All ultra-Orthodox citizens will be eligible for conscription to the IDF as of July 1, and the IDF must begin to prepare for that scenario, the Movement for Quality Government in Israel wrote in a motion to the Supreme Court on Monday.
The MQG sent a similar letter on Sunday to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Likud) and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi.
The existing National Service Law, which passed in 2014 and in 2015, sets allotments of haredi draftees to the IDF per year and sanctions yeshivot that do not meet these allotments. However, in September 2017, the Supreme Court deemed the bill unconstitutional, since the exemption it gave was ruled to be too sweeping and thus violated the notion of equality. The court initially gave the Knesset a year to amend the bill, but this was delayed 15 times due to the recurring elections since. The current extension lasts until July 31.
However, according to the 2015 amendment, the law itself – not the Supreme Court ruling to strike it down – says explicitly that it applies until June 30, 2023, and therefore the current Supreme Court extension is irrelevant – and the IDF must by law begin the process of drafting eligible haredim on July 1, MQG argued in its motion. It added that the Supreme Court addressed the issue of what would happen after June 30, 2023, ruling that if no other laws passed, the part in the bill about haredi conscription would cease to apply.
The IDF would have to begin drafting haredim
“We regret that the state did not prepare for this ahead of time, and we expect it to uphold the language of the law and take action to draft all yeshiva students,” MQG wrote in its letter to Gallant and Halevi.
Should the MQG’s legal argument prove correct, the time the government has to provide a solution will be drastically reduced from a month and a half to just over two weeks.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to convene the heads of the coalition parties in the coming days to discuss the issue.
According to the coalition agreements between Likud and United Torah Judaism, a new conscription bill was supposed to pass by the time the budget passed in late May. However, due to short timetables, the haredi party agreed to drop the demand.
Prior to the haredi agreement to drop the demand, Netanyahu, Gallant and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich held a series of meetings in late April to come up with a version of a new law.
According to reports coming out of from those meetings, the general idea of the new law proposal was to enact a new policy of choosing equality in the “economic burden” over the “military burden,” by lowering the exemption age for haredi men from 26 to between 21-23, thus enabling them to join the workforce earlier, while minimizing the inequality to soldiers by shortening the length of service and providing benefits for those who do serve.
Smotrich said during a press conference ahead of his Religious Zionist Party weekly meeting on Monday that the coalition had previously agreed to postpone the new bill to the Knesset’s upcoming winter session, which begins on October 15.
This could have been made possible by yet another request to delay the implementation of the 2017 ruling. However, if the law itself is set to expire at the end of June, it is unclear if and how the coalition will attempt to postpone the issue.