🧠 The Draft Dilemma Splits Netanyahu's Coalition

Israel's ultra-Orthodox allies just pulled the emergency brake — again. United Torah Judaism is threatening to walk out of the government over a draft law requiring religious students to serve in the military. If they follow through, Netanyahu is left clinging to a one-seat majority.

📊 The Fragile Math of Survival
• United Torah Judaism says Netanyahu’s draft proposals are “too harsh.”
• Degel HaTorah’s ministers already submitted resignations — effective in 48 hours.
• Agudat Israel is also on the verge of quitting, but hedging.
• If one more party leaves, Netanyahu’s coalition may lose its legislative power.

📚 Holy Study vs. National Duty
For decades, ultra-Orthodox men were exempt from military service to study Torah. That arrangement, tolerated for a small minority, now covers 14% of the population.
After nearly two years of war in Gaza — and rising body counts — resentment has reached boiling point.

📜 What’s on the table?
• A “gradual integration” law with enlistment quotas
• Possible cuts to yeshiva funding for non-compliance
• Ongoing backroom bargaining between Netanyahu and Haredi leaders

Will Bibi pull off another political magic trick — or is this the showdown that finally ends the era of special treatment?

#israel #netanyahu #haredim #militarydraft #coalitioncrisis #gaza #politicsisrael #kns #religionandstate

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📰 The King of the Crutches: Bibi Rules the Wreckage

💭 “A minority government cannot decide who will live and who will die.”

— Yair Lapid, auditioning for a conscience

📊 Netanyahu: Weakened, Wounded, Still Weaponized
• Two ultra-Orthodox parties walk out, and suddenly Israel’s government becomes Bibi and the 50 dwarves.
• UTJ quits over the draft bill. Shas just threatens to pout. Both want to keep their boys praying while everyone else bleeds.
• The Knesset’s off for summer. The war’s on for eternity. And Netanyahu has three months of political limbo to stage his next resurrection.
• Lapid screams “illegitimate!” but in Israel, legitimacy comes with 61 seats or a smoke-filled deal — whichever’s cheaper.

💼 Draft Dodgers vs. Drone Diplomacy
• The IDF needs Haredim on the front lines. The Haredim need the state to leave them alone.
• Meanwhile, Netanyahu bombs Syria, flirts with the Saudis, and tries to convince Trump he’s still got it.
• The far-right wants no ceasefire. The centrists want elections. Netanyahu wants all of them to wait until October recess.
• Government or ghost ship? Doesn’t matter — the man still holds the wheel and the detonator.

🔎 The Art of Losing Power Without Letting Go
• Minority rule? No problem. The Knesset only falls if it wants to — and most MKs are too scared of the next ballot box.
• Netanyahu’s coalition may be unraveling, but his strategy is pure inertia: keep bombing, keep talking, keep surviving.
• Smotrich and Ben Gvir threaten to jump ship if Bibi signs a deal. But they can’t swim without the Knesset returning from vacation.
• The real war isn’t in Gaza or Syria — it’s in the WhatsApp threads of Likud backbenchers.

🤔 Final Question
How many governments can Netanyahu lose before he finally has to win one?

#Netanyahu #Israel #Knesset #GazaWar #Haredim #ceasefire #Lapid

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📰 The Holy Draft War: Torah vs. Tzahal

At 11 p.m. in Jerusalem, rabbis shouted from balconies in Yiddish, dumpsters burned in the streets, and mounted police sprayed protesters with “skunk water.” The spark? Israel’s decision to draft the ultra-Orthodox after decades of exemption.

💭 “In this country I’m considered a criminal because I want to study Torah,”

said Haim Bamberger, 23, outside Mir Yeshiva.

📊 What’s driving the crisis
• The Supreme Court struck down the Ben-Gurion-era exemption in 2024. No law means no special deal.
• The IDF says it needs 12,000 fresh recruits after nearly two years of war in Gaza; so far, only 2,940 Haredim have enlisted.
• Netanyahu’s coalition is fraying: two ultra-Orthodox parties have already walked out.
• Demographic pressure is mounting: the Haredi population has grown from 40,000 in 1948 to nearly a million today, projected to reach 30% by 2035.

