Yair Lapid
Yair LapidFlash 90

Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid opened the faction meeting this afternoon with a direct attack to the yeshiva world in referring to the Draft Law crisis.

"The Draft Law is an insult to the State, an insult to every soldier in the IDF, and an insult to the Torah of Israel. Nowhere in the Torah of Israel does it say that it's permitted to send others to be killed for you. Nowhere in the Torah of Israel does it say that there's an halakhic problem in performing national service in MDA, in helping the elderly and disabled," Lapid said.

"The draft-dodging law is a form of blackmail that tramples the secular, religious, traditional, and young haredim. The haredi leaders are drunk with power. After they increased the budgets they receive to an all-time high, they want to turn draft dodging from the IDF into Basic Law.

"What's happening in the coalition isn't even an argument about principles," Lapid said. "It's not even a debate about values. It's a bunch of cynical politicians who don't mind dismantling the Nation of Israel in order to score a headline; politicians who are concerned with only one thing: Themselves. Their positions, their budgets, their corruption."

"The Prime Minister is conducting this bogus symphony," Lapid said of Netanyahu. "There isn't one person in the State of Israel who thinks he really cares about the draft question or the budget; the only thing that preoccupies him is the investigations, how he will stop the interrogations. That's why he's again dragging us into elections that will cost billions." Lapid said, repeating the Opposition's claim that the Prime Minister's time is taken up by the investigations and he cannot run the country, although Netanyahu is at the AIPAC Conference.. "Because of this, he's repeatedly yielded to the haredim and helps them trample the secular, traditional, and religious public, including his own public."

"That's why when he's in the country he spends most of his time writing on Facebook to citizens of the State of Israel that you can't rely on the police, you can't trust the court, you can't even trust what you read and see with your own eyes," Lapid added. "What are people supposed to think and feel when the Prime Minister says they mustn't rely on state institutions, on everything that keeps us together? This drags the entire country into a realm of spiritual and moral disaster."

The coalition crisis began last week, when haredi lawmakers warned the Prime Minister that they would refrain from voting for the state budget, potentially denying the government a majority on the critical vote, if legislation securing army deferments for yeshiva students, set to expire in the summer, is not passed. Failure to pass the spending plan could lead to the dissolution of the Likud-led government and new elections.

The "Draft Law" would include a new "Basic Law" enshrining Torah study as a basic value of the State of Israel, thereby allowing the government to circumvent a 2012 ruling by the Supreme Court. The ruling, made in response to a suit filed by secular Israelis, declared allowing fulltime yeshiva students to defer army service, accepted from the establishment of the state, to be discriminatory.

לפיד: את נתניהו מעניינות רק החקירות