Senior Likud MK says he won’t back daycare subsidies bill for Haredi draft-evaders
Yuli Edelstein says law ‘attempts to circumvent’ IDF draft expansion efforts; while controversial bill advances to Knesset vote, reports say it does not have broad support
Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, the chairman of the powerful Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, declared on Monday that he will not support the so-called Daycare Law being pushed by the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party.
“Israel has been at war for more than a year” and leaders are “obligated to make every effort to provide the IDF with additional soldiers,” Edelstein said in a video statement sent to the press.
As such, “I will not lend my hand to the Daycare Law, nor to any law that attempts to circumvent our ceaseless efforts to expand the conscription base in the State of Israel,” he said.
The government advanced the proposed law on Sunday in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation. The bill will now head to the Knesset for a vote in a preliminary reading, likely this Wednesday, said United Torah Judaism MK Yisrael Eichler, who initiated the measure.
The legislation, which was submitted last week, aims to guarantee that the children of ultra-Orthodox men who are obligated to perform military service, but have not done so, will continue to be eligible for state-paid daycare subsidies. It aims to circumvent a High Court of Justice ruling that such financial support is illegal in cases where the father should be serving in the Israel Defense Forces but is not.
The bill is highly controversial, with critics asserting that it would continue to encourage ultra-Orthodox men not to perform military service even as the IDF faces severe manpower shortages after a yearlong multifront war against the Hamas and Hezbollah terror groups.
United Torah Judaism demanded the passage of the Daycare Bill last week, after backing down from a threat to derail government budget talks until the coalition passes a law enshrining the widespread exemption of Haredi yeshiva students from military service.
According to Hebrew media reports, the bill does not currently enjoy majority support in the Knesset, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reaching out to lawmakers opposed to the measure in an effort to bring them around.
The coalition has indicated that it would postpone the vote if it cannot secure enough support, leading UTJ to threaten to boycott upcoming votes on other coalition-backed legislation.
According to the Ynet news site, the only Likud lawmaker aside from Edelstein who has said he will not support the legislation is freshman Dan Illouz.
Gideon Sa’ar, the chairman of the coalition’s New Hope party, said his party will vote against the legislation when it comes up for a Knesset vote, saying the bill “will convey a message of encouraging evasion from service in the IDF and will assist in doing so.”
Sa’ar, who joined the government in September and serves as a minister without portfolio, added that the coalition “must strive to carry out significant moves that increase the participation of all sections of the public” in military service.
A bill seeking to regulate ultra-Orthodox enlistment is currently stuck in Edelstein’s committee, where he said it will only pass if lawmakers can reach a “broad consensus” on the matter.
The bill’s passage is a key political demand of the Haredi coalition party Shas, as well as UTJ.
Previously, the law allowed ultra-Orthodox families in which a mother works and a father studies full-time in yeshiva in lieu of military service to receive the subsidies, worth thousands of shekels a month for families with a large number of children.
The daycare subsidies constitute a critical component of the household economy of many ultra-Orthodox families, which is why the Haredi parties have exerted heavy pressure on the government to reinstate them.
Approval of the legislation was met with fierce denunciations from the opposition, with Yesh Atid declaring that the ministers who advanced the bill would be remembered for “treachery” and having stuck “a knife in the back of the middle class, IDF reservists, wounded IDF servicemen and the memory of the fallen.”