💼 Why it’s existential
• Secular Israelis are furious: their children fight and die while Haredi contemporaries remain in the yeshiva.
• Polling suggests up to half of Haredi men might serve if their communities allowed it, but rabbis fear losing control.
• The army is overstretched — more than 450 dead in Gaza, suicides rising, and reservists worn down by 400-plus days of service.
• The Gaza famine, with over 60,000 dead, collides with Netanyahu’s push for full control of Gaza City, deepening domestic discontent.

🤔 The unresolved question
If Torah study is presented as national defense and Gaza is an endless war, who really decides Israel’s survival strategy — the generals with their casualty counts, the rabbis with their texts, or Netanyahu clinging to his coalition like a life raft?

#israel #idf #haredim #draft #coalition #gazawar #politics

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🇮🇱 Israel’s War Inside the War
As rockets quiet in Gaza, another battle rages in Jerusalem — over who must fight next time.

⚔️ The Draft That Broke the Right
For years, ultra Orthodox Haredim have lived outside Israel’s mandatory service system — a Ben Gurion era deal that once covered a few hundred yeshiva students and now shields tens of thousands.
After the Supreme Court struck down their blanket exemption in 2024, the army began issuing draft orders. Eighty thousand went out; barely three thousand showed up.
The rest prayed — and protested.

🔥 Coalition on the Edge
Netanyahu’s government of rabbis and ultranationalists is now cracking over the same question it was built to avoid.
If the Knesset can’t pass a new exemption law when it reconvenes this week, the coalition could collapse.
Likud’s own Boaz Bismuth has floated a “compromise”: half the Haredi draft cohort enlisted within five years and exemption age set at 26 — a proposal critics call a “draft dodging bill in uniform.”

💣 The Public’s Fury
Nearly three quarters of Israelis now oppose the Haredi exemption. Reservists who’ve spent months in Gaza call it a betrayal.
Polls show an exhausted “serving public” turning its anger not on Hamas but on fellow citizens who won’t serve.
The army warns that without Haredi manpower, Israel can’t sustain another year long war.

🕍 Faith Against the State
Inside Haredi towns, rabbis preach that Torah study protects Israel better than guns. “Torah saves,” they say — and many mean it literally.
Some yeshiva students told reporters they would rather die than serve.
For them, military conscription is not a logistical issue — it is existential.

🧩 A Nation Split by Duty
To serve or not to serve has become Israel’s new religious line — a fault that cuts through every party and synagogue.
As one former defense official warned: “If October 7 had happened two years later, we might not have held out.”
This war may have paused in Gaza — but Israel’s fight with itself is far from over.

#Israel #Haredim #Conscription #Netanyahu #Knesset #ReligionAndState #IDF #CultureWar

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📰 War Budget, No Draft: How God’s Parties Just Saved Bibi

Israel’s ultra-Orthodox parties are quietly climbing down from their sacred ultimatum: no draft exemption law, no state budget. Now, under the cover of war, Degel HaTorah’s rabbis have told their MKs to back the 2026 budget even if the conscription dodge isn’t legally locked in. In a system built on extortion, the professional extortionists just blinked.

The stakes are simple: no budget by the end of the month, the government falls and elections follow. For years, Shas and Degel HaTorah swore they’d bring the house down before letting tens of thousands of yeshiva students face the draft; now, with a war burning and soldiers exhausted, they suddenly discover “national responsibility.” Translation: better a flawed budget today than risk a different coalition tomorrow.

This isn’t a morality play, it’s a swap. The Haredi leadership knows that any new draft law is likely to be toothless, legally shaky, and eventually gutted by the High Court. So they take the money and time now, bet on legal chaos later, and hope that by the time the justices rule, everyone is too tired, too broke, or too dead to enforce anything on thousands of “deserters.”

