A maximum nine panel bench of the High Court of Justice on Tuesday pummeled the state with repeated demands to know when the new legislation to resolve the issue of drafting haredim into the IDF would be completed. They also implied that the state was contradicting its earlier positions by asking for more time.
Time after time, different justices asked what was the deadline for completing the legislation and how far along it was, with the state merely repeating that the Knesset "was working intensively" and commenting that it "had no prophetic powers."
The court, presided over by Supreme Court President Asher D. Grunis, slammed the state for contradicting its earlier positions. This related to Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein's August 2013 public duel with Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein and Bayit Yehudi MK Ayelet Shaked, who chairs the Knesset committee on the issue, in which he pressed them to finish the bill in the near-immediate future.
Weinstein had told Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon that the process for passing the bill should be pushed ahead more rapidly, even during the Knesset recess.
Edelstein’s response, weeks after the first reading of the bill was approved, had essentially said that it's not the Attorney-General's job to set schedules for the legislature.
Weinstein had said that despite his respect for the Knesset's autonomy, in light of the petition before the High Court, that “in spite of the meeting of the special committee [Shaked Committee] even during the summer recess, I thought that there was still room to increase the pace of the hearings to an even more frequent pace.”
He said that he viewed it as “his duty” as the government’s lawyer to “convey to the prime minister and the defense minister the problems which were liable to occur” in the court proceeding, including unspecified dire consequences, if the legislative process drew out much longer.
The court said that several months having passed since Weinstein took that hardline position on finishing the law soon, and the sense that the state had even less of an idea now about how soon the new law would be finished than before, was a blatant contradiction.
The state responded that Weinstein's letter had merely been a tool trying to press the legislative process forward, not to take a position on a specific hard deadline.
Also, bizarrely, the state's counsel said she was unsure whether Weinstein himself had approved the letter and some current state positions, or whether the approvals came from Weinstein's assistants.
The court also seemed annoyed that the state appeared to be taking advantage of the freeze of the Law of the Security Services that it ordered in August 2013.
In one of the hearings, the High Court demanded that the Minister of Defense explain why he deferred drafting haredi men of the 1994 and 1995 cohorts, but in place of ordering an immediate draft, ordered a freeze of the Law of the Security Services.
The freeze means that the provision of the law that says that delayed drafting of a draftee for more than a year reduces the amount of time that person must serve, will not apply, and that, at least in theory, any court order to draft the haredim in question would still obligate them to serve a full term.
The court implied that when it ordered the freeze to maintain the status quo, it had not expected an extended situation, but that the state was using the freeze as an excuse for buying time.
The Movement for Quality Government in Israel, along with several other groups, petitioned the high court to draft haredi men from 1994-1995 following the expiration of the Tal Law on August 1, 2012.
This law provided a legal framework for full time yeshiva students to indefinitely postpone their military service, but this option no longer exists since the law expired.
MQG has complained that more than a year has passed since the Tal Law was struck and yet the Ministry of Defense has still not drafted any Haredi men except on a voluntary basis.
Hundreds of conscription notices were sent out by the Ministry to haredi boys approaching the age of enlistment, but Ya’alon decided in July 2013 to send deferral letters of at least four months to 608 haredi men, who have been continually deferred since.
This was another issue where the court went on the attack, stating that the state's counsel's claim that Ya'alon had the power to continue to defer the draft dates with no set deadline contradicted earlier statements by the state that his powers of deferral were limited.