Israel’s Knesset parliament will convene next week to discuss holding early elections after one of prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s key ultra-Orthodox coalition partners decided to quit the government.
The coalition pulled all Bills from the parliamentary agenda on Wednesday, fearing they had lost a majority to advance legislation.
Elections were due to be held by the end of October and the coalition crisis means the elections will likely be brought forward to early September.
The ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party said it would seek to dissolve the Knesset and trigger early elections because of the coalition’s failure to pass a law enshrining the decades-old exemption of yeshiva religious seminary students from military service.
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“We have no trust in the prime minister. We no longer feel we are his partners. We are not committed to him,” wrote Rabbi Dov Lando, the spiritual leader of one of the main ultra-Orthodox – known as Haredi in Hebrew – factions.
“From now on, we will do only what we believe is good for ultra-Orthodox Judaism, and in our opinion elections should be held as soon as possible. All kinds of talk about a coalition bloc no longer exist.”
The Haredi parties also warned that their automatic support for Netanyahu will no longer be valid after the election.
Netanyahu’s Likud party promised the ultra-Orthodox that the coalition would prioritise a new law extending the military exemption for Haredi students when the government was formed in December 2022. That promise was never fulfilled.
The Gaza war that began in October 2023 and Israel’s subsequent wars in Lebanon and Iran have placed an unprecedented burden on Israel Defense Forces reservists, who have been called repeatedly to military service, with some serving hundreds of days a year. As the demand for the ultra-Orthodox to share the military service burden grew, Netanyahu realised that extending the Haredi draft exemption under such circumstances would be politically difficult.
Polls show that the right-wing and religious parties that form the current coalition would win about 50 of the 120 Knesset seats, while Jewish opposition parties – from the right, left and centre – would win close to 60, just short of an overall majority. The remaining 10 seats come from the two Arab parties. Most Jewish parties are reluctant to sit in a potential coalition with Arab parties but this may change after the election.
Some members of the Israeli opposition were inspired by the recent elections in Hungary, which toppled Viktor Orban from power after 16 years, but a united opposition to defeat Israel’s longest-serving prime minister is extremely unlikely given the ideological differences of the parties.