Netanyahu, for his part, gets exactly what he needs: a budget that keeps him in office through war, with his most loyal partners back on board and their rage theatrically redirected at the courts and “leftist elites.” The soldiers keep serving, the Haredi draft problem stays unsolved, and the crisis over “sharing the burden” is converted into one more overdraft on Israel’s future.

In this arrangement, the war is not the reason to fix the inequality — it’s the excuse not to.

#israel #budget #haredim #draft #netanyahu #war #oligarchy #fakeDemocracy

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🔯The Rabbi Says the Quiet Part Out Loud

Israel’s ultra-Orthodox leadership is once again reminding everyone that the country is not one nation with one story, but a pile of tribes arguing over who gets to define survival.

Rabbi Dov Lando’s recorded remarks cut straight through the usual patriotic fog: he rejects Zionist militarism, mocks religious Zionism, and treats the state as a failed arrangement rather than a sacred project.

That is the real scandal for the political class. Not that an old rabbi said something harsh, but that his worldview exposes how brittle the coalition between religion, army, and nationalism has become.

Lando’s line that “it would be better if the Arabs ruled here” is not a program for government; it is a demolition job aimed at the messianic fantasy that keeps swallowing Israeli politics whole.

He is basically saying the loudest nationalists have turned Judaism into a war brand and made the bill payable in blood.

Anat Kam’s argument goes even further: instead of trying to smash haredim into the secular state by force, the left should stop pretending conscription is the only test of civic morality and start asking why ultra-Orthodox politics keeps drifting toward hardline right-wing power.

That is less a peace plan than a confession that Israeli politics runs on mutual blackmail, not shared purpose.

So no, this is not just another rabbinic quote cycle. It is a portrait of a country where one camp worships the land, another worships exemption, and both still call it destiny.

#Israel #Haredim #Zionism #Politics #Religion

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Israel’s Draft Law: Sacrificing Soldiers to Save the Coalition

The government just put a price tag on Israeli security, and it’s denominated in coalition math, not in lives.

On Wednesday, the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee is scheduled to debate, in the same morning, two pieces of political dynamite: an amendment to formally integrate yeshiva students into the draft‑exemption framework, and another amendment to extend mandatory military service. The message is simple and obscene: Torah students out, everybody else in for longer.

The second bill — extending mandatory service — was kept in the drawer for months because even this coalition knows how furious the public already is. Now they’re trying to sneak it through in the same package as the yeshiva law, as if you can bury a time bomb under a bigger explosion.

At the same time, there’s a preliminary vote set on dissolving the Knesset. Netanyahu’s camp is trying to convince the ultra‑Orthodox parties that there is still a majority to pass the exemption law, basically begging for time. The calendar tricks are pure survival mode: if they can stall, September 1 becomes impossible, the election date slips past September 15, and suddenly you’re campaigning in October instead of being punished sooner.

Inside the Haredi camp, the split is naked. Rav Lando’s house tells Degel HaTorah MKs to support dissolution and avoid “political games,” but party figures leak that if the draft‑exemption law actually passes, they’ll run back to the rabbis to “reconsider” their stand on the vote. Translation: “principles” are valid until the coalition delivers the goods.

The opposition doesn’t even need to invent a slogan. Lapid can just read the situation out loud: Netanyahu is trying to “sell Israel’s security” — trading the already overstretched combat and reserve pool for one more round of legal protection and political oxygen. For frontline troops and reservists, it looks even uglier: you get longer compulsory service so someone else can keep permanent exemption and permanent leverage.

The Forum of Service Partnership calls the law “an absolute disgrace” in light of the Chief of Staff’s warning that the army and its reserves are “one step away from collapse.” That’s the core of the story: the professional warning is that the system is at breaking point; the political response is to squeeze it harder and hand out exemptions to the government’s most loyal voting bloc.

This isn’t policy. It’s a hostage deal, where the hostages are soldiers, reservists, and what’s left of the idea that the IDF belongs to everyone, not just to the people who know how to blackmail a prime minister on the way to the ballot box.

