The head of the IDF's Personnel Planning and Management Division, Brigadier General Shai Tayeb, updated the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Sunday that there has been a record number of haredi enlistees.
According to Tayeb, "As of this afternoon, there are over 210 combat soldiers and more than 140 combat support soldiers, and in another ten days there will probably be the largest draft in recent times."
The report comes amid committee discussions regarding the Defense Service Bill, which focuses on including the haredi public in military service and setting up incentive and enforcement mechanisms.
Protesters from extreme factions demonstrated today (Sunday) at the IDF Recruitment Center in Tel Hashomer against the enlistment of haredi youth into units designated for the haredi community, including the Netzach Yehuda Battalion and the Hashmonai Brigade.
The protesters, gathered outside the recruitment office, clashed with police and shouted insults at the haredi youth entering the recruitment office. They called the recruits derogatory names such as "Antiochus" and "murderer."
Meanwhile, the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, chaired by MK Boaz Bismuth, continued its series of discussions on the conscription bill. The discussion focused on clauses dealing with the revocation of personal benefits from those who fail to report for regular service.
For the first time, the bill includes mechanisms to revoke benefits from those who do not enlist in the IDF, regardless of compliance with overall enlistment targets and as a result of failing to meet those targets. The benefits proposed to be revoked include a driver’s license, scholarships, tax credit points, discounts on public transportation, subsidies for daycare centers, and reductions in National Insurance benefits.
The committee’s legal advisers emphasized that the benefit-revocation mechanisms are core components of the bill and that their effectiveness is critical to reducing inequality in sharing the burden. They recommended concentrating the sanctions in the law’s first year and considering the addition of further benefits to be revoked, such as municipal property tax (arnona) discounts.
Kfir Battat, deputy budget director at the Finance Ministry, explained that the sanctions are intended to replace criminal penalties and are not meant as punishment, but rather to motivate individuals to enlist. Their effectiveness, he said, depends both on their economic impact and on the likelihood that they will actually be enforced.
According to him, most of the sanctions have little real economic impact, and some already exist in law. The sanctions with the greatest weight, he said, are the revocation of kollel stipends and daycare subsidies.