Defense Minister Israel Katz presented his proposal on Tuesday to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee (FADC) to confront the issue of haredim (ultra-Orthodox) serving in the IDF.
Katz said that his bill would succeed in integrating tens of thousands of haredim into the military over a period of seven years.
Opposition MKs Meirav Cohen (Yesh Atid), Sharon Nir (Yisrael Beytenu), Efrat Rayten (The Democrats), and Merav Michaeli (The Democrats) disputed his remarks by saying that the number of recruits the IDF says it needs and could absorb is higher than what he said.
According to Katz, under the proposed bill, the number of haredim serving in the IDF per year would jump to 4,800 in 2025, 5,700 in 2026, and would steadily reach 50% eligibility by 2032 – the seventh year of the bill’s implementation.Nir, Rayten, and Michaeli responded that full integration was possible within two years.
Introducing sanctions
Katz said that contrary to reports that the bill is weak on enforcement, it includes financial sanctions against any yeshiva that does not meet its quota and against men who are issued draft orders but do not show up.He added that the personal sanctions cancel preschool subsidies, a move that is currently in legal disputes and waiting for either the High Court of Justice or the government to resolve, given the court’s February deadline for freezing such funding.Opposition MKs and hostage families interrupted Katz’s presentation throughout, saying that the bill effectively overlooked the hostages and the soldiers killed at a time when nearly the entirety of the haredi sector has not served.FADC chairman Yuli Edelstein (Likud) eventually kicked Cohen out of the room for successive interruptions and threatened to do the same to Rayten.A mother of one of the hostages screamed at Katz that he had left her daughter to die at the hands of Hamas.“Where is my daughter?” she asked. “Why isn’t she on the list?”Other family members said, “You have selected some hostages to live and some to die.”“At Auschwitz, this selection was done once people got off the train” – unlike in this case, the family members insinuated.Another hostage family member screamed at Katz, “You are Bibi’s [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s] marionette.”