#Israel #IDF #Haredim #draft #Netanyahu #Lapid #security #fakeEquality

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Torah Law vs. War State

Deputy Attorney General Avital Sompolinsky just detonated the coalition’s favorite illusion: in wartime Israel, the new Torah Basic Law doesn’t “honor tradition,” it legally ranks non‑serving yeshiva students above soldiers.

In a country relying on exhausted reservists, the state has decided to give constitutional armor to those who never put on a uniform.

Sompolinsky’s warning turns this from a poetic preamble into a smoking gun. If Basic Law: Torah Study grants full‑time Torah students a higher protected status “in the current context,” any draft law that leans on it screams built‑in discrimination.

Future petitions won’t just attack exemptions; they’ll argue the Basic Law itself hard‑codes unequal citizenship in the middle of a war.

Religious Zionist lawmakers like Moshe Solomon and Dan Illouz have effectively called the move a moral disgrace in parliamentary language, refusing to equate full‑time Torah study with front‑line military service. One side of that camp tries to live “Torah and service,” the other wants “Torah instead of service.”

At some point, at least one faction will brand itself openly as “Torah and uniform” — and start voting with the opposition when the price of loyalty is being the fig leaf for institutionalized draft evasion.

The coalition, meanwhile, will cling to the “supreme value” formula like a get‑out‑of‑equality card. Once Torah study is elevated to Basic Law status, they will argue that broad exemptions, stipends and housing perks for yeshiva students are not privileges but “implementation of a foundational principle.”

Under that logic, everything from non‑service to budget pipelines into seminaries becomes untouchable because it is wrapped in quasi‑constitutional holiness.

The opposition cannot outvote the coalition, so it will try to out‑litigate it. Expect centrist and left‑of‑center parties to quote Sompolinsky in every petition, claiming that any conscription arrangement anchored in this Basic Law violates equality and past Supreme Court rulings on the draft.

The goal is not only to win eventually but to freeze implementation with interim orders, drag the fight into election season, and make the coalition pay politically for prioritizing legal cover for draft dodging during a war.

For the army, this is not theology, it is manpower math. Planners will read the law plus Sompolinsky’s warning as proof that the political system is entrenching unequal burden‑sharing as a long‑term feature, not a temporary glitch.

Quiet leaks about recruitment gaps and burnout will come first; credit‑rating agencies can follow with careful language about “governance and sustainability risks” — a state that relies on the same reservists year after year while legally sheltering a fast‑growing sector from service.

Basic Laws are supposed to be Israel’s substitute for a constitution. This one does not tilt the field; it cements a hierarchy in the middle of mass graves and repeated reserve call‑ups.

Giving Torah study quasi‑constitutional supremacy now does not “balance” Jewish and democratic — it encodes that one group’s spiritual status becomes another group’s obligation to bleed.

The more the coalition shouts “supreme value,” the more it proves Sompolinsky’s point: in a war state, whoever writes the Basic Laws decides whose blood is expendable. Right now, it is not the people in the study hall.

#Israel #TorahLaw #Haredim #IDF #war #coalition #HighCourt #fakeDemocracy #oligarchy #conscription

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Fatwas, Frontlines and the General Staff

Tehran’s clerics just issued a religious death sentence on Trump and Netanyahu; in Bnei Brak, a rabbi calls down a curse on Israel’s own chief of staff. Different languages, same addiction: turning politics into holy war and generals into demons.

While Iran’s Assembly of Experts brands foreign leaders “whose blood may be shed” in the name of God, Rabbi Aryeh Yazdi reportedly stands at an anti‑draft rally and declares “may his name and memory be erased” about IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, accusing “the entire army” of wanting to uproot faith, Torah and the Messiah.

At the same event, former chief Sephardi rabbi Yitzhak Yosef tells the crowd that wars are won not by Iron Dome, but by Torah students in the yeshivot. In Tehran, clerics sanctify violence against enemies abroad. In Bnei Brak, rabbis delegitimize the officers keeping those missiles from landing.

