On Wednesday 8 December at 9:00 a.m., a hearing will be held in the Jerusalem Supreme Court on the petition of the Movement for Quality Government in Israel and Israel’s Defensive Shield Forum for Israel, demanding the conscription of all eligible yeshiva students.
To recall, the Movement and the Forum petitioned the court demanding that the ministry of defense and the IDF be ordered to immediately recruit all 80,000 yeshiva students who are required to be drafted according to the Defense Service Law, and this following the IDF’s disregard of the Supreme Court ruling of 25 June 2024 which stated that there is no legal basis to avoid recruiting ultra-Orthodox drafters and that the security establishment must act in accordance with the provisions of the Defense Service Law.
The petitioners claim that the decision not to draft the yeshiva students is a grave violation of the constitutional rights to equality and life, that it violates the Defense Service Law, and is contrary to previous Supreme Court rulings, including the Rubinstein ruling of 1998 which stated that yeshiva students cannot be exempted from military service without explicit legislation by the Knesset. In addition, the Movement and the Forum highlight the gap between the statements made the government and the IDF and the reality on the ground: while IDF Chief of Staff, Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi, has already stated several times the urgent need to recruit yeshiva students to ease the load on the reserves, in practice no significant steps have been taken to recruit them – and so far, a minuscule number of 48 yeshiva members out of the 80,000 eligible for the draft have actually been recruited. The petitioners claim that this is a decision that was made without authority, arising from extraneous and irrelevant political considerations, which are against the public interest and national security.
The hearing will be held before judges David Mintz, Noam Sohlberg and Daphne Barak-Erez
