Multiple coalition lawmakers, including members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, expressed vocal opposition on Monday to the government’s proposed bill regulating ultra-Orthodox draft exemptions as the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee resumed deliberations on the controversial legislation.

“The purpose of this law could be anything — apparently maintaining the coalition or something else — but it is certainly not recruitment. It is definitely not recruitment,” declared Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, who was removed as committee chair by his party this summer after drafting a strict enlistment bill that angered Netanyahu’s ultra-Orthodox coalition partners.

Asserting that the bill “will harm national security,” Edelstein said that it would lead to the enlistment of far fewer than the 12,000 soldiers the Israel Defense Forces has said it needs, while also lacking sanctions and “real measures aimed at drafting the Haredi public” — ensuring that “nothing will happen.”

Amid rising dissent from within the coalition, it is unclear whether the bill in its current form would win a majority in its second and third readings to become law without first undergoing major revisions. So far, at least eight coalition lawmakers have voiced their public opposition, with multiple others thought to quietly hold similar views.

Current committee chairman Boaz Bismuth (Likud) released the text of the long-awaited revised conscription bill last Thursday, prompting harsh criticism from both the coalition and opposition, as well as, reportedly, his own committee’s legal adviser.

For the past year, the Haredi leadership has been pushing for the passage of a law that would largely keep its constituency out of the IDF, after the High Court ruled that decades-long blanket exemptions from army duty informally afforded to full-time Haredi yeshiva students were illegal.

Some 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men aged between 18 and 24 are currently believed to be eligible for military service, but have not enlisted. The IDF has said it urgently needs 12,000 recruits due to the strain on standing and reserve forces caused by the war against Hamas in Gaza and other military challenges.

The legislation, as currently laid out, would continue to grant military service exemptions to full-time yeshiva students while ostensibly increasing conscription among graduates of Haredi educational institutions.

However, the bill would also remove various provisions from Edelstein’s draft that were intended to ensure that those registered for yeshiva study are actually studying, and cancel all sanctions on draft evaders when they turn 26.

Addressing the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Likud MK Dan Illouz reiterated his previously stated objections to the bill, arguing that without significant revisions “the law won’t be good enough, and it won’t bring the change we need in Israel, both from a security and from a social perspective.”

“And in my opinion, you can’t call this a conscription law if we remove the existing sanctions that encourage enlistment,” he said. “You can’t call it a conscription law and expand the definition of Haredim to include people who are no longer Haredi, people who are no........

© The Times of Israel