Two new laws aimed at laying the groundwork for renewing a blanket exemption from having to draft to the IDF for Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) young men were approved this week, reigniting one of Israel’s longest-running political and constitutional disputes, one that is increasingly expected to shape Israel’s next elections.
The first law, passed Monday, is the Basic Law: Torah Study, which declares that “Torah study is a fundamental value in the heritage of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.” Supporters argue that the legislation provides constitutional recognition of Torah study as a pillar of Jewish national life. Critics contend that it is intended to bolster future legislation exempting yeshiva students from military service.
The second law, approved on Tuesday, temporarily freezes the legal requirement to arrest Haredi men dodging the draft until at least November.
The Haredi draft exemption
Military service is compulsory in Israel. Most Jewish citizens are required to register for the draft at age 18, although not everyone ultimately serves. Exemptions are granted for various reasons, including to married women and mothers, individuals with certain medical conditions, women who observe Shabbat and keep kosher, and Arab Israelis.
Haredi yeshiva students, however, occupy a unique legal category. For decades, many have received repeated deferrals from military service, declaring that “Torah study is their work” and demonstrating full-time yeshiva study.
This arrangement, in place since the state’s founding, was initially agreed to by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, to exempt roughly 400 students, viewing the measure as a temporary accommodation for a community devastated by the Holocaust.
Since then, however, the number of Haredi youth who use the arrangement has surged to tens of thousands, leading to increased criticism from other Jewish citizens who are required to serve.
Over the ensuing decades, however, Israel’s Haredi population grew rapidly. What began as an exemption for several hundred students expanded to tens of thousands, prompting increasing criticism from other Israelis who viewed the policy as an unequal sharing of the burdens of citizenship.
Already in 1998, the High Court of Justice (part of Israel’s Supreme Court) ruled that the exemption was too broad and needed to be regulated to ensure some Haredim were drafted. In response, the government established the Tal Committee, which proposed a compromise intended to gradually integrate Haredim into military or civilian service.
The resulting Tal Law, passed in 2002, allowed full-time yeshiva students to defer service until they reached a certain age. At that point, these students could choose whether to serve a shortened stint in the army, do civilian national service (such as volunteer work in the emergency services or in charitable or educational organizations), enter the workforce, or continue their studies. Lawmakers hoped that the arrangement would eventually lead to increased recruitment among Haredim.
It did not.
A decade later, enlistment rates remained low, and in 2012, the High Court of Justice ruled that the Tal Law had failed to serve its purpose and violated the right to equality.
Since then, the issue has jumped between Israel’s courts and successive governments. Nearly every coalition since has relied on, at least in part, the Haredi parties, making it nearly impossible to pass legislation on the issue that the courts would approve.
Haredi parties have refused to consider any law that would lead to widespread enlistment, so the laws passed have largely extended the existing exemption without change. The parties have said that they oppose enlisting any Haredi young men due to concerns that interactions with other Israelis during their military service would cause them to leave the ultra-Orthodox way of life. They have also presented the issue as a threat to full-time Torah study, although they’ve also rejected proposals that would only draft young men who don’t spend their days in yeshivas.
The dispute has repeatedly destabilized Israeli politics. In 2018, debates surrounding the issue contributed to the dissolution of the 20th Knesset, leading to a series of successive elections and short-lived governments. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s current government was being formed, the right-wing Likud Party signed agreements with ultra-Orthodox partners committing to pass legislation preserving draft exemptions.
The most recent law regulating the exemption expired in June 2023, technically requiring the IDF to begin drafting eligible Haredim. Instead, the government instructed the IDF not to enforce the requirement while it worked on replacement legislation.
The issue was then temporarily sidelined by Hamas’s October 7 attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza. But as the conflict dragged on and reserve soldiers faced repeated deployments, questions about who serves in the military became increasingly difficult to ignore.
In February 2024, Israel’s Defense Ministry proposed extending mandatory service to address manpower shortages. The IDF has said it needs over 10,000 soldiers more than it currently has, including approximately 6,000 combat soldiers.
The proposal sparked outrage and renewed debate over conscripting Haredim, as opponents argued that the manpower shortage could be eased by requiring them to share the burden.
