(RNS) — Ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties in the Israeli Knesset are moving to pull their support from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition over a plan to conscript into the Israel Defense Forces tens of thousands of yeshiva students, who had previously been exempt.
The Knesset is expected to vote Wednesday (June 11) on a motion to dissolve Netanyahu’s government. The Sephardic ultra-Orthodox Shas party and the Ashkenazi United Torah Judaism party have both indicated they will vote in favor of dissolution, stripping Netanyahu’s coalition of 18 of the 61 seats he needs to maintain his government.
“The ultra-Orthodox public feels persecuted by the Likud and (Knesset member Yuli) Edelstein,” Shas spokesperson Asher Medina told Israeli media.
On Thursday, Israel’s attorney general announced that next month, it intends to serve some 54,000 conscription notices to young men from Israel’s ultra-Orthodox sector, known in Hebrew as Haredim.
The plan has widened a long-festering rift in Israeli politics and society.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a speech in Jerusalem, March 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
For decades, the Haredim have relied on a deal struck between Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and rabbinic leaders during Israel’s war of independence.
Ben-Gurion allowed those enrolled in traditional rabbinic seminaries, known as yeshivas, whose main occupation is Torah study, to be exempted from serving in the Jewish militias that would become the IDF.
The agreement became known as “Torah Umanuto,” meaning “Torah is his job.”
Haredi leaders have argued that, while the IDF provides Israel with physical defense, the yeshiva students’ studies make the country worthy of spiritual defense.
At the time, the exemption only applied to a few hundred students, many of whom were Holocaust survivors. They also represented some of the survivors of the major centers of Jewish learning in Europe that had been destroyed in World War II. Today, however, the Haredim comprise some 13% of Israel’s population, the country’s fastest-growing demographic and tens of thousands of military-age young men.
Haredi leaders have also battled against conscription on the grounds that it would erode their communities and forcibly assimilate them into wider Israeli society.
Israeli police officers disperse ultra-Orthodox Jewish men blocking a highway during a protest against army recruitment in Bnei Brak, Israel, Marc …