The meta‑joke writes itself. Iran’s regime uses fatwa language to cover for military weakness and political crisis; it talks big about assassinating Trump while scrambling to keep radar and command posts from getting blown up.

Haredi leaders denounce the army that’s already carrying their security burden, portraying a draft enforcement campaign as an existential war on religion, then insist that the real front line is in the study hall. Both are selling a theology where blood and risk belong to someone else.

Meanwhile, Israel’s own leadership plays both sides. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s successor, Defense Minister Kac, condemns the rabbinic incitement and insists you can’t cross red lines against the people responsible for national security — days after calling to stop arrests of yeshiva draft dodgers.

The coalition passes a Basic Law elevating Torah study to “supreme value,” protects mass exemptions, then expresses shock when rabbis talk about the IDF as a threat to faith and curse its commanders from a stage.

Put Tehran and Bnei Brak side by side and you get parallel processes, not opposites. In Iran, clerical power uses religion to criminalize compromise and keep a collapsing regime afloat. In Israel, coalition politics uses religion to outsource risk to soldiers while building a protected class that can curse those same soldiers with impunity.

In both cases, the uniform is expected to absorb the fire, the robe to claim the victory, and any challenge to that hierarchy to be labeled heresy.

So when Iran’s Assembly of Experts declares Trump and Netanyahu fair game, and an Israeli rabbi declares the chief of staff erasable, the question isn’t who’s more extreme.

It’s how long both systems can keep asking the same people to fight and die while their leaders, clerical and political, compete over who gets to issue the next curse in God’s name.

#Israel #Iran #IDF #Tehran #Haredim #draft #war #religion #Torah #fakeDemocracy

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Israel’s Draft Law Circus: The Rabbi vs. The General

Israel passes a law shielding tens of thousands of ultra‑Orthodox draft dodgers from arrest until 2027 — then explodes in rage at the one man who says this will break the army.

Shas leader Aryeh Deri, key member of the security cabinet and serial defendant in courtrooms, accuses IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir of “trying to help the left-wing bloc during an election campaign” because Zamir warned that the law is “clearly inconsistent” with the IDF’s needs and grants “mass exemptions from prosecution.” Deri insists arrests “won’t bring a single recruit,” while army data shows enforcement doubled Haredi enlistment and that most arrested evaders end up serving.

When the High Court freezes the law, Deri announces he no longer recognizes its authority — a minister deciding that the court exists for him only when it rubber‑stamps inequality.

The IDF spokesman is forced to remind politicians that attacking the chief of staff “in a cheap way” means hitting every Golani kid, tanker and pilot he represents.

Opposition figures line up to cash in on the hypocrisy: Gadi Eisenkot calls Deri’s performance “arrogance and detachment from reality” and says there is “nothing Jewish” about sending only part of the people to a necessary war; Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid point out the same image — Deri visiting evaders, hugging draft‑dodging grandkids, then sending other people’s children to die while branding the general a partisan thug.

The kid holding the draft notice can do the math himself: in 2026 Israel, service is mandatory for suckers, optional for the well-represented, and the only war everyone agrees to fight is over who gets to call that inequality “Jewish values.”

#israel #IDF #haredim #conscription #HighCourt #Deri #Zamir #fakeDemocracy

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Districts Closed. Membership Rolls Open.

Likud's district seats are closed to sitting lawmakers. The District Court upheld the party tribunal's decision, forcing incumbents who hoped for a protected regional slot back into the national primary — where the price of loyalty is measured in activists, buses and membership lists.

The official story is internal democracy. The practical story is that several dozen incumbents suddenly need organized voters, and there are only so many organizers to go around.

Likud has an estimated 140,000 members, roughly 7,000 of them ultra-Orthodox.

Five percent sounds negligible until you remember how a primary works: turnout is low, and a bloc that arrives together on instruction is worth several times its share of the registry.

That bloc is no longer content to channel its votes through Shas or United Torah Judaism. It is building direct influence inside the party that runs the government.

Israel Katz recently visited a major Haredi organizer for a blessing ahead of the vote. In Likud, ideology is useful. A membership registry is better.

