Israel's Ministerial Committee on Legislation approved at its weekly meeting on Sunday a bill proposal to remove a significant financial sanction against haredi yeshiva students who have not enlisted for IDF service, despite the legal requirement to do so.
The bill was first proposed last week by the haredi parties as an alternative to a bill that flat-out exempts most haredim from service, which they first demanded as a precondition for their support for the 2025 budget.
It will now likely go up for preliminary approval on the Knesset floor on Wednesday, after which it will begin the legislative process in one of the Knesset committees.
Current Israeli law requires that the IDF draft all Israeli military-age men and those who do not enlist cannot receive certain financial subsidies.
These include a subsidy of daycare centers for children in which the mother works, and the father is a yeshiva student.
The bill proposes to change this so that the subsidies be given only based on the mother's status, so that such families will continue to receive the subsidies.
The ministerial committee on legislation is the body that sets the government's position on legislative proposals.
While bills that are opposed by the committee still reach the Knesset floor, they rarely advance without the committee's prior approval.
The committee's approval of the daycare bill indicated its intention to advance it despite legal issues and challenges from within the coalition.
The attorney general's office wrote in a legal opinion to committee chairman Justice Minister Yariv Levin on Sunday morning that the bill proposal "incentivizes the illegal evasion of IDF service, harms those who do serve, and is unconstitutional" and therefore should not be advanced.
The committee unanimously decided to approve the bill regardless.
Haredi lawmakers have argued that the sanction barring subsidies from these families would not lead to yeshiva students enlisting in the IDF, but rather to working haredi mothers to quit their jobs in order to care for children who they can no longer afford to send to daycare.
However, according to the legal opinion written by Deputy AGs Gil Limon and Avital Sompolinski, the bill enabled "institutionalized state encouragement to refrain from enlisting in the IDF, against the Security Service Law, against the needs of the IDF, and against the requirement of equality in [sharing] the burden."
The bill proposal addresses three components. The first is the aforementioned change in criteria for receiving the subsidies.
This, according to the proposal, will apply already to the 2024-2025 school year (retroactively). The second component relates to the computation method of the family's income, in order to determine its financial "ranking" and as such the amount of the subsidy.
According to the proposal, this will include the income of both parents, not just the mother. The third component is prioritizing acceptance into the state-subsidized daycares. According to the proposal, this will only go into effect in the 2025-2026 school year.
The Religious Zionist Party announced in a statement prior to the committee vote on Sunday that it would only support the bill if it included two amendments.
The first was that reservists who meet the criteria to receive state subsidies will be prioritized first in acceptance to daycares.
The second is a unique financial "ranking" for reservists that will enable them to receive a higher subsidy.
RZP's demand was noteworthy, as it indicated that the party, many of whose constituents have served prolonged periods in the IDF reserves during the ongoing war, will not agree to all haredi demands aimed at relieving haredi constituents of the requirement to serve. This joins other members of the coalition who have expressed reservations or opposition to the bill, such as MK Dan Illouz from the Likud.
Opposition leader MK Yair Lapid said in response to the bill's approval in the committee that the committee members who voted in favor of it "inflicted a critical blow against IDF soldiers and reservists."
"This is treason without atonement against hundreds of our dead and thousands of our wounded soldiers. Is there blood worth nothing? Is there no value to their sacrifice in the eyes of this government?" Lapid said. He added that "the bill must not have a majority in the Knesset."
Religious Zionist Party conditions its support
Following a High Court ruling in late June that determined that all military-age haredi men were required to enlist in the IDF and that there was no longer any legal basis for their exemption, the attorney general's office listed four financial subsidies that depended on the legality of the exemption and therefore had become illegal as well.
The daycare subsidy was one of them. However, the AG's office consented in September to delay the cancellation of the subsidies for three months, until the end of November, in order to enable the Labor Ministry to prepare for the change.
The government responded by issuing an executive directive that all daycare subsidies, not just for parents whose father is a yeshiva student, would apply only until the end of November.
The AG's office ruled the directive illegal since it did not explain why all other Israelis were also only eligible for three months.
The labor ministry's legal advisor therefore refrained from signing off on the directive, and all Israeli parents have yet to receive daycare subsidies in the current school year as a result.