by Eliav Breuer, Jerusalem Post Staff
The Sephardic haredi party Shas remained mum on Monday about whether or not it would join UTJ.
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In a dramatic political development on Monday, the Lithuanian-haredi Degel Hatorah MKs announced their decision to quit the government and the coalition. The decision came after the party’s two spiritual leaders, Rabbi Dov Lando and Rabbi Moshe Hillel Hirsch, ordered the party to leave the government over its failure to pass a bill to exempt yeshiva students from IDF service.
Degel Hatorah's sole representative in the government, Deputy Transportation Minister Uri Makleb, submitted his resignation on Tuesday, along with MK Moshe Gafni, who resigned as head of the Knesset Finance Committee, making the decision official.
MK Yaakov Asher resigned as head of Knesset Interior and Environment Protection Committee.
A few hours after Degel Hatorah’s announcement, at approximately 9 p.m., a series of reports emerged regarding a breakthrough in negotiations, which were conducted in Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman MK Yuli Edelstein’s office. The reports could not be corroborated by press time, but if true, the bill would likely still require the approval of Rabbis Lando and Hirsch before Degel Hatorah’s threat is removed.
The rabbis’ orders already came on Sunday evening, but the party decided to give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu one more day to try to have a version of a bill published.
Hirsch added his signature on Monday morning.
United Torah Judaism (UTJ) said earlier on Monday that it expected to leave the coalition within the next 24 hours if a draft proposal of a law regarding haredi enlistment was not presented.
"In coordination with the great rabbis of Israel, it was decided to wait a few more hours tonight before publishing the statement, in order to provide one last opportunity for a resolution. This was done with the understanding that United Torah Judaism had not originally sought to dissolve the government, but that the failure to meet the agreements left them with no other option," Lando's office said.
Although the directive was only directed at UTJ’s Lithuanian faction, the members of its hassidic faction, Agudat Yisrael, will likely follow suit, according to a source.
Shas remains quiet about whether it would join UTJ or not
The Sephardic haredi party Shas remained silent on Monday about whether or not it would join UTJ. KAN reported on Sunday evening that party chairman MK Arye Deri had threatened Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Shas might also withdraw from the coalition before the end of the Knesset summer session on July 27, if the party saw that no draft law had advanced.
Opposition party members on Monday morning sought to gather Shas's support for such a bill, but Shas refused, according to a Channel 12 report. KAN reported that for now, the parties will not support dissolving the Knesset before the summer recess
The announcement by Degel Hatorah served as a new peak in a pressure campaign against Netanyahu. The party nearly supported an opposition preliminary vote on a bill proposal to disperse the Knesset on the eve of June 12, a day before the Israeli attack against Iran, but backed down after reaching agreements with Edelstein.
It later became apparent that Edelstein and other negotiators were aware of the impending attack, and backed down in part because of it.
The June 12 agreements stipulated that an increasing quota of haredi draftees would enlist annually, with the ultimate goal of enlistment of 50% of each graduating class within five years.
The bill included a series of sanctions that would apply to draft dodgers gradually, with some relatively light sanctions applying immediately and heavier sanctions added at six-month increments.
Financial sanctions would also be applied to yeshivot that do not reach draft quotas. In the meantime, current sanctions against draft dodgers – which include blocking funds to yeshivot and the cessation of state-subsidized daycare – would be lifted.
The head of the Finance Ministry’s Budget Department, Yoav Gardos, wrote in a letter to Frenkel-Shor on July 2 that the agreement would actually serve as an incentive not to enlist or work, and in effect perpetuate the issues that it had set out to solve.
Gardos pointed out that the idea of quotas may already be a nonstarter, since there was no a specific requirement for individual haredim to enlist. In addition, Gardos explained that the immediate sanctions would not significantly affect many young haredi yeshiva students. In the meantime, the law’s passage will free up funds to yeshivot and to parents, which are currently frozen because of students’ draft evasion.
The previous exemption for haredi men officially ended with a High Court ruling in June 2024, and since no new bill has passed, the current legal status requires the enlistment of all of the approximately 80,000 eligible haredi men.
Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara has held monthly meetings since then to ensure that the High Court ruling is being implemented.
In a letter to Netanyahu on Monday, Baharav-Miara wrote that the government was legally required to use more tools in its power to enforce the law against draft-dodgers.
She wrote that the fact that the government was increasing the burden on some parts of the population while not doing all in its power to recruit other parts was a “severe” violation of the constitutional principle of equality.
Eliav Breuer, Jerusalem Post Staff
Source: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/article-860978
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