The Haredi ultimatum: 8 things to know for August 13

1. The rabbi decides: There was pretty wide consensus among political pundits in Israel last month that when the Knesset came back into session, the government would collapse and new elections would be called, placing them about 9 months ahead of schedule. If anyone was wondering what crisis might precipitate such a move, it has now presented itself in the form of the military draft law.

• On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to call new elections if his secular and ultra-Orthodox coalition partners could not come to some agreement over the law, which will determine how many ultra-Orthodox need to be drafted and what penalties they will face when they refuse.
• The prospect of a snap poll easily tops the news agenda in the Hebrew print press Monday morning, with much of the press, like Netanyahu, placing the onus at the feet of United Torah Judaism head Yaakov Litzman.
• “A Hasidic rabbi will decide if Israel goes to early elections,” Haaretz Yossi Verter writes, noting that Litzman doesn’t do anything without the approval of the rabbi at the head of the Ger Hasidic sect he belongs to.
• The rabbi “is in dubious touch with reality, and he is the one who dictates Litzman’s moves,” he writes.

2. Avoiding the droves: Verter and others have little faith that a solution will be found, predicting the Knesset dissolving itself in mid-October, and elections three months later.

• “It seems the summer recess will go straight into campaign season,” Yedioth Ahronoth writes in its news story.
• The paper reports that Netanyahu can actually call elections earlier, and save millions of shekels by coordinating it with municipal elections that can be pushed to mid-November, but he probably won’t: “Local elections bring Arabs to the polls in greater numbers than Knesset elections. Putting the two elections on the same will cause a high Arab voter turnout and increase their political power.”
• In any case, given the time constraints involved, it would be also impossible for elections to be that early.

3. Best law ever: Though elections will be held in 2019 no matter what, pundits in Israel Hayom, who have exulted in the actions of the most right-wing government in the country’s history, are annoyed that it may bow out early.

• “The ultra-Orthodox are shooting inside the APC,” writes Yehuda Shlesinger in the tabloid, using a popular idiom that is pretty self explanatory.
• “This draft law is better than anything else that’s been proposed to the ultra-Orthodox in the last several years,” he writes.
• In the same paper, Motti Tochfeld writes that Netanyahu very much wants to stay on at least until next July to get in the record books as longest-ever serving prime minister, “but not at any price.”

4. You’re insolent: Given the supposed power they’ve been given, the ultra-Orthodox community seems to be taking little interest in the subject, at least gauging from two leading Haredi news sites, both of which bury the news way in Siberia.

• At the same time, both Kikar Hashabbat and Behadrei Haredim use the coverage to take aim at Yesh Atid head Yair Lapid, who has been among the most strident voices for the ultra-Orthodox “sharing the burden” of army or national service.
• “Insolent Lapid,” reads a headline in Behadrei Haredim, quoting him advising Netanyahu “not to waste his time with the rabbi.”
• Kikar Hashabbat accuses Lapid of “being quick to ride the waves of incitement over the issue.”

5. No, you’re insolent: Uncowed (or sensing elections in the offing) Lapid gave a press conference at the army’s main induction center near Tel Aviv Monday morning, calling on Netanyahu again to “not give in to the ultra-Orthodox again.”

• Lapid also uses the opportunity to attack what he says are “Haredi wheeler-dealers” sending youths to protest the army draft in the street.
• “I heard the screams during the Haredi protests. They yell ‘we’d rather die than enlist.’ Insolents. The ones that could die are not the draft dodgers, but those who enlist in combat units. The amazing youths who are passing by here in front of us and going to enlist in the army,” he says, in what may be the worst possible pitch to get people to join up.

6. Eating soup with a tank: As George S. Patton said, the idea is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.

• In a bid to do that a bit better, or at least more efficiently, the Israeli army is trying out a reshuffle of the way it organizes its units, combining tanks, infantry, engineers and others, rather than having them each be in their own units, ToI’s Judah Ari Gross reports.
• The new idea was tried out for the first time last week during an exercise simulating war against Hezbollah, which as a terror group, contains different challenges than a state army.
• “The military’s underlying understanding is that fighting more nimble non-state actors hiding among civilians, as with the Hezbollah terrorist group in southern Lebanon, is fundamentally different than squaring off against formal militaries on a deserted battlefield, and requires the IDF to be more flexible and more precise to avoid civilian casualties,” he writes.

7. Well-recorded bribes: Shari Arison, the richest woman in Israel, spent 9 hours being quizzed by investigators Sunday in connection with a bribery scandal involving Israeli firms bidding for contracts in Africa.

• The case involves Shikun & Binui, one of Israel’s largest construction and infrastructure companies, which has many projects in Israel and around the world. Six senior executives were arrested in February on suspicion of making the illicit payments to support construction projects in unnamed countries in Africa.
• Yedioth reports that police suspect Arison, who owns Israel’s largest bank and is an heir to the Carnival Cruise throne (and also founded Israel’s Good Deeds Day), knew about the bribes being paid, mostly to officials in Kenya.
• “The payments were even recorded in a organized manner in notebooks that only a few in the company had access to,” the paper reports.

8. Missed the bus: The Moovit public transportation app announced late Sunday that it was chosen as the official transportation app for the Asian Games, which will start next week in Indonesia.

• Though the company was founded by Israelis in Israel, the release has no mention of the Jewish State and even the executive quoted in the release — Vice President Steve Swasey — has a name that nobody would confuse for Israeli.
• That’s probably not surprising given the fact that Israel is persona non-grata at the Asiad, despite being situated in Asia, because of several of the countries opposition to interacting with it — like Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and North Korea.
• The company’s pivot to Asia also isn’t surprising. In May, CEO Erez Nir described himself to ToI’s Shoshanna Solomon as the “Marco Polo of transit.”