‘We won big’: Lapid, Bennett celebrate shelving of Haredi draft exemption law

Opposition party heads declare victory after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced that the ultra-Orthodox draft exemption law being advanced by the coalition will be temporarily shelved as the government works to pass the 2026 state budget as fast as possible in order to pour billions of shekels into defense, amid the ongoing war with Iran.

“When the debates on the despicable draft evasion law that Netanyahu tried to promote began, I declared that I guarantee that the law will not pass,” says Opposition Leader Yair Lapid. “For many months, we thwarted every possibility of advancing the law in the Knesset,” and “tonight, Netanyahu and Smotrich admitted what we have long said: the despicable law has failed,” he claims.

“We won, we won big,” says former prime minister Naftali Bennett in a video message. “After two years of determined struggle by the reservist organizations, by the entire people of Israel, against the law that I defined as ‘the most anti-Zionist law in the history of Israel,’ we won,” and now “everyone understands that everyone must serve together.”

“The people of Israel: one. The Netanyahu government and the Haredim: zero,” he declares.

For the past year and a half, the Haredi leadership has pushed for a law keeping its constituency out of the Israel Defense Forces, after the High Court ruled that decades-long blanket exemptions from army duty traditionally afforded to full-time Haredi yeshiva students were illegal.

Some 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men aged between 18 and 24 are currently believed to be eligible for military service, but have not enlisted. During the course of the war in Gaza, the IDF repeatedly told lawmakers that it lacked 12,000 troops due to the strain of the conflict and other military challenges. Despite that conflict being halted, the military maintains that it is still short of regular service troops.

The current version of the bill, which would ostensibly increase military conscription among members of the Haredi community but ultimately enshrines continued exemptions for full-time yeshiva students, has been come under fire from the IDF brass, the attorney general, and a wide array of other critics, who have objected to it on the grounds that it is full of loopholes, preserves inequality in the mandatory draft, and will not increase Haredi enlistment amid what the military says is a manpower shortage.

Speaking with Channel 14 last week, Netanyahu stated that the budget would pass before the conscription bill. He told the pro-government network that “we are working on that in a serious manner.”