Only 1,212 of the 24,000 Haredi men called up in past year have begun enlisting
Haredim continue legislative boycott for third week in effort to pressure PM to pass a law exempting yeshiva students from military service. Coalition bills removed from agenda
Only 1,212, or five percent, of the 24,000 ultra-Orthodox men who have received initial draft notices since July 2024 have begun the enlistment process, the head of the IDF Personnel Directorate’s Planning and Personnel Management Division told lawmakers on Wednesday, calling the current sanctions available to the military insufficient for mobilizing “significant numbers” of Haredim.
Addressing the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee’s Subcommittee for IDF Human Resources, Brig. Gen. Shay Tayeb said that 2,399 of those who have received draft notices have since been sent demands for an immediate call-up, while 545 have not turned up by their mandatory enlistment reporting date.
After ignoring three draft notices, a potential conscript receives an immediate call-up order. If they do not show up at a recruitment center within 48 hours, the military declares them a “draft evader” and normally will issue an arrest warrant, though these are rarely enforced. Soldiers who fail to show up at induction centers on the day they are supposed to be drafted into the army are also declared draft evaders.
If the potential conscript does not show up at an induction center within 30 days after being declared a draft evader, they will receive an order known as tzav 12, which means they are barred from leaving the country and can be arrested during any encounter with the police.
Out of the first wave of 3,000 Haredim to receive call-up orders, 964 have already been declared draft evaders, while an additional 1,366 have received immediate call-up orders and have subsequently had arrest warrants issued for them.
According to Tayeb, out of those sent orders, half were under the age of 20, 40 percent were 20-23 years old and 10% were over age 23. He says 411 men have been delayed at Ben Gurion International Airport over their enlistment status, 43 of whom were prevented from leaving the country.
“The security situation requires very significant manpower, which has an impact,” he said, arguing that the conscription of Haredim requires harsher legal penalties for draft dodgers.
Sanctions and enforcement
“If we want to deal with such significant numbers, we need more such sanctions. The sanctions that exist today are very sparse,” Tayeb said, adding that “if the state is willing,” it can deny certain government services to those who do not serve.
In response, former IDF deputy chief of staff Dan Harel accused the military of failing to act decisively on the matter, stating that it was “dragging its feet to the point where it does not want to recruit Haredim.”
“You are not enforcing the law,” he accused.
“We have a difficult feeling that there is no progress on the issue of recruiting Haredim,” added committee chairman and former IDF manpower chief Elazar Stern of Yesh Atid.
Currently, approximately 80,000 Haredi men between the ages of 18 and 24 are eligible for military service and have not enlisted. The army has stated that it is facing a manpower shortage and currently needs some 12,000 new soldiers — 7,000 of whom would be combat troops.
According to the Attorney General’s Office, just over 2,000 ultra-Orthodox soldiers have joined up as of the end of April, and by the end of the current recruitment cycle, 2,500-2,700 ultra-Orthodox recruits are expected to enlist, significantly fewer than the IDF’s goal of 4,800.
Despite the slow progress, the military is actively “carrying out enforcement” operations against draft evaders, even though the Military Police force is stretched because of many other war-related tasks, Tayeb told lawmakers.
Last week, the IDF announced that it had launched a “routine” Military Police campaign to detain people who ignored enlistment orders, sparking threats by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultra-Orthodox partners to bolt the coalition.
However, it does not appear that any arrests of Haredim were made during the operation, prompting Opposition Leader Yair Lapid to allege earlier this week that the IDF had “refrained from enforcing the conscription orders issued to young Haredi men” due to “personal and illegal involvement of political figures who interfered in the work of the military police.”
Tayeb also said that”a policy of increasing punishment” had been put in place by the IDF, contradicting claims made by former IDF chief military defense counsel Col. (res.) Ran Cohen Rochverger, who recently alleged that from November 2023 until this April, the military had significantly increased penalties for desertion against regular service and reserve troops, without a corresponding change in legal consequences for draft evaders.
The military, Finance Ministry, and Attorney General’s Office have all insisted that boosting Haredi enlistment will require tough sanctions on dodgers.
Earlier this year, both Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon appealed to Defense Minister Katz to advance sanctions on draft evaders, asserting that imposing sanctions on individuals is within the government’s purview and would not require the passage of new legislation.
Under existing laws, it is possible to block draft dodgers from obtaining driver’s licenses, receiving passports, or renewing their state identification cards, Deputy Knesset Speaker Evgeny Sova (Yisrael Beytenu) told The Times of Israel last week.
“You can do that today, but the state doesn’t do it,” he said. “But you can’t carry on with your life and use state services in a normal and regular way without actually settling this matter.”
A Haredi boycott
While lawmakers wrestled over the best way to enlist Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism’s partial legislative boycott entered its third week, forcing the coalition to remove private member bills sponsored by its members for the third Wednesday in a row.
Both parties have been pushing for the passage of legislation enshrining military exemptions for yeshiva students since the High Court ruled in June last year that the dispensation that have been in place for decades was illegal.
Frustrated by the lack of progress, they have pledged to block the advancement of private member bills sponsored by their coalition partners in a bid to pressure Netanyahu to push the legislation past the finish line.
Under Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee is currently revising a government-backed bill to regulate Haredi enlistment.
He has pledged that any law on the issue of Haredi service coming out of his committee would contain individual sanctions and “significantly increase the IDF’s conscription base” while rejecting suggestions to significantly limit the rate and scale of Haredim enlistment.
There is reason to believe that the rewritten legislation will be unacceptable to the Haredim, with Edelstein reportedly stating last week that there was a chance that “in three weeks this whole business could explode.”
The Times of Israel Community.