Why did the Haredim agree to an enlistment plan containing sanctions?

Following a series of marathon negotiations, representatives of the ultra-Orthodox Shas and Degel Hatorah factions endorsed a scaled-down version of Likud MK Yuli Edelstein’s Haredi enlistment plan overnight on Wednesday, preventing the passage of a preliminary vote to dissolve the Knesset at the very last minute.

While the plan was hailed by the two factions as “preserving the status of yeshiva students” — who until recently were exempt from military service — it is also significantly tougher on draft dodgers than anything previously agreed to by the Haredim, yet drew harsh criticism from reservists and opposition politicians.

Former prime minister Naftali Bennett called the agreement a “crushing blow to the reservists” which would “reduce recruitment of Haredim” while The Democrats chairman Yair Golan slammed Edelstein as a “paper tiger.”

“What appear to be sanctions are not sanctions. It is an incentive for ultra-Orthodox youth to stay in yeshiva, that’s all,” Golan argued during a press conference on Thursday afternoon.

A tussle over sanctions

At the heart of the for-now-concluded crisis was the ultra-Orthodox leadership’s frustration with Edelstein, who as chairman of the powerful Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee has long blocked the passage of a government-backed bill enshrining the broad exclusion from IDF service for Haredim.

An unreleased version of the bill being worked on by Edelstein’s committee was said to contain a raft of harsh sanctions, including the loss of property tax and public transportation discounts, the removal of tax benefits for working women married to draft dodgers, exclusion from the housing lottery, and the cancellation of daycare and academic subsidies.

However, in order to prevent the dissolution of the Knesset, Edelstein appears to have backed down from many of his demands.

According to the ultra-Orthodox Behadrei Haredim news site (Hebrew), the new outline stipulates that the enlistment law will be a temporary measure lasting for only six years, or four if it fails to meet its mobilization goals.

While sanctions connected to subsidies for academic study, international travel and drivers’ licenses would be imposed immediately, others relating to daycare and public transportation subsidies would be delayed.

Should the government be unable to reach its enlistment targets in two years, additional sanctions would take effect, including excluding draft dodgers from the housing lottery.

Institutional sanctions on yeshivas that fail to provide enough soldiers would also be imposed, including up to 50 percent of a yeshiva’s budget if it provides less than 95% of its annual target and all of its budget if it does not reach 75%.

Under the reported compromise, the status of all yeshiva students would be reset and need to be regulated from scratch, meaning that many of those who have received multiple draft orders and been declared evaders will now no longer be subject to arrest.

The new deal also appears to increase recruitment targets much more slowly than Edelstein had previously demanded, rising to half of the annual draft cohort by 2030.

What’s in it for the Haredim?

Not all of the Haredim have accepted the deal, with the Hasidic Agudat Yisrael — which together with Degel Hatorah comprises the United Torah Judaism party — rejecting the compromise. But they remain a minority among Haredi lawmakers in the Knesset.

Asked why the ultra-Orthodox would agree to a compromise which still imposes multiple sanctions on yeshiva students, Yisroel Cohen, an ultra-Orthodox journalist with close ties to the Haredi parties, told The Times of Israel that Shas and Degel Hatorah supported a watered down version of Edelstein’s proposal “because they think there is no other choice.”

Noting that the army is preparing to begin issuing over 50,000 additional enlistment orders to Haredim in July, Cohen said that, if passed, the proposed law would “reset” the status of those being mobilized and allow their Knesset representatives to “buy time” to find a better solution.

From their perspective, “even a bad law” is better than no law, and Shas and Degel Hatorah “know that with another government they won’t achieve anything even close to this,” he said.

The legislation would also restore yeshiva budgets cut following last year’s High Court ruling that yeshiva students must be conscripted. And the sanctions going into force immediately would actually be welcomed by many rabbis — who would prefer that their students not travel abroad or engage in other behavior that would distract them from their studies, said Yanky Faber, a reporter for Behadrei Haredim.

“They don’t mind these sanctions at all,” he said.

“Their biggest pressure right now is to fix the damage to the yeshiva budget and the status of yeshiva students and men studying in Kollel as lawbreakers,” agreed Dr. Gilad Malach, a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute who studies the Haredi community.

And while the Haredim don’t actually accept the terms of the Edelstein compromise, “they believe that within the framework of drafting the details they will be able to correct or reject the content of the harsh clauses and then, in the next government, when hopefully the war is behind us, everything will be open to further changes and moderations,” he said.

Losing their leverage

Asked why the opposition did not remove its bill to dissolve the Knesset from Wednesday’s agenda after the Haredim announced that they had accepted the new proposal and would thus no longer vote in favor, a spokesman for the Yisrael Beytenu party argued that to do so would be to “play into their hands” and “give them more time to bring an evasion law.”

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) sounded a similar note, telling lawmakers overnight that proceeding with the dissolution vote would strip Haredi parties of the ability to threaten to disband the Knesset in future talks over the bill.

Under parliamentary rules, because the legislation was defeated, lawmakers will have to wait six months to bring another Knesset dissolution bill to a vote.

Since voting down the Knesset dissolution law, the Haredim “have much less leverage” than they did previously, making it significantly more difficult to bring another such a bill to the plenum in another half a year, Assaf Shapira, the director of the Israel Democracy Institute’s Political Reform Program, told The Times of Israel.

“I think that now everyone sees that they don’t really want to do it. They threatened and threatened and threatened and nothing happened. They lost their credibility,” he said.

According to Shapira, the Haredim have three remaining options.

The first is to make use of a Knesset bylaw stating that a defeated bill can be submitted again for reconsideration before six months have passed if circumstances have changed significantly changed. However, such a move would require the support of Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, making it far from certain.

The second would be to bring a “full constructive vote of no confidence, which means that 61 Knesset members must support an alternative government” that could take the current one’s place — an option which Shapira says is not particularly realistic in light of the current opposition’s demand for full ultra-Orthodox conscription.

Lastly, the Haredim could “just leave the government.”

“It would then be a minority government, but it doesn’t mean that the government automatically falls,” he said — adding that the ultra-Orthodox had “really lost their last chance to do anything” to topple Netanyahu before 2026.

The fact that the Haredim have little, if any, leverage left has not been lost on the coalition, with Likud MK Dan Illouz tweeting on Thursday evening that “there is currently no real threat to the stability of the government because it is not possible to bring up the law to dissolve the Knesset again without an exceptional change in circumstances.”

“Precisely now, when the pressure has subsided, the Likud must insist on a conscription law that reflects the national and liberal values ​​of our camp,” Illouz demanded.