Shas to back preliminary vote to dissolve Knesset, citing stalled draft exemption law
Spokesperson for ultra-Orthodox party says it’s ‘disappointed with Netanyahu,’ as its rabbinical leaders insist no community members be conscripted into army
The ultra-Orthodox Shas party said Monday that it will vote in favor of a bill to dissolve the Knesset, set for a preliminary vote Wednesday, citing its disappointment over the government’s failure to legislate broad exemptions from the army for the ultra-Orthodox community.
Shas’s ally, the United Torah Judaism party, is also expected to back the preliminary reading of the bill, which would require three more votes in the coming weeks in order to pass.
“As things stand, we will vote on Wednesday in favor of dissolving the Knesset, Shas spokesman Asher Medina said in an interview with the Kol Beramah radio station.
“We are disappointed with [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. We expected him to take action earlier and not just in the past few days,” he said.
Netanyahu’s ruling coalition entered a crisis last week when the two ultra-Orthodox parties announced they would leave the coalition and vote to dissolve the Knesset if the government does not pass a bill exempting yeshiva students from military service.
Speaking to Channel 12, Medina said, “We are not happy to bring down a right-wing government, but we are at the end of our rope. If there is no last-minute solution, we will dissolve the Knesset.”
Likud MK Dan Illouz posted to X that “anyone who brings down a right-wing government during a time of war will live forever in infamy,” referring to the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
The Shas party’s spiritual leadership, a council of senior rabbis, appeared to double down on its opposition to a version of an IDF draft bill currently under discussion, with the sages putting their signatures to a missive declaring “it is completely prohibited to agree to or advance a bill that includes draft goals, and it is prohibited to compromise even on one soul — even among those not studying [in yeshiva].”
Meanwhile, National Unity chairman Benny Gantz ordered his party to withdraw all its legislation from the plenum agenda on Wednesday, save for its own bill on dissolving the Knesset.
The move was a response to “the coalition’s decision to introduce dozens of laws to overload the agenda and try to avoid a vote on dissolving the Knesset,” the opposition party said in a statement.
On Friday, Netanyahu’s office reported “significant progress” in negotiations with the ultra-Orthodox parties regarding the draft exemption bill.
However, UTJ later told the Kan public broadcaster that its lawmakers would nevertheless push forward with a bill to dissolve the legislature and trigger new elections.
Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Yuli Edelstein, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party currently revising a government-backed bill that would sanction draft evaders, has come into the crosshairs of ultra-Orthodox leadership over his insistence on ending the longstanding practice of granting blanket exemptions to members of the community.
His stance has proven one of the central obstacles to enshrining the Haredi community’s exemptions from military service in law, which became a major goal for ultra-Orthodox parties since last June, when the High Court of Justice ruled that there was no legal basis for the practice.
The ruling led the IDF to begin efforts to conscript tens of thousands of previously exempt men into the military, though few have joined.
Currently, approximately 80,000 Haredi men between the ages of 18 and 24 are eligible for military service and have not enlisted, even as reservists have performed hundreds of days of service since the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, which sparked the war in Gaza.
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.
Haredi opponents of the draft argue that it would cripple Torah scholarship and lead to mass secularization of ultra-Orthodox recruits.
The Times of Israel Community.