On June 25, Israel’s supreme court ordered the conscription of ultra-Orthodox students yeshivareligious schools, which until now benefited from an exemption from military service, in a context of strong tensions on the issue in parliament and within the government.
“The executive cannot exempt students from yeshiva by the Military Service Act in the absence of an appropriate legal framework,” the court said.
The ruling comes at a time when parliament is considering a bill that provides for the gradual enlistment of ultra-Orthodox, against the backdrop of the war in the Gaza Strip.
Military service is compulsory in Israel, but ultra-Orthodox Jews can avoid it by dedicating themselves to the study of the sacred texts of Judaism thanks to an administrative exemption introduced in 1948 by David Ben Gurion, founder of the state of Israel.
Some critics argue that the text before parliament, supported by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but not by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, is insufficient to meet the Israeli army’s staffing needs.
“The failure to implement the law on military service creates significant discrimination between those who are required to carry it out and those who are exempt,” the supreme court judges said in the text of their ruling.
“Right now, with a war going on, this discrimination is more pronounced than ever,” they added.
The Movement for Quality Government in Israel, one of the authors of the appeal to the supreme court, called on “the government and the defense minister to respect the ruling and to proceed quickly with the enrollment of students of the yeshiva”.
Yitzhak Goldknopf, leader of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, expressed “strong disappointment” with the sentence.
