Shas leader threatens Haredi ‘tax revolt’ over latest push to conscript yeshiva students

The ultra-Orthodox public in Israel could soon begin refusing to pay taxes, the leader of the Haredi Shas party, Aryeh Deri, warned on Sunday, after Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara announced an end to tax breaks for donors who give money to yeshivas that harbor military draft dodgers.

In a statement, the Attorney General’s Office said that — in line with a High Court decision issued just over a month ago calling to impose financial sanctions on dodgers — it had consulted with the the Tax Authority, Israeli Corporations Authority and Finance Ministry in order to implement the decision, under which such yeshivas would no longer be eligible under Clause 46 of the Income Tax Ordinance, which grants exemptions from having to pay taxes on charitable donations.

“It is not possible to indirectly finance the activities of Torah institutions where students who are subject to military service and who have not settled their status with the military authorities study, by granting a tax credit pursuant to Section 46 of the Ordinance,” the Attorney General’s Office stated in a position paper explaining the decision.

Sunday’s decision was the latest attempt to punish ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers by denying them various financial and welfare benefits unless they enlist for military service, and the government’s criticism of Baharav-Miara and the decision was swift.

Deri, whose Shas party is one of two ultra-Orthodox parties in the Knesset, decried the “anarchist” attorney general, and warned that her efforts to clamp down on draft evaders were “leading the ultra-Orthodox public to the edge, and will lead it to a tax revolt, a disconnection from the police and a deep rift with the state authorities.”

“Everyone who cares about the future of this country must stand up against this insanity,” Deri insisted, addressing his plea to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party, as well as the far-right Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism parties.

Repeating the oft-uttered threat of severing the long alliance between the Haredi parties and Israel’s right wing should the matter not be rectified, Deri warned that it was “inconceivable” for Shas and United Torah Judaism to become “this government’s punching bag.”

His outrage was echoed by Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who called for the government and coalition to “unite” and “put an end to discriminatory judicial anarchy.”

Government Secretary Yossi Fuchs also criticized the attorney general’s decision, opining that the current tactics being used to try to enlist Haredi men, namely arrests and economic sanctions, would only backfire.

These efforts, Fuchs said, “will ultimately lead to a decrease in ultra-Orthodox recruitment to the IDF, to the transformation of the entire Haredi public into the Jerusalem Faction (an extremist group which regularly holds rowdy protests against the conscription of yeshiva students) and, God forbid, even to civil war.”

Since the High Court’s 2024 ruling ending military deferrals for yeshiva students went into effect, the government has ceased paying daycare subsidies for the children of evaders and providing funds to ultra-Orthodox yeshivas for students eligible for IDF enlistment, effectively ending the transfer of subsidies for increasing numbers of full-time Talmud students.

Lawmakers have continued to allocate billions of shekels in funding for ultra-Orthodox schools, however, and are currently advancing legislation to undo the cancellation of daycare subsidies.

Addressing a rabbinic conference on Sunday evening, Rabbi Dov Lando, the spiritual leader of the United Torah Judaism party’s Degel HaTorah faction, ripped into those pushing to cut yeshiva funding, stating that they were “the continuers of the path of the persecutors of the Torah.”

A Haredi tax revolt would likely be ineffective. Despite constituting 14 percent of the working-age population, the ultra-Orthodox community generated only four percent of Israeli tax revenues in 2023, costing the government billions and adding thousands of shekels to the average non-Haredi worker’s annual tax burden, according to a 2025 study by the Israel Democracy Institute.

The threat of a Haredi tax revolt came days after the chair of Degel HaTorah, one of the two factions that make up United Torah Judaism, Moshe Gafni, instructed local party representatives on regional councils across the country to halt all cooperation with law enforcement over the arrest of several draft dodgers.

Over the past two years, the military has sent out tens of thousands of enlistment orders to members of the ultra-Orthodox community whose exemptions from mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces were revoked under the 2024 High Court ruling. Most have ignored the orders, leading to large numbers of young men being classified as evaders and being subject to arrest or other sanctions.

In April, the High Court of Justice ordered the government to adopt the sanctions against ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers and called on the state to take “actual criminal proceedings” against them, saying it was issuing the orders because the government had failed to implement a previous ruling from November 2025 to adopt enforcement measures against ultra-Orthodox men who have failed to enlist in the IDF after being sent conscription orders.

The IDF recently warned of a steadily worsening shortage of combat soldiers in the standing military, high burnout among troops, and fears that the reserve army could “collapse” if necessary legislation is not advanced by the government.

Jeremy Sharon contributed to this report.