The crisis caused by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inability to fulfill his coalition-agreement pledge to the ultra-Orthodox parties to pass legislation guaranteeing yeshiva students’ continued exemption from military service could become a seismic moment that redraws the borders of Israel’s political camps.
The refusal of the ultra-Orthodox rabbis to accept any compromise that would limit the number of exemptions of young Haredi men, at a time of war that is severely testing the Israel Defense Forces’ personnel capacity, has dragged the serving Israeli public to the limits of its patience. Even Netanyahu’s fully right-wing governing coalition can no longer withstand the pressure.
Netanyahu personally has no problem passing into law any abomination that the Haredi politicians demand of him, as long as it guarantees his Knesset majority. He is used to sacrificing Israel’s future on the altar of his political survival. Most Likud lawmakers are the same. But within the party there remain a handful of members who, if not for the future of the state, then for the future of the party and their own public careers, will join Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in opposing an exemption bill.
Even if Netanyahu were to succeed in cajoling and threatening the necessary majority to vote in favor in the Knesset’s next session, it is by now clear that there is no wording of the exemption bill the Haredi parties will accept that would meet the High Court of Justice’s basic standard of equality.
Since Likud first came to power in 1977 and included Agudat Yisrael – then the only ultra-Orthodox party – in its first coalition, Israeli politics has been on a trajectory toward the fusing of the right-wing and religious parties into one solid bloc: the Netanyahu camp.
However, the greed of those parties, demanding that serving and taxpaying Israelis agree not only to allow their young men not to join the army but to pay for their stipends and yeshivas while they’re refusing to serve, has reached a point where even a sizable chunk of right-wingers are not prepared to countenance it any longer.
Perhaps if Israel wasn’t fighting a war both in Gaza and on the border with Lebanon (while also having to deploy over 20 battalions to protect the settlers in the West Bank) in which hundreds of thousands of reservists have to leave their homes and families for months on end, those right-wingers would have continued swallowing it for the sake of a Likud government.