Efforts to reach an agreement on a new bill were unsuccessful, despite meetings between Netanyahu, government officials, and Haredi party leaders. Ultra-Orthodox leaders warned that they would leave the coalition if any bill included significant recruitment quotas or financial sanctions. Meanwhile, many members of both the opposition and the coalition insisted that enforcement mechanisms were necessary if any new law was to be effective and withstand judicial review. Then, in June 2024, the High Court of Justice unanimously ruled that the state could wait no longer and had to begin drafting Haredim.
In the two years since, several Ultra-Orthodox young men who refused to show up for their draft dates were detained or arrested, though most were released after a couple of hours or days. In practice, enforcement remained minimal, with only a few dozen arrests in proactive operations.
Nevertheless, the arrests sparked large-scale protests by Haredi Israelis, with demonstrators blocking roads and clashing with police in several cities across the country.
Amid the rising unrest surrounding the draft issue, Haredi party leaders threatened in recent weeks to support the early dissolution of the Knesset, which would have brought the national elections forward by a few weeks from their scheduled date of October 27, 2026. In response, Netanyahu and the rest of the coalition agreed to fast-track the two laws passed this week, and the Haredi parties agreed to let the Knesset finish out its four-year term, the first time it will be doing so in decades.
What is a Basic Law, and what does it have to do with the draft?
The first law passed, the Basic Law: Torah Study, is primarily important because it’s a Basic Law.
Israel has no formal written constitution. Back in 1948, Israel’s Declaration of Independence tasked the Knesset with drafting a constitution within a matter of months after its establishment, but two years later, those efforts stalled due to political disagreement. Instead, the Knesset decided in 1950 that it would adopt the “Harari Resolution,” which called for a constitution to be written chapter by chapter through the passage of Basic Laws. The idea was that, eventually, these Basic Laws would be brought together and officially approved by the Knesset as Israel’s constitution, but so far, this hasn’t happened.
That status remains controversial. Most Basic Laws can be passed or amended by a simple majority of 61 members of Knesset, a threshold nearly every governing coalition possesses. On paper, the difference between a Basic Law and an ordinary law is often little more than the words “Basic Law” in the title.
In practice, however, Israel’s courts have increasingly treated them as constitutional principles.
Because of the lack of any substantive difference between regular laws and most Basic Laws, both legal experts and politicians are split on whether the Basic Laws have any superiority over other laws. Until the mid-1990s, the courts largely refrained from intervening when a regular law conflicted with a Basic Law. That began to change with a 1995 ruling establishing the courts’ power of constitutional review. Two years later, it did exactly that, nullifying several parts of a law that contradicted the Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation.
Since then, the court has repeatedly relied on Basic Laws to invalidate legislation, including several attempts to regulate exemptions for Haredi military service.
Even though the new Basic Law: Torah Study is only one sentence long, its purpose has never been particularly mysterious. The official Explanatory Notes, as well as statements made by the MKs who promoted it, make clear that lawmakers hope it would prevent the High Court of Justice from overturning future attempts to renew a blanket draft exemption.
Until now, the High Court of Justice has ruled that blanket draft exemptions for Haredis violate the right to equality, which the court derives from the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty.
Notably, the word “equality” does not appear anywhere in that law. Instead, the court has long argued that treating similarly situated citizens differently is an affront to human dignity itself, an interpretation that remains hotly debated in Israeli legal and political circles.
The court has argued that such blanket exemptions cannot be justified by the fact that many Haredi young men are involved in full-time Torah study, because the rest of society has to bear the burden of military service, in which they must actively risk their lives, and this is a very discriminatory situation.
The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty does include a limitation, though. It states that the rights it protects can be violated by a different law “that corresponds to the values of the State of Israel, which serves an appropriate purpose, and to an extent that does not exceed what is required, or on the basis of a law, as aforementioned, by force of an explicit authorization therein.”
What that means is that Israeli constitutional law does not treat rights as absolute. Courts generally apply a principle known as proportionality: a right may be infringed if doing so serves a legitimate purpose and if no less restrictive alternative exists.
This proportionality logic is also why the court did not strike down earlier, more limited versions of the exemption right away. Those laws were justified as imperfect attempts to increase the number of Haredim who drafted while balancing competing values, namely equality, religious freedom, and the preservation of Torah study. The Tal Law, described above, ultimately failed to increase enlistment, leading the court to strike it down in 2012 after concluding that it functioned in practice as a blanket exemption and did not provide a proportional solution.
Lawmakers tried again several years later, passing legislation that set gradually increasing quotas, criminal sanctions on those who evaded service, and exemptions to about 1,800 standout yeshiva students.
