Opposition pans Netanyahu ‘spin’ as he distances himself from Haredi draft evasion law

Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"

Politicians seeking to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the upcoming election accused him of engaging in disingenuous “spin” on Sunday, after he appeared to indicate his next government would take steps to conscript ultra-Orthodox men, despite recently passing a series of laws aimed at preventing enforcement against Haredi draft evaders.

“Anyone who does not study Torah will enlist or go to prison,” he reportedly said, a little over two weeks after his coalition passed legislation banning the arrests of draft dodgers — legislation that was immediately frozen by the High Court pending a final ruling.

“Netanyahu thinks the serving public is dumb” and his comments walking back recent legislative efforts are “pathetic spin,” declared former prime minister Naftali Bennett in a statement.

“After four years of personally preventing the recruitment of Haredim, ignoring the warnings of the chief of staff and the cries of the reservists who asked for reinforcements, Netanyahu thinks that this time the people of Israel will believe him,” Bennett said, adding that the premier “knows that he will not be able to recruit even one Haredi” because Aryeh Deri, the chairman of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, “won’t let him.”

Tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox men aged 18 to 24 are currently eligible for military service but have ignored conscription orders, despite manpower shortages in the army and widespread anger among the general population over an unequal sharing of the burden of defending the country.

Last month, despite opposition by Knesset legal advisers, the attorney general and the Israel Defense Forces, lawmakers voted 58-54 to pass a coalition-backed law temporarily banning the arrest and prosecution of ultra-Orthodox men evading military service, thereby legitimizing continued mass Haredi non-enlistment for at least the next seven months. The law also froze criminal proceedings already in place against current Haredi draft dodgers.

Implementation of the law was quickly frozen by the High Court, with a decision pending on whether to strike it down entirely. Coalition politicians called on the government to disobey the court.

According to leaks published in the Hebrew press, which the Haaretz daily attributed to Netanyahu’s Likud party, the prime minister admitted during a recent discussion that the controversial law did not serve its purpose and the policy will not continue in the next government, should he win the upcoming election.

The law “was intended to lower the flames and increase the number of Haredi enlistees [but] in practice it did not work, and therefore there will be no such law in the next government,” the Ynet news site quoted Netanyahu as saying.

“After the elections, we will form a broad national government that will immediately pass a full draft law that will meet the needs of the IDF,” Netanyahu further stated, indicating, however, that he will continue to pursue legislative changes that would allow full-time yeshiva students to receive exemptions from military service.

The coalition had previously argued that the controversial law was necessary because, it claimed, arrests of Haredi men who have failed to report for conscription after receiving draft orders are causing a reduction in motivation among ultra-Orthodox men to enlist.

In a post on X, Yashar party chairman Gadi Eisenkot accused Netanyahu of evading responsibility for his actions only weeks after passing “a despicable evasion law that weakens the IDF and Israeli society as a whole” while simultaneously having “prevented a real conscription law.”

Netanyahu’s comments are more “vile and cynical spin by a man who has lost all connection to Israel’s security,” posted The Democrats chairman Yair Golan, while Yisrael Beytenu chief Avigdor Liberman insisted that Netanyahu “has no government without the draft dodgers,” referring to his longtime political alliance with Haredi parties.

Netanyahu’s comments were also condemned by Yitzhak Goldknopf, the chairman of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, who asserted that they “only confirm[ed] what was clear to us from the very first moment: The prime minister does not intend to regulate the status of yeshiva students and does not plan to introduce a conscription law, which is why we left the government.”

UTJ quit the government and coalition in July 2025 over the coalition’s failure to pass a bill reinstating conscription exemptions for yeshiva students struck down by the High Court of Justice the previous year.

“The ‘arrests law’ was just more spin that was not meant to solve anything, and it is a shame it came into being. After the elections, we will only go with whoever regulates the status of yeshiva students and kollel scholars,” said Goldknopf.

Speaking with Ynet, a senior UTJ source said that Netanyahu had failed to meet his commitments to the Haredim and that as a result “we would prefer to sit in the opposition and let others pass a law that Netanyahu is unable to pass.”

It is highly unlikely the Haredi parties would sit with the current opposition, which has pledged to enforce ultra-Orthodox conscription.

The ultra-Orthodox parties have been pushing hard for legislation exempting yeshiva students from military service ever after the High Court of Justice ordered the government to start conscripting Haredi men in 2024.

Since then, the military has sent out tens of thousands of enlistment orders to members of the ultra-Orthodox community whose exemptions were revoked. Most have ignored the orders, leading to large numbers of young men being classified as deserters and made subject to arrest or other sanctions.

While the government has largely refrained from complying with a High Court order to increase arrests and impose financial sanctions on Haredi draft evaders, a small number of Haredi men have been arrested for draft evasion. Their imprisonment has become a cause célèbre among Haredi politicians and their constituents.

A number of protests have blocked highway traffic in opposition to the arrests, and other Haredi demonstrators have protested violently at officials’ homes or at police stations. National broadcaster Kan reported last month that one anti-conscription organization, which has openly bragged of blocking evader arrests, had actually received government funding.

Tension over the conscription issue led Shas and UTJ to boycott coalition bills ahead of the current pre-election Knesset recess, prompting Netanyahu’s coalition to pass the law freezing arrests as well as a divisive Basic Law declaring Torah study a “foundational value” of the Jewish people in order to obtain Haredi support for his own legislative agenda.

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