Israel to prepare enlistment of strictly-Orthodox on 1 April

Israel’s attorney general Gali Baharav Miara told the government to prepare to enlist strictly-Orthodox to the army starting 1 April.

In February, the Supreme Court ordered the government to explain why ultra-orthodox still aren’t drafted to the army, with a deadline set for Wednesday.

As the deadline expired on Wednesday, the government requested a 12-hour extension to solve the issue, after days of discussions led nowhere.

Miara told the government that yeshivas failing to send its students to the army will lose their state funding, unless the government passes a new bill on the issue of army enlistment.

The “status-quo” agreement in Israel has exempted ultra-orthodox boys and girls from the army for decades, whereas secular and less religious Israeli Jewish girls and boys have to serve roughly two and three years in the IDF respectively.

In 2017, after years of debate over the arrangement, the Supreme Court finally ruled that the exemption of strictly-Orthodox from the army was   unconstitutional.

United Torah Judaism lawmaker Moshe Gafni issued a statement on Thursday, saying: “Without the Torah scholars we have no right to exist in this land. After two thousand years of exile, the people of Israel returned to being a Jewish nation in their own land and this is in the merit of the Torah scholars who continue the tradition.”

“I bless the soldiers who risk their lives in Gaza and here on the northern border, I pray with all the people of Israel that they return home safe and sound, but without Torah students we have no future, and therefore we need to preserve them with all possible force.”

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party lashed out at the government on Thursday, saying it “won’t get away with” continuing to exempt strictly-Orthodox youth, calling it “an insult to the IDF and its combatants. The stain will be on Netanyahu and his cabinet members alone, and to their eternal disgrace.”