Then there is the other door. Netanyahu has given the first of his eight reserved slots to Oren Dobronsky, a businessman and tech investor, at No. 11 on the list.

Likud says Dobronsky will lead artificial-intelligence policy across education, medicine, the economy and "all sectors of the state."

Israel's AI future has been assigned before the primary electorate has selected a single candidate.

Within hours, reporters and rivals noted that Dobronsky's father has long chaired Yisrael Beiteinu's arrangements committee — the body that runs a rival party's internal machinery — and that Dobronsky himself had recently posted a blistering attack on Donald Trump.

The party that sells discipline, loyalty and ideological hygiene has brought in an outsider with an inconvenient family résumé and an inconvenient social-media archive.

That is the point. Likud is not one system but two, running at the same time. Incumbents who spent years accumulating members are sent out to win them all over again, while the seat that comes with a policy portfolio and a national brief goes to a man who never needed a single member.

The primary is real. It is also not where the decisions that matter are made.

The districts are shut. The deals are open. And the ruling party is assembling its list for the next decade one personal favor at a time.

#Israel #Likud #Netanyahu #primaries #Haredim #AI #fakeDemocracy

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Jerusalem’s Draft-Dodger Dividend

Thousands marched through Jerusalem to honor ultra-Orthodox men released from military prison for draft evasion. At the end, each man was promised 1,000 shekels.

The country is extending reserve call-ups while a religious movement puts a cash prize on refusing the draft.

The procession began in Geula and ended near Kikar HaShabbat. About 50 recently released draft evaders attended, though roughly 100 had been invited.

Participants held signs calling the IDF an “enemy army” and demanding the release of “hostages” from Prison 10, the military prison.

The event’s organizers said the money came from donations abroad. Video later showed Rabbi Yehuda Tzadaka handing envelopes to the men, with 1,000 shekels in each.

The cash is neither a salary nor a fine. It is a public reward for choosing the army’s jail over the army.

Yashar! leader Gadi Eisenkot called the coming vote a choice between a “government of draft evasion” and a “Zionist government of enlistment.”

Democrat leader Yair Golan said people were marching through the capital with anti-IDF signs while Netanyahu transfers billions of shekels to their community. Bennett said the Netanyahu-Deri government pays them billions.

Ofer Winter placed the sequence correctly: the evaders received honors in Bnei Brak, then the calls of “enemy army” arrived in Jerusalem. He said the scenes demeaned IDF soldiers.

Avigdor Liberman demanded an immediate investigation into who financed the envelopes and called on Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz to condemn the event that same night.

Israel’s government is asking for authority to keep up to 200,000 reservists under emergency call-up through November. In Jerusalem, a parallel institution handed cash to men whose emergency was refusing to serve.

#Israel #IDF #Haredim #Draft

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Chosenness Has a Finance Department

Rabbi Dov Lando says Israel would have been better off never being founded. His political allies negotiate with the government. The state’s spiritual value and its payment schedule belong to separate departments.

Lando exposed a disagreement over what Jewish chosenness requires. In the Haredi model, Jews owe obligations to Torah. The state earns its keep by supporting that life. Religious Zionism gives land and sovereignty a sacred purpose. Secular Zionism translates chosenness into democracy and military morality. Each camp arrives with a different job description for Israel.

Religious Zionists want the army to secure the promised land. Secular Zionists want it to protect the country and certify its moral distinction. Lando’s standard asks whether the national project serves Torah.

A flag answers that question poorly. A budget line does better.

Netanyahu’s coalition makes these competing interpretations administratively compatible. Politicians who sanctify sovereignty need votes from politicians whose religious authority questions the state’s very existence.

The latter can collect public funding without purchasing the accompanying theology.

Three versions of chosenness share one treasury. Coalition negotiations handle the exchange rate.

#Israel #Haredim #Zionism #Netanyahu

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The Army Needs an Escort

Military police went to Modi’in overnight to arrest a deserter. By morning, the soldiers had left under police protection. The deserter celebrated surrounded by hundreds of protesters.

