‘Netanyahu doesn’t have options’: Israel’s governing coalition on brink of collapse

Israel’s coalition crisis deepened on Monday when the Haredi Orthodox Shas party announced it would support a preliminary vote to disperse the Knesset on Wednesday, prompting one analyst to tell The Press Service of Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has run out of options to keep the government afloat.

Without controversial legislation exempting yeshiva students from military service, Shas will join the United Torah Judaism party in quitting the coalition.

“If there is nothing serious…that we can bring before the rabbis and say, ‘Here is an achievement we can discuss, that we can put our minds to,’ then as we promised and said, we will need to vote for dispersing the Knesset,” Shas spokesperson Asher Medina told Kol Berama Radio.

Medina insisted that Shas has no interest in elections but said the party had “reached the limit, especially out of the attempt to humiliate the haredim,” citing criticism from Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, who chairs the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, through which any legislation will have to pass. Medina blamed Netanyahu for failing to produce an acceptable compromise, though noted Netanyahu recently “entered the heart of the issue.”

United Torah Judaism has already announced support for dissolving the Knesset, making both major ultra-Orthodox parties potential coalition-breakers. Even if the dissolution bill passes its preliminary reading, it requires three additional Knesset votes—a process that could extend for weeks.

The Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee’s legal team is crafting new legislation that would establish annual draft quotas from the haredi sector, eventually reaching 50% of each graduating class. The bill would include sanctions for individuals ignoring draft orders. Since the previous legal exemption expired in June 2024, approximately 24,000 draft orders to haredi men have been largely ignored. The IDF has already acknowledged it won’t meet its High Court commitment of 4,800 haredi draftees by June 30, 2025.

If the new bill doesn’t pass by the Knesset’s summer recess in late July, the current law requiring all eligible haredi men to serve will remain in effect until at least October. However, if the Knesset dissolves, legislative progress becomes impossible.

In a bid to buy time, coalition lawmakers planned to bring 50 bills to the plenum agenda. In response, opposition National Unity chairman Benny Gantz ordered his party to withdraw all legislation from Wednesday’s plenum agenda except the dissolution bill.

But Professor Emmanuel Navon, who lectures on political science at Tel Aviv University, told TPS-IL that there’s no room for a compromise that would be acceptable to both the Haredi parties and the High Court of Justice. Firing Edelstein as committee chairman, as some MKs have called for, won’t make any difference either.

“Netanyahu doesn’t really have options,” Navon said. “Let’s say he fires Edelstein — then what? Maybe he’ll get a more agreeable chair for the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee who will promote a conscription law that the Haredim demand — but it won’t pass the High Court. And practically, it will be disqualified. No Knesset legal advisor or committee advisor will agree to promote such a law.”

Navon added that in the unlikely event such legislation were promoted, “the law would get struck down and won’t be accepted by the public. Promoting a draft-evasion law will only strengthen Netanyahu’s rivals, especially in upcoming elections. So Netanyahu has no interest in making the next election about conscription or the exemption law — that would anger a large part of his voters.”

The controversy has divided Israeli society for years, but a recent High Court ruling and the prolonged war with Hamas has made the exemptions harder to sell to voters, Navon explained.

“Most Israelis now feel there’s no reason not everyone should contribute to the war effort. Unfortunately, we’ve had many casualties, and the burden is very heavy. Reservists are being required to serve three months a year — that’s a lot. Regular soldiers had their service extended by a year. Meanwhile, a large part of the population is not contributing. That damages tolerance in Israeli society,” Navon told TPS-IL.

The military began making plans to draft yeshiva students after Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled in June that exemptions for the Haredi community were illegal.

The army told lawmakers it faces a critical manpower shortage, needing approximately 12,000 new recruits, including 7,000 combat soldiers and seeks to recruit 4,800 Haredi men annually, a figure expected to rise over time.

Military service is compulsory for all Israeli citizens. However, Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and the country’s leading rabbis agreed to a status quo that deferred military service for Haredi men studying in yeshivot, or religious institutions. At the time, no more than several hundred men were studying in yeshivot.

However, the Orthodox community has grown significantly since Israel’s founding. In January 2023, the Central Bureau of Statistics reported that Haredim are Israel’s fastest-growing community and projected it would constitute 16% of the population by the end of the decade. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, the number of yeshiva students exceeded 138,000 in 2021.