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Opposition MPs planning to introduce a bill to dissolve Israel’s government may have the numbers to threaten Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, as arguments over the conscription of ultra-Orthodox Israelis continue.
Ultra-Orthodox religious parties have warned they will pull out of Netanyahu’s coalition if the prime minister fails to fulfil his promise to commit to law an exemption from military conscription that their followers have, who are not drafted if they’re studying in Jewish seminaries, known as yeshivas, until they turn 26.
The conscription exemption issue is a sore one in Israel, where the army argues it needs more recruits immediately as its bombardment of Gaza since the 7 October 2023 attacks has exhausted reservists, experts say.
So could the issue break Netanyahu’s political alliance, and what might happen next?
Israeli parliament to debate on Wednesday
Netanyahu’s Likud party formed a Coalition with six parties, including the Ashkenazi United Torah Judaism (UTJ) party and the Sephardic Shas party.
Both parties represent different sects of ultra-Orthodox or Haredi Jews, who make up about 11 per cent of the country’s population.
During the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, it was agreed that Haredi men, who numbered a few hundred at that time, could be exempt from military service and given funding to study the Torah full time.
But the country’s demographics have changed significantly, and over 85 per cent of Israelis believe Haredim should also be included in the country’s mandatory military service program from the age of 18, according to a March poll in the right-wing newspaper Israel Hayom.
While Netanyahu’s coalition could survive without the seven MPs from the UTJ, who have threatened to vote to dissolve parliament, it would lose its majority if the 11 politicians from the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox Shas party decided to quit the government.
Last week, a Shas source told Agence France-Presse the party was threatening to quit the coalition unless a solution was reached by Monday.
The opposition is seeking to place a bill to dissolve parliament on Wednesday’s plenary agenda, hoping to capitalise on the ultra-Orthodox revolt to topple the government.
Ran Porat, an affiliate research associate at Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, told SBS News it’s too early to tell if the vote could spell the beginning of the end for Netanyahu.
“The ball has started rolling for the fall of Netanyahu’s government. It’s rolling faster, but it has a long, long, long way before it hits the bottom,” he said.
“And along the way, so many things could happen that divert that ball from actually reaching the bottom, not least the position of the Shas party.”
On Wednesday, even if the opposition receives support for its bill to dissolve the government, the bill still needs to undergo three more readings before it can pass.
Porat said Netanyahu will likely seek to delay deciding on the conscription issue before the end of July, which is when the Knesset (Israeli parliament) takes its summer vacation, granting Netanyahu more time.
He is not performing well in polls, but is the ultimate “comeback kid”, Porat said.
How did the conscription issue get to this point?
Israel’s supreme court ruled in June 2024 that the state must draft ultra-Orthodox men into military service, saying their legal exemption had expired.
About 66,000 Haredim are of conscription age, according to the army.
In April, a military representative told a parliamentary committee that of 18,000 draft notices sent to ultra-Orthodox persons, only 232 received a positive response.
Some members of Netanyahu’s party have demanded that these persons face economic punishment and be barred from municipal, housing, and study discounts normally available to them.
On the other side, the ultra-Orthodox parties want to introduce a bill to not only ensure they are exempt from national service, but also that those who have been called up aren’t sanctioned for at least a year.
Eyal Mayroz, a senior lecturer in peace and conflict studies at the University of Sydney, told SBS News Netanyahu is “stuck in the middle because he is trying to save his government”.
“The religious nationalists, which are also quite powerful in the government, are adamantly against that bill because they send their young religious nationalists to the army,” he said.
“Since the war in Gaza started, they actually had more casualties than any other faction within Israeli society. So they’re very angry at Netanyahu for really trading the security of his government against their lives.”
Mayroz said many Israelis feel they’ve been fighting and dying for their country while the Haredim haven’t.
“It is very difficult to justify for the government to justify why they would legislate [the UTJ’s bill] when the rest of Israel is struggling,” he said.
“There’s a lot of resentment within the Israel Defense Forces, mainly among the reserve soldiers who have been called again and again, hundreds of days away from their families and their jobs, and there’s a higher numbers of people, reservists who are refusing to go back into Gaza.”
Porat said that since 1948, the idea of exemption from the army “became sanctified” among Haredim.
“They believe that they are what they call ‘dying in the tent of the Torah’, meaning that praying for Israel saves all of Israel, and that’s how they view it,” he said.
“Some ultra-Orthodox rabbis have openly said ‘we would rather die than join to this army of infidels’.”
Porat said the issue has become an existential one for Israel, which doesn’t have a constitution.
“It touches on the very nature of what Israel is. The discussion about whether Israel is more democratic or more Jewish is at the very heart of the nation,” he said.
Haredi families have six to seven children on average, compared to secular Israelis, who have two on average. If this trajectory continues by 2065, they’ll be a third of the population, according to a report by the Israeli Democracy Institute.
Porat said this means: “There’s a lot at stake here … who will defend Israel?”
—With additional reporting from Agence France-Presse