Reports offered competing versions of the operation. One described a failed arrest after violence against police.

Another said protesters stormed a police station and forcibly freed the detainee.

A third described a crowd forcing its way into a building to prevent his arrest. The ending stayed consistent: the arrest target stayed, and the arresting force needed an escort out.

The opposition promptly opened its campaign office at the scene. Gadi Eisenkot promised a draft law that would strengthen the army. Naftali Bennett offered a financial sanction: “In our government, anyone who doesn’t serve won’t get a shekel.”

Avigdor Lieberman supplied the coalition arithmetic: “Without the draft dodgers, Bibi has no government.”

Netanyahu depends on the political partners the opposition blames for obstructing military service.

His rivals promise to bring them into line once they take office. The soldiers sent to enforce the existing rules needed police protection to leave.

The deserter got his celebration immediately. Enforcement comes after the election.

#Israel #Conscription #Haredim #Netanyahu

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Gur Backs UTJ, Barely

The Gur Rebbe, Rabbi Yaakov Aryeh Alter, called on his Hasidim to vote for United Torah Judaism, ending days of uncertainty over whether Israel’s largest Hasidic movement would back the party at all.

The call appeared in the Oct. 18 edition of Hamodia, the Agudat Yisrael daily tied to Gur. It asks followers to vote for the “Gimel” list, UTJ’s ballot letter.

The silence had followed weeks of tension between Gur and Degel HaTorah, UTJ’s non-Hasidic partner, partly over how hard to press the government on the draft law.

One Gur Hasid told Arutz Sheva the aim was to keep Belz candidate Elyakim Stark out of the Knesset.

Belz endorsed UTJ on the night of Oct. 17. Hamodia ran a parallel endorsement from the Slonim Rebbe below the Gur statement.

Gur’s notice did not urge activists to recruit additional voters, unlike the movement’s previous election directives.

The message lifts the threat of a public boycott without resolving the dispute behind it. UTJ got the endorsement. The Gur leadership kept the campaign at arm’s length.

#UTJ #Israel #Haredim #Elections

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Nothing to Declare but an Exemption

Forty-two Chabad students returned from New York to find Military Police waiting at Ben Gurion Airport. Haredi politicians called it election interference. The army called it enforcing the draft law.

Twenty-seven agreed to enlist, received suspended sentences, and went home pending induction. Thirteen refused and were sent to military prison. Two others, who had evaded service for more than 540 days, were also imprisoned.

Netanyahu called the arrests “unacceptable,” saying they undermined efforts to arrange ultra-Orthodox enlistment without coercion. The operation nevertheless produced 27 commitments to serve.

The men had received enlistment orders before leaving for America, according to Kan. They reportedly moved through the airport together, hoping their numbers would deter arrests. Military Police brought a bus.

A week before the election, the prime minister and his own army disagree over whether getting men to report for service counts as success.

#Israel #Conscription #Haredim #IsraelElections

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Nobody Expects the Israeli Inquisition

Israel’s culture minister has found a historical comparison for sanctions against draft evaders. It is the Spanish Inquisition. The proposed punishment is losing benefits. Miki Zohar supplied the persecution.

The Likud minister told Kan Reshet Bet that sanctions on individual ultra-Orthodox Torah students amounted to religious persecution. “This reminds me of the dark days of the Inquisition,” he said. Zohar also said men who were not genuinely studying should serve. Apparently, the line between lawful enforcement and medieval terror depends on attendance records.

In Kfar Saba, police found that a yeshiva student involved in a traffic incident was listed as a deserter and transferred him to the Military Police. Protesters gathered to prevent the handover, then blocked roads around the station and Ra’anana Junction. The transfer went ahead.

The protesters tried to stop an arrest. The minister recast sanctions as persecution. Both give religious status a veto over an obligation the state imposes on other citizens.

Zohar belongs to the government responsible for enforcing that obligation. His Inquisition has a Cabinet seat.

#Israel #Conscription #Haredim #MikiZohar

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