Ultra-Orthodox leaders in Israel accuse Netanyahu government of waging war on Torah students

Israeli ultra-Orthodox political and religious leaders accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government on Thursday of waging a political war against ultra-Orthodox Torah students. 

“The ones who are leading the war against Torah students are the religious Zionists,” stated Moshe Gafni, a lawmaker from the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism (UTJ) party. He added that “those who are leading the incitement against us… they are worse than the biggest haters of Torah scholars.” 

The harsh statement comes after the UTJ earlier this week decided to leave the Netanyahu-led coalition government. The Sephardi ultra-Orthodox Shas party announced on Wednesday that its ministers would resign from the government due to what it claimed constituted a “continued terrible persecution against the holy yeshiva students.” 

The ultra-Orthodox leaders have accused the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Yuli Edelstein from Netanyahu’s Likud party of walking back on alleged commitments made in negotiations concerning laws that would greenlight widespread conscription exemption for ultra-Orthodox Torah students. However, Motto Babchik, a veteran advisor to the UTJ head Yitzhak Goldknopf, mainly blamed Netanyahu for the political split with the ultra-Orthodox parties. 

“I don’t want to defend Edelstein, but he hasn’t changed his position. He’s not to blame. The [prime minister] is to blame,” Babchik said in an interview with an ultra-Orthodox news outlet.  “Netanyahu continues to lie. He is an expert in divisiveness and causing conflict,” he claimed. 

Looking back, Babchik assessed that if the prime minister had approached Edelstein months ago “demanding a draft of the conscription law, everything would have been behind us, but he simply didn’t want to.”

Gafni accused Netanyahu of misleading the ultra-Orthodox parties in the political and legal negotiations. 

“He should have told us that he couldn’t pass this law. He misled us – that’s one issue. And the second is the prime minister. He bears responsibility because he is the head of the system. He did not lie to us about this matter, but he bears responsibility and he needs to fix it. He made an agreement with us in which the main issue was regulating the status of yeshiva students.”

Military exemption for ultra-Orthodox men has been a controversial and divisive issue in Israeli society for decades. Mainstream Israelis whose sons and daughters serve in the Israel Defense Forces have demanded that ultra-Orthodox men share the burden of national defense. The issue has become particularly acute amid the ongoing war where the Israeli military has stretched its limited manpower in the ongoing war with Iran and its various terrorist proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. While some ultra-Orthodox men have joined the IDF, the majority have not. 

In June 2024, the Israeli Supreme Court in Jerusalem ruled the government must recruit ultra-Orthodox students to the IDF and stop funding religious students who refuse to join the army. 

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich who heads the National Religious Party, responded by stating that the ultra-Orthodox lawmaker Gafni should be ashamed of himself, urging him to “go visit the bereaved families” and visit the military cemetery on Mount Hertzl. 

Last June, former IDF Chief of Staff Lt-Col. Herzi Halevi emphasized that the military needed more troops, specifically combat soldiers. 

"The IDF needs more fighters," Halevi told ultra-Orthodox soldiers. He praised them and stressed that they serve as role models for other religiously observant soldiers. 

"We want you to show that it's possible to be a Haredi fighter, to study and protect the state's security. Continue doing a good job, protecting the residents here and also being a pioneer – Haredi fighters, each one as he defines himself," the IDF chief stated.