That compromise proved short-lived. After the Haredi parties joined Netanyahu’s coalition in 2015, the government removed the criminal sanctions, made the quotas non-mandatory for at least five years, and gave the defense minister the authority to exempt students from the draft. This removed the law’s only enforcement mechanisms, rendering it unable to achieve its stated purpose. Two years after the amendments were enacted, the High Court of Justice struck them down.
From that moment until today, no new law has been passed, partially due to years of political instability, the COVID-19 pandemic, the wars since October 7, and partially because of the failure by any government to build the consensus needed for a new law that would stand up to scrutiny when held up to the Basic Laws.
That left lawmakers with two choices: keep trying to draft a law acceptable to the courts and the Haredi parties, or change the Basic Laws themselves.
The Basic Law: Torah Study is the second approach. By making Torah study a value protected by a Basic Law, lawmakers are effectively arguing that courts should no longer view this as a conflict between a constitutional value and an ordinary public interest. Instead, they are asking judges to balance two competing constitutional values: equality and Torah study.
The lawmakers who promoted this law explained that they hoped that it would tilt future considerations in favor of upholding a future blanket exemption, since the discrimination resulting from it would thereby be proportional, as the court would now be dealing with two equally weighted values under the Basic Laws.
The original text of the law explicitly made this argument, stating that those who devote themselves to long-term Torah study should be considered performing a service equal to military or national service. That language was ultimately removed amid substantial pressure from legal experts and lawmakers across both the opposition and the governing coalition.
Without that clause, the coalition’s argument isn’t nearly as clear-cut. The courts could still decide that the harm posed by a blanket exemption outweighs the national interest in protecting Torah study, especially if other solutions could be found that would protect both values more proportionally.
Using the law to justify a special exemption for Haredim also raises an even deeper question: if Torah study is now constitutionally protected, whose Torah study counts?
Many communities in Israel also have strong centers of Torah study of their own. For example, Religious Zionist young men often take part in Hesder programs, spending about 18 months in the army and about three and a half years studying full-time in yeshiva.
On paper, that Torah study is no different from that of a Haredi yeshiva student. A future court could therefore question how the government is justifying an exemption based on the value of Torah study if it applies only to one specific community’s Torah study.
In attempting to resolve one form of unequal treatment, lawmakers may have opened the door to another. Differentiating between Haredi and Religious Zionist Torah study would be creating a new form of discrimination, while also keeping the older, broader discrimination concerning military service intact.
Additionally, while the Haredi parties are claiming that military conscription is an infringement on the value of Torah study, that’s not a claim that all Jews or even all Ultra-Orthodox communities agree with. For many Israelis, military service is one of the many expressions of their Torah observance, a sacred duty to protect lives and defend the Jewish people. For them, a blanket exemption would actually be a violation of Torah principles, not a protection. That tension will make the coalition’s argument in any future court case even more difficult.
Freezing arrests
The second law, passed on Tuesday, halts the arrests and prosecution of Haredi young men dodging the draft until November 30, 2026.
The law grants temporary immunity to those who are already considered draft dodgers and those who will fall into that category in the interim. It also suspends ongoing criminal proceedings against those already facing enforcement and directs the IDF to establish a committee tasked with determining who qualifies as an eligible yeshiva student under the law.
Opposition to the new laws
The two laws drew widespread opposition from across Israel’s political spectrum.
Likud MKs Dan Illouz and Yuli Edelstein were the only coalition members who voted against the Basic Law: Torah Study.
In the vote on the law freezing arrests of draft dodgers, New Hope MK Sharren Haskel and Religious Zionist MK Moshe Solomon joined in opposing the law. Religious Zionist MKs Michal Woldiger and Ofir Sofer were absent from the vote, rather than actively voting against it. Haskel resigned as deputy foreign minister immediately afterward, in protest of its passage.
Despite playing a central role in advancing the laws, Netanyahu was absent from both final votes, showing up only briefly in the plenum before Tuesday’s vote. He had, however, voted in favor of the Basic Law: Torah Study at its initial reading on July 1.
Opposition was not limited to lawmakers. Ahead of the vote, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir warned Netanyahu, Defense Minister Israel Katz, and the head of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, arguing that freezing the arrest of Haredi draft dodgers would create an incentive for people to dodge the draft and worsen the manpower crisis the IDF is already experiencing.
