Shas vows to oppose 2026 budget unless coalition passes Haredi draft exemption bill

The ultra-Orthodox Shas party will not vote for the 2026 state budget without the prior passage of the coalition’s bill regulating Haredi conscription and exemptions, party speaker Asher Medina threatened on Sunday, a move that would bring down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

The support of Shas’s 11 MKs will be critical for the budget to pass by its March 31 deadline and head off the dissolution of the Knesset, triggering early elections.

“From the perspective of the Haredi public, the draft law is as far-reaching as one could possibly imagine. With God’s help, we will support the law because it is the only thing that will save the world of Torah,” Medina told the ultra-Orthodox Radio Kol Barama, adding that “the only thing that will stop the arrests is not demonstrations, but legislation.”

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. The IDF has said it urgently needs 12,000 recruits due to the strain on standing and reserve forces caused by the war against Hamas in Gaza and other military challenges.

Shas MKs repeatedly voiced their support for the bill — which proposes continued military service exemptions to full-time yeshiva students while purportedly increasing conscription among graduates of Haredi educational institutions — while visiting draft evaders in military prison.

In a separate interview with Kol Barama on Sunday, Shas lawmaker Michael Malkieli insisted that his party was fully coordinated with fellow ultra-Orthodox party United Torah Judaism (UTJ) — even as the two parties engage in a high-profile fight for control of Jerusalem’s religious council.

Medina’s comments came only days after a senior representative of UTJ’s Degel HaTorah faction told the Ynet news site that “if there is no progress” on the enlistment bill, “we will not vote in favor of the budget…and if that means the government falls, then let the government fall.”

Both Shas and UTJ have previously denied threatening the prime minister with the dissolution of the Knesset should he fail to accelerate the bill’s advancement.

In an apparent response to Haredi threats, Netanyahu told a meeting on Haredi education funding on Sunday that lawmakers must significantly speed up the passage of the controversial legislation.

“We need to accelerate the completion of the conscription law legislation — everything depends on it,” the Ynet news site quoted Netanyahu as saying.

If passed into law, the bill would effectively reset the status of yeshiva students who ignored call-up orders over the past year, while yeshivas would immediately receive half of the funding cut in the wake of 2024’s High Court ruling, easing economic and legal pressure on the community.

The sanctions battle

Those who receive deferments under the new bill would be subject to sanctions related to travel, which critics say are largely irrelevant and would be lifted by age 26. Harsher sanctions affecting various subsidies would only kick in if enlistment levels fall short of targets.

The bill has come under harsh criticism from the Attorney General’s Office, IDF and Finance Ministry, all of which argue that it will not lead to a significant increase in Haredi enlistment.

In a legal opinion sent to lawmakers over the weekend, Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee legal adviser Miri Frenkel Shor criticized the bill’s gradual application of sanctions based on consecutive annual failures to meet enlistment targets and called for a reexamination of the bill’s clause ending sanctions at age 26, when annual deferments turn into a permanent exemption from service.

A representative of the Finance Ministry likewise criticized the way sanctions are handled in the bill on Sunday, telling the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that “setting an expiration date for the sanctions empties most of them of their substance.”

The proposed sanctions regime also came under harsh criticism from opposition lawmakers, who questioned why the bill calls for an exceptions committee dealing with such matters to include a representative of the Yeshiva Committee, a group that a Times of Israel investigation had found actively advises yeshiva students to engage in draft evasion.

Also on Sunday, United Torah Judaism chairman Yitzhak Goldknopf insisted that, instead of punishing those who choose to learn and not serve, “all sanctions should be abolished.”

“I implore the committee: If there are those who study Torah, exempt them from everything. They should not be tied to quotas or targets,” he said, accusing those in favor of sanctions of supporting a “yellow star” for Torah scholars.

“My father wore a yellow star in the Budapest ghetto simply because there was no Jewish army to protect his life. My grandfather wore a yellow star when he was murdered in a concentration camp,” retorted Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, calling Goldknopf’s statement “the dream of every antisemite.”

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also slammed Goldknopf, declaring that there was “no place in our coalition” for such people “who don’t stop harming the people of Israel, IDF fighters and Torah scholars.”

“Our heroic fighters are the ones battling the Nazis of every generation and preventing them from carrying out the Final Solution conceived by the one who devised the yellow star,” he tweeted.

“The members of the committee know the immense respect I have for Torah scholars and, in general, for the Haredi world, but a yellow patch is not here — we need to set a limit,” Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Boaz Bismuth said in response.

‘Starvation’

UTJ MK Meir Porush adopted an even harsher approach than Goldknopf, insisting that withholding daycare subsidies from the families of draft evaders would cause “starvation” among Haredim, arguing that such a policy could violate Israel’s obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Unlike Degel HaTorah and Shas, Goldknopf and Porush’s Agudat Yisrael faction has been publicly critical of the bill, with Goldknopf unable to support any measure containing sanctions.

Pushing back against critics, Bismuth (Likud), the author of the revised bill, called the opposition “unrealistic,” telling Yisrael Beytenu MK Sharon Nir that if he had listened to her, “there will be not be 17,000 [Haredi] soldiers, there will be 17,000 prisoners and 5,000 soldiers forced to guard them.”

As lawmakers sparred over the bill, ultra-Orthodox protesters attempted to stop Haredi recruits at the Jerusalem enlistment office and the Bakum military induction base in central Israel, leading to clashes with police, who used water cannons to disperse them.

‘Constitutional crisis’

Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon also criticized the government over its handling of sanctions on Sunday, accusing it of contravening a High Court order to draw up new sanctions against Haredi draft evaders and calling its refusal to do so a “constitutional crisis.”

“The High Court required the formulation of the policy by today. This constitutes a violation of the ruling,” the Ynet news site quoted Limon as telling a weekly cabinet meeting, following the expiration of a court-ordered deadline to present tougher penalties for the draft evaders.

In mid-November, the court gave the government 45 days to draw up effective enforcement measures, including criminal proceedings, against ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students who have refused to comply with IDF conscription orders.

In a unanimous decision, the court accused the government and state agencies of having almost “totally shirked” their responsibilities to enforce the law when it came to Haredi draft dodgers, which the court said constituted selective enforcement, as well as a violation of the state’s obligation to enforce its laws.

The court instructed the government to begin criminal proceedings against ultra-Orthodox men already deemed legally to be draft dodgers as quickly as possible, and to draw up, by January 4, civil and economic enforcement measures deemed to have a high chance of success against all those refusing to comply with conscription orders.

In response, Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs reportedly told Limon that “the government’s policy is to approve the conscription law.”