Haredi conscription, not Benny Gantz, may topple government
Although Gantz's quitting the government failed to bring about its collapse, the festering issue of haredi exemptions from military conscription may ultimately do the trick.
National Unity Party leader Benny Gantz left the government on Sunday evening in a long-expected and anticlimactic move that politically altered little.
Gantz made clear from the first day he joined the government on October 11 that this was not a marriage of choice but, rather, a necessity born of Hamas’s barbarous attack, and that when the utility of this union expired, he would dissolve the marriage.
Or, in his words at the time, “Ours is not a political partnership but a shared fate.”
Conflicting visions
On Sunday that fate diverged amid ongoing disagreements with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over how to best wage the war and what the “day after” would look like.
Following Gantz’s move, two things predictably happened: the government survived, and Gantz’s poll numbers tanked.
Anybody who expected Gantz’s resignation to trigger a political earthquake that would swallow up the government was in for a disappointment. Netanyahu’s government had a solid 64-56 parliamentary majority before October 7 and before Gantz joined the government, and it retains that same solid majority now that Gantz has left.
Gantz’s inclusion in the war cabinet provided a strong message of unity at the time and gave more people a sense that their voice was being heard around the table where life-and death decisions were being made. Now that he has left the government, that message of unity has been diluted, and wide swaths of the population may not feel they have a voice in how the war is being waged.
While this is something that may affect the public’s view of the government’s legitimacy, none of that changes the simple coalition math. It was no surprise, therefore, that Netanyahu’s government survived Gantz’s step.
Nor was it a surprise that Gantz’s numbers in the polls nose-dived as a result of the move. These numbers were on a downward trajectory since Gideon Sa’ar and his four-person faction quit Gantz’s party and moved into the opposition. Nevertheless, the fall was particularly steep this week.
According to the average of the polls broadcast on Monday by Channels 11, 12, and 13, were elections held today, Gantz’s National Unity Party would win 23 seats, and the Likud would win 20, if the same political formations were contesting the elections as they did last time. The Likud has 32 seats in the current Knesset, compared to 12 for the National Unity Party.
When the three television networks polled the public two weeks before Sa’ar left the party, the breakdown was 32 for the National Unity Party and 19 for Likud. That in itself was a sharp decline from the five weeks of polling done immediately after October 7. Those polls were all Maariv polls – the television networks did not take polls during this period – and the average of those polls had Gantz’s party leading the Likud 39 seats to 18.
Gantz’s strength in the polls fell some 40% from when he went into the government until when he exited – and that is when the pollsters asked respondents about the existing parties.
When the pollsters threw in other possible formations – such as a right-wing party that would include former prime minister Naftali Bennett, former Mossad head Yossi Cohen, Yisrael Beytenu head Avigdor Liberman, and Sa’ar – Gantz’s numbers dropped even lower. A Channel 12 poll on Monday found that if this new right-wing political party were to be established, it would win 23 seats, compared to 18 seats for both the National Unity Party and the Likud.
One caveat about these polls is that they are only polling known actors and likely players such as Bennett and Cohen, who have shown an interest in running in the next election. The polls are not, however, polling unknown actors – completely new faces and voices without a hand in the failures of October 7 or the divisiveness that led to it – who are sensing the sour national mood and a desire for something new entirely and who may enter the political ring.
Though no new framework has yet been formally established, when one or more does emerge – and there is a high probability that representatives of reservists and/or bereaved families will put together such a list – it could have an impact on the elections just as Yigal Yadin’s Democratic Movement for Change (Dash) did in the pivotal 1977 election.
Born out of a recoiling from the corruption at the time and amid lingering public anger and frustration over the 1973 Yom Kippur War, this party of prominent nonpoliticians shocked the country by winning 15 seats.
Although the party fell apart just two years later, it was instrumental in the Likud’s rise to power and the realignment of Israeli politics. A similar dynamic could play itself out the next time this country goes to elections as well – a dynamic that pollsters asking only about existing parties and known political personalities are currently overlooking.
ALTHOUGH GANTZ’S quitting the government failed to bring about its collapse, the festering issue of haredi exemptions from military conscription may ultimately do the trick.
If it does do so, it will not be the first time. One of the issues that brought down Netanyahu’s fourth (and longest-serving) government in 2018 was an inability to get a bill passed regulating haredi draft before a Supreme Court-mandated deadline on the issue.
Although this issue has long been an open sore in Israeli society, the current war – the heavy burden being borne by reservists and their families, and the IDF’s need for more soldiers – has even intensified the sentiment among the non-haredi public that the system of wholesale exemptions is no longer tenable.
While the haredi crisis in 2018 was more about the inequality of the system, the debate today is of a different nature: the country simply needs more soldiers to share the burden.
In 2018 there were those arguing that the army does not really need additional manpower, something evident in shortening the length of regular army service from 36 to 32 months, and that reservists were generally only being called up for a couple of weeks a year.
That has all changed now as regular army service for men has been raised again to three years, and both the maximum age for reservists and the number of days they have to serve have been increased dramatically. The current situation where tens of thousands of reservists, who already served four, five, and six months since October 7, are being called up for a second and even a third shift of up to 45 days is also augmenting the frustration and anger felt by those upon whose shoulders this burden rests.
One indication of the intensity of this sentiment among the non-haredi population is that in last week’s edition of Makor Rishon, a right-wing newspaper identified largely with the religious-Zionist camp, three of the 20 pages of its news section was filled with full-page ads calling for haredi conscription, including a letter signed by some of the leading rabbis in the National-Religious camp.
This campaign is significant because it signals the Likud and politicians identified with religious Zionism that the move to conscript haredim is no longer the realm of the secular Left, but now has much wider appeal.
A Midgam poll, published on June 2 in Maariv, among 1,200 Israeli Jews bears this out, with 65% of Likud supporters against the bill Netanyahu is promoting to extend draft exemptions, 60% wanting their MKs to vote against it, and 54% wanting them to vote against it even if it brings down the government.
Despite this, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was the only person among the 64-member coalition who late Monday night voted against a procedural measure that would advance a Netanyahu-backed bill from the previous Knesset that would enshrine into law wholesale exemptions for haredim.
But that vote is by no means the last word. The measure still must go to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee for review and likely revision, and then for a second and third reading in the plenum.
This is something, much more than Gantz’s leaving the coalition, that could seriously threaten the government. Already on Tuesday morning, within hours of the vote passing, Likud MK Moshe Saada said the bill – which he had ironically just voted to advance, though he dismissed that vote as just a “technical” matter – was neither moral nor ethical. He said unequivocally he would not support the bill as is.
Whereas the bill that moved forward would put quotas on how many yeshiva students need to serve, Saada said that the quotas need to be set on how many yeshiva students receive exemptions to study full-time.
Likewise, he said that whereas under this bill the sanctions for not meeting preset quotas for haredi conscription will be placed on the yeshivot where the students study, Saada said that these sanctions need to be placed on the students themselves in the form of an end to subsidies received from the state, discounts for municipal tax, discounts for early childhood education, and the like.
These are the only types of stipulations in a new haredi draft bill that would satisfy him and a handful of other Likud MKs, he indicated. Such stipulations, however, will not fly with Netanyahu’s haredi partners, and therein lies the one real threat to the coalition’s stability: much more so than disagreements over a hostage deal or what to do about the North.
If the haredi conscription issue helped bring down the government in 2018, when the issue was acute but much less emotionally charged than it is today, then how much more so might it topple the government now, when it is coming up during wartime, and when so many people are directly feeling the effects of an army badly in need of additional manpower.