Israeli Supreme Court Revokes Law Giving More Yeshiva Students Draft Exemptions
Ultra-Orthodox Jews gather in Bnei Brak to protest Haredi draft laws in Israel in March 2014. Image by Getty Images
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel’s Supreme Court struck down a law that increased the number of draft exemptions for haredi Orthodox yeshiva students.
The legislation, passed two years ago, was “unconstitutional, disproportionate, and harms equality,” the justices wrote in the majority decision, which passed 8-1. The law’s stated purpose of reducing the inequality of the burden of military service was not achieved, the justices said.
The court gave the government one year to rework the draft for haredi men.
Among those that welcomed the move was the Yesh Atid party, which has been demanding that the haredim serve in the Israel Defense Forces.
“Values won today, the spirit of IDF won today, our soldiers won today,” Yesh Atid head Yair Lapid said in a news conference Tuesday evening in Tel Aviv. “It’s clear that things can be different. Today we started to turn the ship towards sanity and values. That’s why we are in politics. Everyone serves. Everyone works.”
Arye Deri, the head of the Sephardi Orthodox Shas party and the nation’s interior minister, slammed the ruling, saying the decision “again proves the serious disconnect between the Supreme Court and the Jewish people, who have known through all generations that what holds us together against persecution and decrees was Torah study.”
The haredi exemptions had been a condition of Shas and the United Torah Judaism party when they agreed to join the government coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud party following national elections in 2015.
Haredi Jews, as opposed to the modern or “religious Zionist” Orthodox who regularly serve in the IDF, were exempted from military service under agreements that go back to the founding of the state.
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