Exclusive: Senior IDF Officer — Government's Bills "Will Break the IDF"

Netanyahu's coalition grants ultra-Orthodox draft evaders immunity from arrest - and the IDF chiefs decide enough is enough

The Court Blocks the Draft-Exemption Law — But the Damage Is Done

Israel’s Supreme Court issued an injunction this morning freezing a new law that would have barred the arrest of ultra-Orthodox men who refuse to report for military duty, less than a day after Netanyahu’s government pushed it through the Knesset. The measure passed alongside a new quasi-constitutional Basic Law enshrining Torah study as a foundational value of the state — the coalition’s final legislative acts before the Knesset dissolves ahead of the October 27 election.

Most sources in Jerusalem now assume the arrest-freeze law is dead. But the story of how it passed — and why — says a great deal about where Israeli politics stands after more than two years of war.

The background

Israel has mandatory military conscription, but for decades its ultra-Orthodox — Haredi — minority has been granted sweeping exemptions to study full-time in yeshivas instead of serving. This is one of the rawest fault lines in Israeli society; Israelis call it “sharing the burden.” It has grown rawer still during the war that began in Gaza, which has left the General Staff warning openly of a manpower crisis.

The Supreme Court has already ruled the blanket exemptions illegal. But Netanyahu’s coalition depends on the Haredi parties to survive. Hence this week’s legislation: a bill freezing the arrest of Haredi men who ignore draft orders, bundled with a Basic Law elevating Torah study to constitutional status.

Why do it, knowing the court would intervene?

Netanyahu could hardly have failed to foresee the injunction. The answer, according to people familiar with the coalition’s thinking, is that the legislation was never primarily about taking effect. It was about demonstration.

Netanyahu is fighting for his political survival, and the Haredi parties are essential to it. He has funneled many billions to the Haredi sector in the middle of a war, with the help of far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — the man who has done more than anyone to keep Haredi men out of uniform and the money flowing. The goal of every arrangement, every combina (the Israeli word for a fix), is not effectiveness but signaling: showing his Haredi partners that he is the only politician who will deliver for them. He is willing to absorb the public-relations blow for the bigger prize — the coalition negotiations that will follow the election, which matter no less than the election itself.

All this while Haredi demonstrators block highways in protest of draft warrants, and while the army pleads for manpower.

The political calculation regarding right-wing voters appears to be simple: they will forget. Old and young alike will drop machal (מחל) — the Likud’s ballot slip — into the box on October 27.

The army’s red line

For the IDF, the arrest-freeze measure was the last straw. The army is facing a severe and deepening shortage of fighters; for months the government ignored the General Staff’s pleas to resolve the crisis of extended reserve service. The new law went further than inaction: it spared deserters arrest while men their age are asked to risk their lives — and it imposed on the IDF itself the duty of granting the exemptions.

That last detail is worth some specific focus. Under the emergency provision, it is the army that must sign the exemptions for yeshiva students, through a military committee staffed by senior officers — placing the stain on the officers rather than the politicians.

Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir sent an urgent letter on Monday, and the restraint in it was visible in every sentence — as was the anger underneath. Its most important line: the bill grants an incentive not to report for service, because it comes bundled with immunity from prosecution, and is therefore, in his words, “clearly and unequivocally” inconsistent with the army’s needs.

Zamir raised three objections. The gravest was moral: it cannot be, he wrote, that the military establishment under his command — the one demanding unprecedented sacrifice from those who serve — should simultaneously put its signature to the mass granting of exemptions.

Senior officers were less restrained. “Enough!” one told me. “With one hand they’ll draft reservists like madmen, with a second hand they’ll grind the conscripts to dust, and with a third hand they’ll exempt the shirkers. It will break and tear the IDF apart.”

The committee chairman’s defense

The response of Boaz Bismuth — the Likud lawmaker who chairs the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee — was that the army’s opposition arrived only after the committee had finished its deliberations.

The record says otherwise. The army objected sharply, repeatedly, throughout the committee’s hearings. The Chief of Staff’s letter came after the IDF had already registered its objections at every stage of the legislative process.

And it is difficult to believe an earlier letter would have changed anything. Had one arrived two weeks ago, would Bismuth have halted the hearings, told the Haredim there would be no immunity for deserters, and demanded an equal share of the burden from the prime minister? Nothing in his conduct suggests it.

Bismuth holds his post for one reason. His predecessor, Yuli Edelstein, believed that Israel’s security and its conscription actually mattered — and held up this very legislation over that principle. He was ousted in Bismuth’s favor.

What comes next

The politicians collaborating with the mass draft-dodging and the diversion of state resources appear to assume this is merely another chapter of politics. There was always talk of the draft; there was always coalition money; this is simply another day at the office.

The evidence from within the army — and from the polls — suggests otherwise, though in Israel such things can change quickly. Whether that memory survives until October 27 is now one of the central questions of the campaign. That is as true of draft-dodging bills as it is of the failure of October 7, 2023.