Brig. Gen. Shay Tayeb, a senior official in the IDF’s Personnel Directorate, presented data on measures against army deserters and draft dodgers at a meeting of the Knesset’s IDF Manpower Committee on Wednesday.
“In the first nine months of the war,, we did not carry out enforcement operations against deserters,” he said, adding that the 340 deserters arrested at Ben Gurion Airport were from all sectors, not just the Chareidi sector.
Committee chairman Elazar Stern (Yesh Atid) asked: “What tools do you need to obtain thousands of new recruits? There are arrests and travel bans and driver’s license bans—the tools you aren’t using.”
Tayeb replied: “These tools and the sanctions you mentioned are not enforceable. Most of the draft dodgers in the IDF today are not Chareidi.”
MKs from the opposition slammed Tayeb’s remark, saying “that’s a sentence you were better off not saying.”
But Tayeb repeated his words: “Most of the draft dodgers today are not Chareidi. The numbers are now rising because the legal arrangement has been canceled.”
Tayeb continued by saying that “the sanctions that exist today, except for arrests, are minimal,” adding that he thinks the state needs to refuse services, such as driver’s licenses, to draft dodgers in order to increase the number of recruits.
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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10 Responses
Thank you for saying out loud on the record what most people here in Israel know already…
So to paraphrase:
Question: Why aren’t you using the available measures to enforce the draft?
Answer: Because most of the draft dodgers aren’t Charedi.
Gotcha!!!
If so it would be nice to have a breakdown of the draft dodgers and why they’re refusing.
Are they left wing elitists, or people tired of being called up so many times and their personal lives are coming apart maritally & financially due to chareidim not doing their fare share?
we know that in tel aviv most dont serve and if they do they like lapid do nothing jobs that are safe, 75% of the dead in this war were Dati
“drivers’ licenses”? don’t some yeshivas in israel expel bochers who get a license? this is almost funny.
@ Yaakov Yosef A: or for saying out loud what people want to believe. the fact is, the majority of secular israeli jews DO enlist, and there are NO organized riots against the draft. the hareidim, on the other hand…
Most draft dodgers are not Chareidi because as yet most Chareidim have not been drafted.
A “draft dodger” is some who uses fakery to avoid military service, such as someone who pretends to be a yeshiva student when they in fact aren’t one. Yeshiva students who refuse military service are “draft resistors” and/or “conscientious objectors” who openly tell that government they refuse to service, typically for religious or moral reasons.
shloimebaruch – ” or for saying out loud what people want to believe.”
What motive would he have for making such a statement if it weren’t true? A former IDF Chief of Staff noted that he never had to be מנחם אבל the family of a fallen soldier in Tel Aviv…
Long Island Yid – “people tired of being called up so many times and their personal lives are coming apart maritally & financially due to chareidim not doing their fare share?”
Do you know anything about how Miluim works? Only a certain percentage of soldiers serve in active combat positions, and those are the ones most often called up. The more elite special forces units can only be joined voluntarily (and passing grueling testing and training), not by automatic placement. Both of those groups are typically highly motivated (and disproportionately Dati Leumi). It was and remains unlikely for a Chareidi recruit to end up in the former group, and near-impossible in the latter. The typical profile of a Chiloni draft dodger is a ‘tzfonboni’ kid who goes to college in Europe instead of the army. (If you don’t know what that word means, find out more about Israeli society before throwing dirt at Chareidim…) The current draft controversy is not about a need for soldiers, it’s about the AG/Bagatz & co. trying to topple the Netanyahu government.
I know many Dati Leumi soldiers past and present, who served with great distinction and valor, as well as my father-in-law (who became more Chareidi later in life) who served with distinction in the Golani Brigade in two wars, who have more respect for Israeli Chareidim than many people posting on this site who live in America and never served themselves…