Israeli Defense Chief's Real Aim Is to Bring Down Netanyahu's Government - Israel News - Haaretz.com
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant flew to Washington with one main mission – to try to hasten the supply of U.S.-made munitions that Israeli forces urgently need to continue the war against Hamas in Gaza and prepare for an escalation with Hezbollah in the north. Gallant's American interlocutors will ask some tough questions about Israel's planned operation in Rafah, not to mention the urgent steps needed to alleviate the hunger in Gaza and deploy a force that's neither the Israeli army nor Hamas for taking over the Strip.
With such a packed and combustive agenda, it's not entirely clear why Gallant made a point of announcing that he refuses to sponsor the bill exempting ultra-Orthodoxyeshiva students from the draft – legislation the cabinet is expected to approve this week. In all his years as a general in the Israel Defense Forces, Gallant never bothered with these matters, nor in the decade or so since he entered politics. He now has a war on his hands.
It would have made more sense for him just to kick the can down the road and go along with the filing of the bill, which is unlikely ever to pass, to the Knesset. As it is, the Supreme Court – sitting as the High Court of Justice – is highly unlikely to rule that the bill conforms with the justices' standard of equality, so the legislation will be sent back to the legislature for yet another revision.
On the other hand, even if no law is passed by the court's end-of-month deadline, the yeshiva students are no longer exempt from the draft, and the government funding for their institutions is cut, the IDF's personnel headache won't be over. No one in the army has any real plan to force tens of thousands of young ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, men into uniform and then onto the battlefield in the coming months or years. Israel has a compulsory draft, but it can only work with a consensus. The IDF can't and won't press-gang an entire community.
Israeli soldiers in Gaza on Thursday.Credit: IDF/Reuters
Gallant knows that failing to pass the exemption bill won't help him fill the IDF's ranks in time for this war, or this decade. And it won't provide more than a small and very temporary boost to the morale of reservists who only a few weeks ago returned home after four months of service during a war – and with a call-up order for the spring or summer already landing in the mailbox.
The difficult dilemma they face as they're called on once again to leave their families and jeopardize their jobs, businesses or studies won't be any easier just because the Haredi exemption bill didn't pass. Gallant should know this as well.
The bottom line is that Gallant seems to have reached the unavoidable conclusion that with the current governing coalition, not only will there be no equality of service, but more immediately, the war cannot be prosecuted. Benjamin Netanyahu's incessant efforts to provoke a crisis in Israel's relationship with the United States, his cynical use of the Rafah operation that the IDF is in no rush to embark on, and his refusal to even discuss a realistic "day after" plan for Gaza are all preventing the IDF from planning the next months of the war.
Gallant was in a similar position exactly a year ago when he announced that he wouldn't vote for the coalition's bills to weaken the judiciary. He didn't refuse to do so out of a deeply held belief in an independent Supreme Court, but out of a concern for the effect the legislation was having on the IDF.
Gallant isn't that bothered by the inequality of service. If he could just get on with running the war as he and the General Staff think it should be run, he would probably accept the exemption. He didn't object when it was a key element of the coalition agreements with the Haredi parties when the government was formed at the end of 2022.
A young ultra-Orthodox Israeli in Tel Aviv walking past a poster calling for unity, declaring that "there is no right or left."Credit: Tomer Appelbaum
But after nearly half a year of war, Gallant is convinced that this government either doesn't want or simply can't set clear strategic objectives for the IDF. His only alternative is to try to engineer the coalition's downfall over an issue where there is a rare public consensus. He also knows that this time around, Netanyahu can't fire him.
So far the ultra-Orthodox rabbis have been playing into his hands. Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef's sermon two weeks ago where he "threatened" that if the Haredim are forced to enlist, they will leave the country, was endorsed by the senior Ashkenazi rabbis as well. This made clear to the Haredi politicians that they have no leeway.
It's now a matter of religious ideology on which there can be no compromise. The bill on the draft that they agreed to doesn't include any specific targets or sanctions, or even pretend ones. This only makes it easier for Gallant to stick to his position and perhaps even force his hesitant colleague in the war cabinet, Benny Gantz, to take a position as well.
This doesn't necessarily mean that Gallant will manage to bring down the government. In the cabinet, Netanyahu and his Haredi allies can still try to vote on an exemption bill, without the defense minister's support, just to buy time at the High Court, even though the chances of mustering 61 coalition lawmakers to pass the bill in the next Knesset session are far from certain.
Even if the cabinet doesn't vote, the Haredi students are liable for conscription, and the funding for the yeshivas is cut off, the ultra-Orthodox parties won't necessarily leave the government. They still have unprecedented power there and billions in funding elsewhere – and Netanyahu will claim that he did all he could.
Even if they do break away from the coalition, this doesn't mean they will automatically vote with the opposition on dissolving the Knesset. From their perspective, an early election won't yield a better government.
But Gallant has nothing to lose. It's clear to him by now that under this government the IDF, even if it had thousands of Haredi recruits, can't win the war against Hamas.