After surviving the justice reform protests and a devastating war, will Netanyahu’s coalition be brought down by the draft law crisis?

“Y

ou’re living in an alternate reality,” was Yisrael Beitenu chair Avigdor Lieberman’s message to chareidi friends — and he does still have a few — who reached out to him regarding the possibility of a consensus chareidi draft law after the elections.

At the start of the war, when there was talk of his joining the emergency government and returning to the right-wing bloc, Lieberman sounded conciliatory, even accepting guided tours at several chareidi chesed organizations. At one of these, he appeared to walk back his infamous comment about carting the chareidim to the garbage dump in wheelbarrows, which had aged like milk.

Today, the wheelbarrows are back, and the chareidi parties are closer than ever to the political dustbin. In Lieberman’s view, there’s no room for compromise. With 12,000 soldiers taken out of action by the war, no interim legislation exempting tens of thousands of chareidim from the draft will survive the court of public opinion.

What will the next election campaign look like, in the event that the chareidim finally follow through on their threat, and the bill to dissolve the Knesset passes its second and third readings?

No one is better placed to answer that question than Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who lives on a steady diet of opinion polls and political analysis.

Election campaigns are dynamic events — you can’t predict the outcome based on the starting point. That said, the starting point does matter, and in this case, it could be decisive. If the campaign begins against the backdrop of the chareidi draft crisis, accompanied by daily reports of the fallen in Gaza — in what this week officially became the longest war in the country’s history — Netanyahu is predicting a historic rout.

The Israeli media, already airing interviews with disgruntled reservists about the chareidi draft, will keep the issue on the airwaves day and night. Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman, who are struggling to formulate a coherent agenda as they compete for both right- and left-leaning voters, will make the draft the defining issue of the campaign. Lapid and Golan won’t be able to afford holding back even if they want to, and the same is true even for Benny Gantz, who last week met Gur’s Motti Babchik and visited Rav Reuven Elbaz, a member of Shas’s Moetzet Hachachamim, in a not-so-subtle jab at Netanyahu.

And it’s not just the left. Religious Zionism and Otzmah Yehudit won’t be able to avoid the issue either. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose party has slipped under the 3.25% electoral threshold in recent polls, will try to prove his religious Zionist bona fides by distancing himself from chareidi draft evasion. In this climate, it will be easier to walk the streets as a chareidi in London or Paris than in secular Israeli cities.
Shock, Then Rage

Chareidi resolve was forged by Yuli Edelstein’s demands

“Fewer rights than a Sudanese refugee” — that’s how Degel HaTorah MK Uri Maklev described to me the status of a yeshivah bochur in the Jewish state if the personal sanctions proposed by Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chair Yuli Edelstein become law. From being denied a driver’s license to being barred from leaving the country, to losing eligibility for arnonah (property tax) discounts and housing assistance. The penalties would apply from day one, with no waiting period for assessing if conscription goals are being met.

The initial shock of chareidi MKs when they saw Edelstein’s list of demands swiftly gave way to rage, leading to wall-to-wall adoption by the rest of the chareidi factions of Gur’s threat to dissolve the coalition.

That said, the apparent united chareidi front doesn’t tell the whole story. In the face of the chassidic faction’s demand to go all in, Sephardic Shas and Litvish Degel HaTorah remain deeply concerned about the ramifications of dissolving the government — even before the next government is sworn in.

From the moment elections are called, the chareidim will lose what little influence they have on the budget through the ministries they control. Every bureaucrat will become an independent actor, ignoring the minister in charge and looking up to the attorney general, who sees the chareidim as the easiest punching bag, given the wide public opposition to chareidi benefits.

For Shas, the situation is further complicated by its relatively diverse voter base. Party chair Deri must navigate between the roshei yeshivah in the Moetzet Chachamei HaTorah, whose positions in some cases aren’t that far from the Peleg HaYerushalmi, and masorati voters who occupy the eastern stand of Teddy Stadium (home of the Mizrahi Beitar-Jerusalem soccer club) and remain loyal to Maran’s party — until it topples the secular “Maran,” l’havdil — Bibi Netanyahu.

Gur, on the other hand, sees things differently. In their view, things can’t get any worse than they are now. Granted, we’ve heard similar messages in the past, when what now seem like dream bills were rejected by the chareidi parties. The Gur faction of Agudas Yisrael claims that during the Bennett-Lapid change government, then-finance minister Avigdor Lieberman offered to transfer NIS 100 million to chareidi educational institutions in exchange for two Agudas Yisrael MKs, Porush and Eichler, abstaining from the vote on the state budget.

