Analysis: The Haredi Draft Fight Could Decide Who Forms the Next Government | Israel Politics Post
Analysis: The Haredi Draft Fight Could Decide Who Forms the Next Government
The images of protesters blocking a highway over draft-dodger arrests make for striking television, but the real story is what the standoff reveals about the coalition math awaiting whoever wins on October 27.
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By Israel Politics Post Staff·Published
Traffic builds up as ultra-Orthodox demonstrators block Route 4 at the Yavne Interchange · Source: Chaim Goldberg/Flash90, via The Times of Israel
Dozens of ultra-Orthodox demonstrators blocking a highway and the jailing of two yeshiva students who skipped enlistment are, on their face, a single news cycle. Underneath it is the fault line that has run through Israeli coalition politics for years, and that will likely decide who actually gets to govern after this election no matter who wins the most seats.
Every recent government, right or left, has eventually run into the same wall: the ultra-Orthodox parties will not sit in a coalition that enforces military conscription on their community, and the High Court has made increasingly clear it will not accept a government that simply ignores the law. That collision forced the Knesset's own legislative blitz before dispersal, including a law shielding Haredi draft dodgers from arrest, a move critics call a direct challenge to the court's 2024 ruling that blanket exemptions have no legal basis.
For Netanyahu, Haredi parties remain the most reliable path to 61 seats, which means any government he forms will almost certainly need to protect some version of the exemption framework the court keeps striking down. For Eisenkot or Bennett, courting the same Haredi vote is not realistic, but governing without some accommodation risks reigniting exactly the kind of highway-blocking unrest seen this week, just from the opposite direction if enforcement resumes.
Whoever ends up negotiating a coalition after October 27 inherits this same unresolved tension. The next government's first real test may not be Iran or the economy, but whether it can find a version of the draft law that survives a High Court challenge and a Haredi walkout at the same time. No party currently running has shown it has an answer.
