Former prime minister Naftali Bennett announced on Wednesday that the reservists’ group Shoulder to Shoulder has joined his political effort and that its chairman, Yonatan Shalev, 23, will be placed on his party’s slate for the next Knesset election, a move that would make him the youngest lawmaker in Israel’s history if elected.
Shalev has emerged as one of the most prominent public opponents of legislation that would exempt ultra-Orthodox men from military service. He took part in deliberations of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and drew attention during one session when he interrupted Shas lawmaker Yinon Azoulay.
“I lost dozens of fighters and you are talking about bringing hearts together?” Shalev said, according to accounts of the exchange.
Then-committee chairman Yuli Edelstein ordered him removed from the hearing. As he was leaving, Shalev shouted: “I fought for a year. What are you fighting about here?” He was later invited by Defense Minister Israel Katz for a meeting.
In a statement, Shoulder to Shoulder said: “We will take care of Israel’s young people.”
Shalev said the decision to enter politics came “in the name of our generation and in the name of the friends we lost in battle.”
“We are answering the call of the moment and stepping forward to bring change,” he said. “Naftali Bennett is the only leader who can rehabilitate the nation and rebuild the state. We will represent young people with honor and responsibility. We will do everything so that we can look our children in the eye and say, ‘We were there, we built, we saved.’”
Bennett said that after the Oct. 7 attack, “when Israel’s leadership collapsed, the younger generation rose up, fought and saved the State of Israel.”
“We discovered that we have the best young generation in the history of the State of Israel,” Bennett said. “As we prepare for the day after, we need the energy of this wonderful generation to lift Israel up again.”
Shalev’s grandfather, Lt. Col. Shaul Shalev, was killed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In an interview published last October by Ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth, Shalev said he saw himself as continuing his grandfather’s path.
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Shalev and his grandmother Gabriella, who is holding a portrait of her late husband Saul
(Photo: Dana Kopel)
He arrived for that interview after completing his third round of reserve duty in northern Israel. “In the past two years we gave everything for the state,” he said.
He also spoke of the emotional toll of the war and the loss of comrades. “On the coming Memorial Day, the first in which I will not be serving within a military framework, I will have to decide which grave to visit,” he said. “There is not a day when I wake up and do not think about them, with a feeling of heaviness in my chest, thinking about what I could have done better in the war. Much of the difficulty I carry is because of the responsibility I feel.”
The record for Israel’s youngest lawmaker is currently held by Moshe Nissim, later a Likud finance minister, who was elected in 1959 on the General Zionists list at age 24. In the last election, the youngest lawmaker elected was Yitzhak Wasserlauf, now the Negev and Galilee minister, who is currently 33.
Former prime ministers Shimon Peres and David Ben-Gurion both served in the Knesset at age 83, making them the oldest lawmakers in Israel’s history. The oldest current Knesset member is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 76. Minister Haim Katz, 78, is older, but resigned from parliament at the start of the current term under the so-called Norwegian Law.