The Supreme Court on Sunday considered annulling the Tal Law which allows hareidi religious rabbinical students to postpone army service while they continue their studies.
Five human rights groups appealed to the court claiming the law discriminates against the rest of the Israeli population, which serves for a mandatory three years. The Defense Ministry claims that the law is in fact designed to increase hareidi-religious participation in Israeli society, in that it allows four-year yeshiva students to work for a year before deciding if they want to continue their yeshiva studies or enlist in the army.
A nine-judge panel began deliberations in the morning to consider the legality of the Tal Law. Several soldiers' rights groups protested outside as the State Prosecutor tried to convince the justices that the law was designed to increase hareidi religious participation, not decrease it. Lawyer Avi Licht also warned that the process would take time.
“The army does not need 50,000 hareidim who don’t want to serve,” he told the judges. “You need to look at the reality here. Forcing hareidim to serve in the army would create a societal crisis."
The long-standing agreement between the Defense Ministry and the hareidi religious population represented by the Tal Law has been in the court’s crosshairs for the last decade. In 1999, the court ruled that the norms which had until then been in place on the issue had to be formalized into a law.
The Tal Commission, headed by retired justice Tzvi Tal, recommended an appropriate law to settle the controversy. The measure passed the Knesset in 2002. According to the law, hareidi religious men who remain in yeshiva can avoid military service as long as they study and do not work. After the age of 22, rabbinical students who want to leave yeshiva have the choice of completing either a shortened military service or one year of national service.
Over 50,000 hareidi religious men in their 20s are currently registered as studying in yeshiva under the law and are therefore exempt from military service. In 1999, 30,414 were registered in this category.
In 2006 the Court ruled that the Tal Law violated the human rights of those Israelis who do serve in the army, and that the government had failed to properly influence hareidi religious men to perform either military or civilian service. It chose, however, to give the state another year and a half to change the situation.
Judge Asher Grunis was the only justice to disagree at the time. “The court should not interfere with the Knesset’s decisions unless they hurt the rights of a minority,” he claimed. “In this case, it is the majority whose rights are impacted, and it is therefore the majority that should protect its own rights [through legislation in the Knesset].”
The High Court is expected to take several months to issue a ruling in the case.