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Israel’s supreme court dealt a blow to Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightwing coalition on Thursday by ordering it to suspend state subsidies for many ultraorthodox Jews who attend religious schools instead of doing military service.
The interim order came as the government, which includes two ultraorthodox parties, looked set to miss a deadline to draw up new conscription legislation needed after a supreme court ruling that exempting religious students from Israel’s compulsory military service was unconstitutional.
The future of the exemption is widely seen as a topic with the potential to spark a serious enough split within Netanyahu’s government to bring it down, with ultraorthodox politicians determined to preserve the arrangement, and others, including defence minister Yoav Gallant, intent on ending it.
But while both coalition parties representing the ultraorthodox community — known as the Haredim in Hebrew — reacted furiously to the court’s move, neither immediately threatened to withdraw from the government.
Aryeh Deri, head of the ultraorthodox Shas party, accused the court of “destroying the foundations of the Jewish identity of the State of Israel”.
“The judges of the High Court of Justice want to saw off the branch of existence of the Jewish people,” he wrote on X. “The people of Israel are engaged in a war of existence on several fronts and the judges of the High Court did everything tonight to create a civil war as well.”
Yitzhak Goldknopf, leader of the United Torah Judaism party, branded the order a “disgrace” and invoked the Torah — the Hebrew bible. “Without the Torah, we have no right to exist. We will fight for the right of every Jew to learn Torah and we will not compromise on that,” he said.
However, Benny Gantz, a former general who joined Netanyahu’s coalition in a unity government after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, praised the court’s decision, and urged the government to pass a law conscripting the Haredim.
“The High Court ruled the obvious today. The time has come for the government to do the obvious,” he said.
The exemption for religious students dates back to a compromise between Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, and rabbis representing a few hundred ultraorthodox families in 1948. This exempted 400 young Haredi men from military service if they enrolled in a yeshiva, or religious school, instead.
But even before the war with Hamas, the arrangement — and the state subsidies for yeshiva students that financed it — had become a source of deep frustration for the rest of Jewish Israeli society, as the number of ultraorthodox exempted had soared, partly because of the rapid growth of the Haredi population.
Israel’s top court ruled in 2017 that the exemption was unconstitutional, and since then, successive governments have tried and failed to pass new legislation on ultraorthodox conscription.
Last year, Netanyahu’s government issued a temporary resolution ordering the army not to conscript yeshiva students before March 31, pledging to come up with new conscription legislation in the meantime.
But with that deadline looming, Netanyahu’s government on Thursday applied to the supreme court for another 30 days to draw up the legislation.
The court did not immediately respond to that request, but ordered instead that from April 1, the government must stop subsidies to religious schools for students who have not received an exemption or deferral of their military service and have not reported for conscription since July 1.
Schools will continue to receive subsidies for students with an exemption from military service.
The court will decide in May whether to make the interim order permanent.
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