United Torah Judaism chairperson Yitzhak Goldknopf sparked outrage for comparing enforcing yeshiva students' conscription to the military to “placing a yellow badge on them,” in remarks during a Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting advancing the controversial haredi (ultra-Orthodox) draft bill on Sunday.
“I beg you, exempt them from everything,” he told the panel, before seeming to refer to the yellow star that Nazi’s placed on Jews during the Holocaust.
“They should not be tied to quotas or targets,” Goldknopf said about yeshiva students.
“In what country in the world do they take a rabbi and punish him? And here in Israel, we would decide to punish them? A yellow badge, how can we do such a thing?” Goldknopf told the panel.
The remarks came during a full day of meetings on the haredi draft law at the Knesset, continuing from the morning into the evening.
Critics slam Bismuth’s Haredi draft bill as ‘ineffective’
Critics of the new outline of the bill that was presented by Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairperson MK Boaz Bismuth (Likud) argue that it fails to enforce haredi conscription, stalls time, and is a political solution that attempts to appease the haredi parties to return to the government after they resigned in protest of an earlier version of the bill in July.
Marathon meetings have been taking place to advance the bill ever since Bismuth laid out a revised version.
Meanwhile, the IDF has repeatedly warned that it urgently lacks manpower in combat units, especially after over two years of war.
The meetings on Sunday focused for the first time on the sanctions section for draft evaders, which has been widely criticized as far too lenient and ineffective in enforcing conscription to the IDF in Bismuth's revised version.
The comments sparked outrage among politicians from both Israel’s opposition and coalition.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) asked, “How dare you? My father wore a yellow badge in the Budapest ghetto simply because there was no Jewish army to protect his life. My grandfather wore a yellow badge when he was murdered in a concentration camp."
"What you said today in the committee is the dream of every antisemite, both a debasement of the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and a show of contempt for the IDF and its soldiers," Lapid added.
Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikili said, “I’ve encountered disconnected politicians before, but Goldknopf is truly in a league of his own."
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (Religious Zionist Party) remarked that it was good Goldknopf was no longer part of the coalition.
“As appears, he's also not expected to return,” Smotrich added.
“There is no place in our coalition for disconnected and obtuse people who don't stop harming the people of Israel, IDF fighters, and Torah scholars," the finance minister said.