Hareidim, soldier.
Hareidim, soldier.Israel news photo: Flash 90

The Perry Commission’s report on hareidi-religious army recruitment does not offer real solutions, MK Eitan Cabel of the Labor party argued Friday in a post to his Facebook page.

“Real equality means enlistment at age 18, without deferral and without ‘maybe,’” he wrote.

The proposed legislation would allow men to defer military service in favor of full-time Torah study for a maximum of three years.

The proposal ignores social realities, Cabel wrote. “Hareidi men will keep getting married at a young age. Some of them will get out of service altogether, and as for the rest, it will be so expensive to keep them [as soldiers] that it will not be worth it for the IDF to enlist them.”

The IDF pays married soldiers a significantly higher monthly salary than that given to unmarried soldiers.

The proposed deal is not good for hareidi men either, Cabel said, as it would mean they would be required to serve for 32 months, while those in the hesder program, which combines army service and Torah study in religious-Zionist yeshivas, would be required to spend only 24 months on active military duty.

“[Finance Minister] Lapid and [Economics Minister] Bennett went behind the hareidi public’s back on this,” he said. “But the secular will be the ones who pay the price.”

“This isn’t what we hoped for from the two ‘brothers’ who very quickly became a pair of old politicians,” he concluded.