Education Minister and Jewish Home chairman Naftali Bennett said on Wednesday evening that he would like to see haredi candidates running for the Knesset on the Jewish Home list.
"Our home is open to all audiences," Bennett said in an interview with Kol Barama radio. "I want to see haredi candidates on the list of the Jewish Home party."
Bennett stated that he is striving to eventually serve as Prime Minister but is not "obsessed with being Prime Minister," as he put it. He added, however, that he views himself as Defense Minister in the next government.
"In the next government, I will be sitting next to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as Defense Minister," he said.
Earlier this week, Bennett claimed that there was a lot of hypocrisy among the parties conducting a political battle against the haredim over the issue of the enlisting of yeshiva students to the IDF.
"If there are problems it’s only because someone is looking for problems. In the last decade, every year the number of haredim who have enlisted has increased, a tenfold increase. I want to see haredim in the IDF, but willingly and not by force," Bennett told Kan Moreshet radio in an interview.
He added that even the army is not interested in mass enlistment of haredim. "If today you come to the IDF and say: ‘Please absorb 30,000 haredim’, I will tell you that the IDF does not know and does not want to do it, because it requires certain qualifications that it does not have, because it requires gender segregation in the bases, and then people will attack the haredim and say, ‘What are you doing? You're doing religious coercion.’ There's a lot of hypocrisy here."