Haredi parties reject latest draft exemption bill, setting stage for Sept. elections |
The Knesset’s ultra-Orthodox parties have rejected the latest draft of the coalition’s Haredi conscription exemption bill, Channel 12 reported on Sunday, calling the future of the controversial legislation into question.
The latest hurdle to the bill’s passage means it is likely that the two Haredi parties in the Knesset, United Torah Judaism and Shas, will continue pushing to bring elections forward by about a month, likely to September 15 in the middle of the High Holidays, as they have increasingly tied the two issues together.
The rejection of the bill by the Haredi parties came hours after Hebrew media outlets reported that the leadership of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee was preparing to distribute an updated draft of the controversial legislation to lawmakers.
The legislation — which would ostensibly increase military conscription in the Haredi community, but ultimately enable continued exemptions for full-time yeshiva students — is widely seen as legally dubious and laden with loopholes.
The bill has generated intense resistance even among members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, and was briefly taken off the table in March with the outbreak of the US-Israeli war with Iran.
However, Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Boaz Bismuth later announced that he would continue to push the bill through, although it failed to progress due to a last-minute disagreement with the United Torah Judaism party’s Degel HaTorah faction’s rabbinic leadership over the bill’s contents.
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