With Gallant gone, Edelstein is the ‘final obstacle’ to Haredi draft exemption law

Addressing a gathering of coalition party leaders last Monday, cabinet secretary Yossi Fuchs appeared to be optimistic about the chances of passing a bill enshrining the exemption of ultra-Orthodox men from military service.

According to leaked quotes published by the Hebrew press, the longtime associate of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that the recent ouster of former defense minister Yoav Gallant, and his replacement by Israel Katz, marked “a new opportunity” to advance “a good law.”

Members of the coalition have long blamed Gallant, who had demanded that any new status quo be advanced “with broad agreement,” for the government’s failure to pass the controversial military draft exemption legislation — as demanded by ultra-Orthodox coalition partners whose support Likud needs to stay in power.

In June, the High Court of Justice ruled that there was no legal basis for the decades-long practice of exempting Haredi men from the military draft. A bill that would “very slowly” increase the rate of ultra-Orthodox conscription is currently stuck in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, whose chairman, Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, like Gallant, has said that it will only pass if lawmakers can reach a “broad consensus” on the matter.

Fuchs’s comments came on the heels of what many saw as an attempt by Netanyahu to clamp down on internal dissent by party lawmakers, removing Likud MK Dan Illouz from the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and informing Edelstein that he will not be allowed to submit any bills for a month.

According to members of his committee, the moves left Edelstein as the final significant obstacle to the passage of the legislation.

Now that Gallant has been ousted, “the next person in line is Yuli Edelstein, because if he doesn’t start cooperating with the coalition now, they will surely replace him as chairman,” predicted Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee member Evgeny Sova, from the opposition Yisrael Beytenu party.

“As with any committee chair, he has the sole authority to put it to a vote… so that is why there is pressure on him now; they will say Yuli Edelstein is causing the dissolution of the government,” Sova told The Times of Israel. “There is no doubt that Edelstein is currently the final obstacle to the enactment of this law in the Knesset.”

Tensions between Edelstein and Netanyahu are nothing new, with the former health minister and Knesset speaker launching an abortive challenge for the leadership of Likud in 2022.

But even if Edelstein becomes Netanyahu’s next target, it would be a much more difficult challenge to remove him than Gallant, both procedurally and because he enjoys much wider support within the coalition, Sova noted.

“You don’t want to turn the chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee into your enemy,” he said. “It’s not practical.”

Religious Zionism pushback

Passing the bill has become one of the chief legislative priorities of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party (UTJ), though it last month appeared to back down, at least temporarily, from a threat to derail government budget talks over the issue.

Failure to pass a budget by March 31 would result in the automatic dissolution of the government and early elections, so the threat was a potent one.

Instead, UTJ it put its weight behind the so-called Daycare Bill, which sought to circumvent a High Court ruling preventing state-funded daycare subsidies from going to the children of ultra-Orthodox men who evade the draft.

However, due to internal opposition from within the coalition, that bill was also taken off the Knesset agenda, further angering the ultra-Orthodox.

“Many people in the religious Zionist world have organized against the [IDF draft] bill and are not ready to see it pass [in its current form],” MK Moshe Tur-Paz, a religious lawmaker representing the opposition Yesh Atid party on the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, told The Times of Israel.

“And the religious lawmakers, both in Religious Zionism and Likud, are very influenced by this work, because people are saying that if you support the [current] enlistment bill we won’t vote for you, no matter what happens.”

A large part of this resentment has to do with what is seen as the disproportionate burden placed on reservists serving in the war in the absence of new ultra-Orthodox recruits.

Amid a growing manpower shortage, military sources have indicated that the turnout rate in the reserve units currently fighting in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip has dropped to between 75 percent and 85% — a figure confirmed by another member of the committee who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Speaking recently with The Times of Israel, Edelstein appeared to dismiss concerns that Netanyahu could circumvent the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on the enlistment issue or, failing to do that, remove him from his chairmanship of the influential body.

“It’s more complicated to remove a chairperson than to fire a minister,” Edelstein said, citing the support he enjoys among not only Likud lawmakers but members of the coalition more broadly.

Dismissing IDF figures

In a separate interview published in the national-religious Makor Rishon newspaper over the weekend, Edelstein said that while “there is no law that will satisfy everyone one hundred percent… it is possible to reach some common denominator.”

Dismissing the sanctions against himself and Likud MK Illouz, he argued that one of the chief obstacles to legislating a solution to the issue has actually been the IDF, which “doesn’t really know what it wants.”

The military said it currently requires some 10,000 new soldiers — mostly combat troops — but can only accommodate the enlistment of an additional 3,000 ultra-Orthodox recruits this year, due to their special needs.

Added to the around 1,800 Haredi soldiers who are already drafted annually, this would mean only 4,800 out of more than 60,000 eligible ultra-Orthodox men would be conscripted, a number that Edelstein has long dismissed as insufficient.

“The army can absorb much more than the 3,000. The army will accept any number,” argued Tur-Paz, representing a view shared by more than one member of the committee.

“The IDF manpower chief made, in my eyes, a serious mistake” when he told the committee the army could take only 3,000 Haredim currently, he said. “He acted against the IDF’s interest and I’m sorry that no one put him on the spot.”

Seeking an interim arrangement

At the end of the day, the legislation’s passage through the committee “has to do more with the way Edelstein is going to work” than with what Netanyahu is going to do, predicted Moshe Roth, UTJ’s representative on the committee.

Netanyahu’s “goal is not to pass a law. The goal is just to at least get the show on the road” and show at least some advancement, Roth acknowledged, adding that “it doesn’t seem feasible at the moment for a law to pass.”

“Passing the law is not the first priority. The first priority is just not to be illegal,” he continued — a reference to the loss of financial benefits and other sanctions faced by Haredi community members following the High Court ruling, such as travel bans placed on around 900 young men.

Asked if his party would follow through on its recent threat and oppose the budget, bringing down the government over the enlistment issue, Roth replied in the negative, indicating that there was no desire to do so “in the middle of a war” but rather to find some sort of interim arrangement.

“We still have very much at stake in many other issues — many other fields that are very important not only to us as a party, but important to the Jewish people,” he said.

“I don’t think the issue is really to topple the government, at least not so fast. It may come to that, but I don’t think it’s not going to be because of the draft law.”

Remaining optimistic

Despite Roth’s pessimism regarding the enlistment bill’s chances, however, Likud’s Illouz at least appeared to believe that Gallant’s ouster may actually ease the passage of the legislation — in a formulation he and others could accept.

Sitting in his Knesset office several days after being removed from the committee, Illouz was sanguine about his political fate, telling The Times of Israel that he “knew this was a price to pay, and I decided that I had to pay it for my principled stance.”

Illouz asserted that there is now an opportunity for a “real attempt at solving the problem of the enlistment question because Gallant put sticks in the spokes of any attempt to get to a solution.”

Without Gallant “giving veto power to the opposition on an issue that can make the government fall,” lawmakers can now work toward an acceptable compromise based on the immediate real needs of the IDF — even if full equality of the burden will take more time, he said.

“There needs to be a serious growth in the number of Haredim that get enlisted. And it needs to be enforceable, not just numbers on a piece of paper.

“I don’t know if we’ll succeed [but] we can try to make a real attempt within the coalition at finding a solution,” he said.