Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai said Thursday that the IDF would stop enlisting soldiers through the “hesder” yeshivas if it had no choice. He was reacting to recent cases of insubordination by religious Zionist soldiers who were protesting the use of the IDF for expulsion of Jews from their homes in Samaria.
IDF soldiers must not have opposing sources of authority, Vilnai said in a Voice of Israel government radio interview. He said that the phenomenon of refusal of orders needs to be “mapped out” in the IDF's various units before the military decides what steps to take against it. The hesder yeshiva soldiers are good soldiers, he said, and the IDF would not want to lose them, but if it has to, it will forgo their service “with pain, in order to avoid crushing the military.”
Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Wednesday that the phenomenon of refusal in the IDF needs to be dealt with severely and advocated the possibility of taking unspecified measures against “a handful of rabbis from the hesder yeshivas who call for refusal.”
Barak said, however, that if it proves possible to resolve the matter without “closing the taps” on the hesder yeshivas, that would be his preferred solution. He said people “should not stand over us with a stopwatch” regarding the question of dealing with calls to refuse.
"Hesder" means "arrangement." Students in the hesder yeshivas combine years of Torah study with a shortened military service.