Knesset panel to advance measure freezing arrests of Haredi draft evaders for 90 days

Boaz Bismuth, chairman of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, announced on Sunday that he will advance temporary legislation to halt the arrests of Haredi draft dodgers for 90 days.

Bismuth’s announcement, in a letter addressed to Defense Minister Israel Katz and Yossi Fuchs, the cabinet secretary, comes amid a bid to resolve a coalition crisis with less than four months to go until elections. It also comes as a series of mass Haredi demonstrations over the arrests of draft dodgers have blocked traffic and targeted police and judges in recent weeks.

Haredi parties have boycotted coalition legislation in protest of the government’s failure to pass a bill enshrining blanket exemptions from military service for yeshiva students. Now, the government is advancing two key Haredi priorities: a quasi-constitutional basic law that would effectively place Torah study on par with military service, which was the subject of a stormy Knesset discussion on Sunday, and the measure to freeze the arrests of Haredi draft evaders.

Earlier on Sunday, Defense Minister Israel Katz called for a moratorium on arrests of Haredi draft evaders, pushing Bismuth to hold an “urgent hearing” on a proposal to end such enforcement. Katz’s letter followed a similar one from Fuchs.

In his own letter on Sunday, Bismuth said he will convene his committee this week to discuss such a freeze, which would be enacted as a temporary order, according to a copy of the letter posted by opposition Yesh Atid MK Elazar Stern.

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“Continuing the policy of arrests is likely to harm conscription efforts and to shrink the scope of those who enlist in practice,” Bismuth wrote, citing Fuchs’s letter. “In actuality, the arrests achieve the opposite of what is intended, and push young Haredim away from a path of service.”

According to the text of the bill released by the committee, the temporary order would suspend arrests, investigations, and other enforcement measures for 90 days against full-time yeshiva students eligible for military service.

Under the proposal, a yeshiva student would be defined as someone studying at least 45 hours a week at a recognized institution designated by the defense minister and approved by the committee.

If inspectors find that at least 20 percent of a yeshiva’s students are absent, the institution would be removed from the list of recognized yeshivas. According to the Walla outlet, anyone who receives a draft order will be able to request to freeze it by submitting a letter from the head rabbi of their yeshiva. Until the request is evaluated, the petitioner will be immune from arrest.

The order would also halt any ongoing criminal proceedings against Haredim for draft evasion. It is unclear from the letter and from the Walla report whether that would include the release from military prison of those who have already been arrested for draft evasion.

In his letter, Katz had asked Bismuth to draw up regulations that exempt Haredi draft dodgers while ensuring “the continuation of criminal enforcement against draft-evaders from the Haredi public who are not studying in yeshivas.”

The committee is set to hold three sessions this week to advance the measure.

The proposal is one of two parallel bills, along with the basic law bill being pushed by ultra-Orthodox lawmakers in the hopes of keeping yeshiva students out of the army, despite a High Court of Justice ruling from 2024 ordering the government to start conscripting Haredi men.

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.

The IDF has repeatedly said it urgently needs 12,000 recruits, while some 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men aged between 18 and 24 are currently believed to be eligible for military service, but have not enlisted.

A small number of Haredi men have been arrested for draft evasion, and their imprisonment has become a cause celebre 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 at officials’ homes or at police stations.

Opposition slams bill equating Torah study, IDF service

Also on Sunday, opposition lawmakers slammed their ultra-Orthodox colleagues during the first of a series of scheduled Knesset panel hearings this week on the controversial proposed basic law to declare Torah study a foundational value of Israel, accusing them of supporting mass draft evasion and desecrating the Torah.

Lawmakers vocally objected after United Torah Judaism Chairman MK Yitzhak Goldknopf claimed that there are “also draft dodgers who live in Tel Aviv,” that those studying Torah full-time and not enlisting are “a small group,” and that anybody who claims that Haredim do not serve is “denying reality.”

Haredim who do not serve are contributing through their Torah studies, Goldknopf asserted, calling on lawmakers on the Knesset House Committee deliberating on the bill to “be as one man with one heart” and vote unanimously to advance it.

Opposition lawmakers erupted in anger, with Yesh Atid MK Merav Cohen calling his words “a slap in the face” and bemoaning that “even three years of a difficult war have not made you change your mind.”

Cohen said the law — which states that recognizing Torah study as a foundational value is intended to create “a just balance with respect to other foundational values” — would only serve to allow Haredim to continue avoiding military service while still receiving billions of shekels in government funding.

“You are causing a desecration of God’s name, and you should be ashamed of it because it is not Jewish, not Zionist, not Israeli, not anything,” she said.

Religious Zionism MK Moshe Solomon, who broke ranks with the coalition to vote against the bill in its preliminary reading, also argued against it, saying it “harms the ability of the entirety of the people of Israel, across its whole spectrum, to respect, love, and embrace the Torah world.”