“The bill is clearly and unequivocally inconsistent with the needs of the IDF,” Zamir wrote. He argued that it was inconceivable for the military to demand unprecedented sacrifice from its soldiers while simultaneously signing off on mass exemptions from prosecution, warning that doing so would deepen the rift with those who have borne the burden of the war. He also objected to the law’s requirement that the IDF itself determine who receives immunity, calling it an inappropriate task that would divert critical command attention from operations on multiple fronts.
Support for the new laws
The laws’ supporters cast them in very different terms. On the Basic Law, lead sponsor MK Moshe Gafni called its passage “a historic step,” arguing that for thousands of years, Torah study “was the force that preserved the Jewish people,” and that the new Basic Law would serve as “the state’s moral compass.”
Shas leader Aryeh Deri called it “a victory for the world of Torah” and “a historic chapter” in which, for the first time, the Jewish state recognizes the supreme value of the Torah and those who study it.
On the arrest-freeze the following day, the chairman of United Torah Judaism, Uri Maklev, described it as a step toward fully regulating the status of Torah students and as part of an effort to defend against “elements in the religious Zionist community who seek and incite to condition the recognition of Torah study on military service or other new requirements.”
MK Meir Porush added that any renewed arrests of Haredi young men would lead to a “civil uprising the likes of which has never been seen before by about a million and a half ultra-Orthodox people.”
Beyond the religious framing, coalition figures made a practical argument that the arrests were backfiring.
Government Secretary Yossi Fuchs, in the letter that laid out the government’s position, argued that arresting yeshiva students “does not advance enlistment among the Haredi public but actually drives it away,” warning that continued arrests risked a rupture with the community that could reach, in his words, “civil war.” Fuchs also stressed that the measure was narrow, noting that it “does not exempt yeshiva students from the duty to serve,” does not grant them IDF-approved deferrals, and does not lift the financial sanctions imposed on them after the High Court ruling.
Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chair Boaz Bismuth, of Likud, defended the freeze as “a tourniquet” meant to halt “a dangerous deterioration” in relations between the Haredi community and the wider public, and told colleagues that the IDF had not presented the committee with a single case of an arrest that led to actual enlistment.
That premise, however, is contested, including within the army itself. Brig. Gen. Shay Tayeb, who heads the planning division of the IDF’s Personnel Directorate, told the same committee that enforcement, “including arrests,” was part of the army’s ability to implement the draft law and had contributed to a steady rise in Haredi enlistment since the war began, and that the freeze will not help the army increase recruitment. Critics also point out that in practice, only a tiny number of evaders were ever arrested, which undercuts the claim that arrests were the main thing pushing Haredim away from service.
The battle moves to the courts
Both laws faced immediate legal challenge. Within hours of their passage, petitions were filed with the High Court of Justice by the opposition parties Yesh Atid and Yisrael Beytenu, along with the Movement for Quality Government and the Be Free Israel (Israel Hofsheet) movement.
Critics argue that the Basic Law itself is not beyond the court’s reach. The High Court has previously held that Basic Laws are subject to judicial review, and the petitioners contend that this one amounts to a misuse of the Knesset’s constituent power, since it singles out a single value and was passed by a bare majority as part of a coalition deal rather than as a genuinely foundational constitutional norm.
The first blow came quickly. On Wednesday, less than a day after the arrest-freeze law passed, the High Court issued an interim order suspending the law’s entry into force, along with an order requiring the state to show cause why it should not be struck down entirely.
Justice Ofer Grosskopf said the case would be heard as soon as possible before an expanded panel. The court pointed to its long-standing rulings on the conscription of yeshiva students, the significance of freezing arrests and enforcement for only part of the population, and the weight of the arguments raised by the petitioners.
Notably, the order suspends the arrest-freeze law, not the Basic Law: Torah Study. The Movement for Quality Government called the ruling a significant achievement but stressed that it was only an interim order, not the end of the road, vowing to press on until both the arrest-freeze law and Basic Law: Torah Study are annulled.
The Haredi parties reacted with outrage. Deri accused the court of a power-drunk judicial activism that tramples democracy and risks dragging the country toward civil war, while Porush claimed that the decision to keep arresting yeshiva students was itself illegal. The clash sets up precisely the confrontation between the Knesset and the court that the Basic Law was designed to head off, and it ensures that the draft question will be fought both in the courtroom in the coming months and at the ballot box in October.
