12,000 recruits.
For the past year, the Haredi leadership has pushed for a law keeping its constituency out of the IDF, after the High Court in 2024 struck down decades-long blanket exemptions from army duty traditionally afforded to full-time Haredi yeshiva students.
The bill, which is currently being debated in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, proposes continued military service exemptions to full-time yeshiva students while purportedly increasing conscription among graduates of Haredi educational institutions. Critics of the legislation say that it includes too many loopholes and opt-outs to mark a significant change.
If passed into law, the bill would ease economic and legal sanctions that have been placed on the community in order to end systematic draft evasion.
The Times of Israel Community.