In the middle of a war and amid plans to keep calling up reservists for long rounds of service next year, Israel is going to draft Haredi men with its hands tied.

On Thursday, Likud MK Boaz Bismuth, the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chair, proposed a joke of a conscription law, exempting many tens of thousands of Haredi men, who may as well update their “we’ll die and won’t enlist” rallying cry to “we’ll live and won’t enlist — and everyone else can go to hell.”

Practically every clause in the draft bill’s 38 pages is enough to raise the ire of anyone who hopes for Israelis to equitably share the burden of military service — and suffers just the burden, with no equity.

Bismuth was appointed to the powerful position in July after the Likud voted out his party colleague Yuli Edelstein from the chairmanship because he had insisted Haredi draft dodgers be subject to criminal sanctions, including fines on non-compliant yeshivas, loss of social benefits and restrictions on travel abroad and getting a driver’s license.

Edelstein’s insistence led Netanyahu’s Haredi coalition partners — the Sephardic Shas and Ashkenazi United Torah Judaism — to boycott government-backed votes in the Knesset plenum. After Bismuth shared the official draft legislation among committee members on Thursday, Shas and UTJ announced they would go back to voting with the government.

The upshot is a piece of pretty masterful manipulation, all to enable a declaration that thousands of Haredi men will ostensibly be drafted — 8,160 over six months, to be precise. Ten percent of those will enlist in the Sherut Leumi national service corps, assisting workers in fields such as health, tech and education.

But the bill’s stated goals and quotas are largely meaningless because, to give one prime example, under its terms, the “Haredi” label can be applied to such a broad swath of young men.

Under the draft law, for instance, anyone who studied in a yeshiva for two years between the ages of 14 and 18 is considered ultra-Orthodox, even if they are no longer observant. So ultra-Orthodox Yeshiva boys can stay put, their weight pulled by “Haredim” on paper who are already slated for enlistment anyway, or who are already serving in the army’s regular and reserve forces.

Even now, before any legislation has been passed, close to 3,000 “ultra-Orthodox........

© The Times of Israel