Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured another reprieve in a long-running Israeli dispute over exemptions of ultra-Orthodox Jews from military service, with the Supreme Court today deferring the deadline for a new conscription plan to 16 May, Reuters reports.
The court, hearing appeals that described the decades-old waiver as discriminatory, had given 31 March as the original deadline. That was extended to 30 April at the request of the government, which argued it was busy waging a genocidal war on Gaza, and which last week asked for a further deferral.
Netanyahu’s coalition includes two ultra-Orthodox parties that regard the exemptions as key to keeping their constituents in religious seminaries and away from a melting-pot military that might test their conservative values.
The latest extension is shorter than that requested by the government, but may still spare Netanyahu a public reckoning over the combustible issue ahead of Israel’s day of commemoration for fallen soldiers on 13 May, and Independence Day on 14 May – a day which marks the Palestinian Nakba and the forced displacement of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes to make way for the creation of the apartheid state of Israel.
READ: Netanyahu’s coalition gov’t in turmoil over exemption of ultra-Orthodox Jews from military service
Both national holidays are expected to be especially fraught this year, amid an open-ended war on Gaza and knock-on fighting on other fronts that have exacted the worst Israeli casualties – mostly among teenaged draftees and reservists – in decades.
The ultra-Orthodox make up 13 per cent of Israel’s ten million population, a figure expected to reach 19 per cent by 2035 due to their high birth rates. Economists argue that the conscription waiver keeps some of the community unnecessarily out of the workforce, spelling a growing welfare burden for middle-class taxpayers.
Israel’s 21 per cent Arab minority are also mostly exempted from the draft, under which men and women are generally called up at age 18, with men serving 32 months and women 24 months.