Defense Minister Israel Katz presented his proposal on Tuesday to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee (FADC) to confront the issue of haredim serving in the IDF.
Katz said that over seven years, his bill would succeed at integrating tens of thousands of haredim into the military.
Opposition MKs Merav Cohen (Yesh Atid), Sharon Nir (Yisrael Beytenu), Efrat Raiten (Democrats), and Merav Michaeli (Democrats) called out that Katz was ignoring the numbers that the IDF itself said it needed and could absorb.
The defense minister said that in the first year of the law, the number of haredim serving in the IDF per year would jump to 4,800 in 2025, while it would jump to 5,700 for 2026, and then it would gradually eventually reach 50% of those haredim eligible by 2032, the seventh year of the bill.
Nir, Raiten, and Michaeli were referring to the IDF, saying that within around two years, they could integrate all eligible haredim.
Introducing sanctions
Next, Katz said that contrary to reports which say his bill is weak on enforcement, his bill would include institutional financial sanctions both on any haredi yeshivot not meeting their quota for IDF service as well as personal financial sanctions against haredim who are issued draft orders and yet are not serving.
He added that the personal financial sanctions would also cancel subsidies for preschool for haredim, a legal question that is currently in dispute and waiting for either the High Court of Justice or the government to resolve, given that the court gave a February deadline for freezing such funding.
Throughout Katz’s presentation, opposition MKS and family members of hostages called out and interrupted, accusing him of deserting the hostages and those soldiers who had died during the war while the haredim had not served.
FADC Chairman Yuli Edelstein eventually kicked Cohen out of the room for successive interruptions.
Edelstein has also threatened to kick out Raiten.
A mother of one of the hostages screamed at Katz that he had left her daughter to die in Hamas’s hands in Gaza. “Where is my daughter?” “Why isn’t she on the list?”
Multiple hostage family members said, “You have selected some hostages to live and some to die.”
They added, “At Auschwitz, there was selection off the train” of who would live and who would die.
Another hostage family member screamed at Katz, “you are the marionette of Bibi.”
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