“Anyone who evaded IDF service will not be able to sit in the security cabinet. Anyone who evaded service, or encourages draft evasion, will not be able to sit in the cabinet. This is one of our core conditions for the next government,” former prime minister and Beyachad chairman Naftali Bennett said Tuesday.
Bennett said he was calling the proposed legislation the “Deri Law,” a reference to Shas chairman Aryeh Deri. Deri, who served for three months in the IDF, has not been an official member of the security cabinet since the current government was formed in January 2023.
Shas chairman Aryeh Deri and Beyachad chairman Naftali Bennett
(Photo: Yoav Dudkevitch)
Speaking at the Reichman Conference, Bennett framed the proposal as part of a broader campaign to expand military conscription. “For us to truly prevail, our soldiers need reinforcements,” Bennett said. “As long as Deri, Netanyahu and Smotrich continue encouraging and funding mass draft evasion, who will fight? Who will prevail?”
Bennett described draft evasion as “a strategic danger to Israel’s security” and said officers and combat soldiers he has spoken with report that the IDF is immediately short of 20,000 troops.
According to Bennett, that shortage is costing soldiers’ lives and limiting the military’s ability to achieve its objectives. “Soldiers are wounded and killed by drones because there are not enough observation posts and snipers to protect them,” he said. “Fighters are forced to leave positions they captured because there is no one to hold them. Then they have to return and capture them again, at the cost of blood.”
He said prolonged deployments were also wearing down troops. “The long rotations erode the soldiers. Alertness declines, and the price is human lives,” Bennett said.
Bennett pledged that a government including his party would impose a universal military-service requirement and cut state funding to those who refuse to serve.
“In the next government, we will apply the obligation to enlist to everyone, without compromise, and we will completely stop the money going to draft dodgers,” he said. “Anyone who does not enlist will not receive a single shekel from the state.”
Bennett then presented the proposed cabinet restriction as one of his party’s conditions for entering the next coalition. “I am revealing here and now one of our core conditions for the next government,” he said. “We will pass the ‘Deri Law,’ which states that anyone who evaded IDF service, or encourages draft evasion, will not be able to sit in the cabinet.”
“We will no longer accept a distorted situation in which someone who boasts that he does not send his grandchildren into battle is the one sending our sons and daughters into battle,” Bennett added. “Anyone who does not know what it is like to lie awake at night fearing a knock on the door cannot sit in a war cabinet.”