The government isn’t just dodging the Haredi draft; it’s dodging the law |
In its failure to fulfill its obligation to draft members of the ultra-Orthodox public into the army, the government has been violating High Court of Justice rulings for years.
Until recently, however, the Attorney General’s Office and the State Attorney’s Office provided it with a measure of protection. They helped generate the legal cover necessary to extend deadlines for implementing the court’s rulings — requesting endless extensions, reporting on ostensible progress in policy formulation, and establishing committee after committee to feign compliance.
But no longer, as Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara made clear on Monday in a damning notice filed with the court.
In a ruling handed down nearly two months ago, the High Court ordered the government to formulate a clear policy to ensure equal conscription, including criminal, economic, and civil measures.
Once the government stopped pretending it intended to do anything to implement that ruling, it also lost the protective shield provided by the attorney general.
If this is how the government behaves, state attorneys will no longer stand before the Supreme Court and struggle to defend the indefensible in the face of the justices’ rebukes.
The attorney general’s notice, submitted on Monday to the High Court in response to petitioners’ request to hold the government in contempt of court, is unprecedented in its severity.
The declaration that the government has not acted to implement the High Court ruling is not surprising; the same point had appeared in letters from Baharav-Miara to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that were made public by the Justice Ministry.
The surprise lies, however, in the harsh, dramatic description of the danger to the stability of Israel’s democratic system as a direct result of the government allowing itself to openly ignore a binding ruling.
“The government,” the attorney general wrote to the court, “did not act to carry out the ruling, nor did it express any intention whatsoever to comply… This conduct constitutes a real danger to the existence of the democratic regime in the State of Israel, including the principle of separation of........