Photo by
Yoav Dudkevitch/TPS-IL on 11 June, 2025
Israeli Government Stays Afloat With Framework for Religious Army Conscription
Jerusalem, 12 June, 2025 (TPS-IL) -- Israel’s governing coalition survived a vote on dissolving the Knesset after leaders of the Haredi Orthodox parties agreed on the principles of legislation for conscripting yeshiva students into the military on Thursday morning. An opposition bill that would have set in motion the process for new elections was rejected by a vote of 61-53.
“After long discussions, we reached agreements on the principles on which the draft law will be based,” said MK Yuli Edelstein, chairman of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, whose legal team is crafting new legislation that would establish annual draft quotas from the haredi sector, eventually reaching 50% of each graduating class. The bill would include sanctions for individuals ignoring draft orders.
The breakthrough came when Edelstein, who took a hard line on sanctions against Haredim who refuse draft orders, softened his stance. If new legislation doesn’t pass by the Knesset’s summer recess in late July, the current law requiring all eligible haredi men to serve will remain in effect until at least October.
Members of the Shas party voted against the dispersing the parliament while the United Torah Judaism party was split.
Speaking in the Knesset before the vote, opposition leader MK Yair Lapid accused the government of “selling out” soldiers.
“Again you sold out our fighters – for what? For another two weeks? Another three?” he said. “The Haredi had two options tonight – either they will lose the evasion law or they will lose the government. The government helped them choose evasion.”
The opposition must wait six months before it can propose legislation to dissolve the Knesset.
Since the previous legal exemption expired in June 2024, approximately 24,000 draft orders to haredi men have been largely ignored. The IDF has already acknowledged it won’t meet its High Court commitment of 4,800 haredi draftees by June 30, 2025.
Professor Emmanuel Navon, who lectures on political science at Tel Aviv University recently told The Press Service of Israel that a conscription law agreeable to the Haredim ultimately “won’t pass the High Court. And practically, it will be disqualified.”
The controversy has divided Israeli society for decades, but a recent High Court ruling and the prolonged war with Hamas has made the exemptions harder to sell to voters, Navon said.
The military began making plans to draft yeshiva students after Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled in in 2024 that exemptions for the Haredi community were illegal.
The army told lawmakers it faces a critical manpower shortage, needing approximately 12,000 new recruits, including 7,000 combat soldiers and seeks to recruit 4,800 Haredi men annually, a figure expected to rise over time.
Military service is compulsory for all Israeli citizens. However, Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and the country’s leading rabbis agreed to a status quo that deferred military service for Haredi men studying in yeshivot, or religious institutions. At the time, no more than several hundred men were studying in yeshivot.
However, the Orthodox community has grown significantly since Israel’s founding. In January 2023, the Central Bureau of Statistics reported that Haredim are Israel’s fastest-growing community and projected it would constitute 16% of the population by the end of the decade. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, the number of yeshiva students exceeded 138,000 in 2021.