“Odds are that the center left won’t have a majority without the Arab parties, even in the worst-case scenario,” a senior Agudas Yisrael figure told me. “Sitting in the government is a means, not an end. And under those circumstances, it’s fair to assume that we’ll be able to get much more from the left than the right can give us today.”

In this chaos, nothing is black or white. There are dissenting voices even in Shas, such as the Rishon L’Tzion, Rav Yitzchak Yosef, whose Jerusalem shul incidentally suffered an arson attack this week. “Yamin — meshuga’im (the right is crazy),” Rav Ovadiah’s son cried during his weekly shiur, criticizing the chareidi parties’ blind loyalty to the right when they could get much more from the left.

The most tangible evidence of the behind-the-scenes divide will come overseas — in the renewed fundraising push for Keren Olam HaTorah. The fundraising goals — just as with the draft law — are no longer achievable. In the first campaign, the goal was $125 million; this time, the goal has been lowered to $75 million.

The current campaign will focus on limited meetings with wealthy donors, rather than holding large-scale gatherings like the first time, with each community acting alone. The Gerrer Rebbe has set out alone on a private jet, as will Rav Dov Landau and Rav Moshe Hillel Hirsch. The latter has been delayed as he reviews entrance exams for the Slabodka yeshivah, in a poignant illustration of the paradox he faces. As the spiritual leader of Degel HaTorah, he can’t guarantee to himself as a rosh yeshivah that the bochurim he accepts will be free to learn Torah as Israeli citizens with equal rights.

Unclear Path Forward

Netanyahu toils to find a compromise

This is Netanyahu’s current plan of action, subject to revision: negotiating an agreement between Edelstein and the chareidim, and if that fails, ousting Edelstein as chair of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee before or after the bill to dissolve the Knesset passes its preliminary reading.

The polls he’s commissioned since the chareidim announced their decision to support a motion to dissolve the Knesset have led Netanyahu to do everything in his power to resolve the crisis and avoid elections. The chatter in his circle about riding the anti-chareidi wave and portraying Netanyahu as the man who heroically blocked a draft bill was dismissed out of hand by Netanyahu.

“In any event, we’ll be seen as having followed the trend,” he explained before returning to the negotiations — fashionably late, as usual.

Neither the chareidim nor Netanyahu place much hope in Edelstein, who’s briefing journalists against them before, during, and after every meeting. Former housing minister Ariel Attias, the lead chareidi negotiator, hasn’t experienced such double dealing since he lost tens of thousands of housing units for chareidim in Harish, which he worked on as the chareidi city of the future for an entire term before the High Court forced him to hand it over to other communities.

Netanyahu, for his part, has mobilized everyone to solve the crisis. Settler leaders Yisrael Gantz and Yossi Dagan sat down with Edelstein on Motzaei Shabbos for an extended meeting in an effort to reach an understanding. Their willingness to help shows how terrified the right is of elections against the backdrop of the draft law.

Netanyahu’s goal is to get the chareidim to consolidate around a reasonable compromise, which will allow him to rally the coalition behind the proposal in spite of Edelstein’s intransigence.

Will firing Yuli Edelstein get Bibi’s chestnuts out of the fire? Politically, perhaps, but not legislatively. Bibi’s hot mic moment from a conversation in English with Rav Moshe Hillel Hirsch revealed his philosophy — fire, fire, fire. In the conversation, which a chareidi Knesset aide recorded on his phone and leaked to the press, Netanyahu bragged that the dismissal of defense minister Yoav Gallant and chief of staff Herzi Halevi had cleared the way for a draft law.

But with Bibi, the way is never clear. If Edelstein is ousted as chair of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, going the way of Gallant and Halevi, the chareidim will find themselves in an impossible situation vis-à-vis the legal advisor to the Constitution Committee, who will receive the full backing of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara. Despite the coalition’s measure to oust her this week, the attorney general is here to stay, with the High Court likely to invalidate her dismissal. And as part of her revenge tour, she’ll block any proposal that softens Edelstein’s draconian proposal.

At this point, the only thing Netanyahu can offer the chareidim is morphine for the pain. He doesn’t even have a clear diagnosis, let alone a cure.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1065)