Yesterday the Israeli Supreme Court delivered a bombshell decision. The law exempting Yeshiva students from military service expires on April first. A replacement law has not been drafted. Prime minister Netanyahu wanted an extension of a month in order to work out a new law that would be acceptable to his ultra-orthodox coalition partners. The legal advisor to the government was not prepared to support the delay. The Court rules on the case very quickly. The decision was not favorable for the ultra-orthodox (but was very happily greeted by the majority of the population). The court said that universal military service for all Jewish citizens would go into effect on April 1st (in principle). But the actual enforcement of the draft might be delayed until August 9th, (due to the need for the IDF training command to make adjustments in order to handle a large number of ultra-orthodox recruits).
The immediate effect of the decision is that some religious institutions will lose funding (and many others will do so in August). The original exemption law was declared unconstitutional about 7 years ago, but did not expire until last June. Coalition political horse trading resulted in much larger amounts of money going to the religious institutions (but all based on the number of students, and on those students being exempt from the draft). The current decision means the yeshiva students are no longer exempt, and therefore the yeshiva where they studied cannot receive any funds for their support. It may not cause new elections (no indication the ultra-orthodox could get a better deal if there were) but it does mean that the Treasury will immediately stop a lot of funds from being transferred to yeshivas.
Another dramatic event was the release of a video of an interrogation of one of the participants in the October 7th attack. In the video the prisoner freely admits to having raped a Jewish girl in one of the kibbutzim. He said “Satan took me over. I lay on top of her on the bed, I started to strip her clothes off, and I did what I did.” In a later excerpt he says explicitly “I raped her.”
Wetherhorn 