Blue and White candidate: Only top Yeshiva students, like top athletes, should be exempt from IDF service

Gabi Ashkenazi,  former IDF chief and now politician on the Blue and White list, says it’s dangerous to allow “a growing public” to avoid military service.

By World Israel News Staff

Gabi Ashkenazi, one of three former IDF chiefs of staff leading the Blue and White list, which is challenging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the country’s leadership in the April 9 election has been quoted as saying that only top yeshiva students should be absolved from military service.

Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion accepted the idea that the new Jewish state needed a core of Torah scholars and set a quota of learned yeshiva students who would be exempt from serving in the IDF.

However, in the decades after the 1948 establishment of the state, avoiding military service increasingly became commonplace in some Orthodox communities, with rabbis providing letters to the IDF recruitment office as a matter of course to ensure exemption, while others just avoided any contact with the IDF.

“We have a model in which outstanding athletes are given exemptions and everyone else must serve,” said Ashkenazi in a recording played on Kan public broadcasting on Monday. He was said to be speaking at a conference on equality in public service, saying that just as athletes are exempt from serving in the IDF only if they are at the top of their sport, yeshiva students should be absolved only if they are considered leading scholars.

Ashkenazi, who is number four on the Blue and White list, served as Israel’s military chief from 2007 to 2011. He was succeeded at the helm of the IDF by Benny Gantz, who leads Blue and White. The number three candidate is Moshe Ya’alon, who was chief-of-staff from 2002 to 2005 and later served as defense minister.

While Blue and White has been leading Netanyahu’s Likud party in most public opinion polls ahead of the election, it does not appear to have enough support to form a  majority coalition in parliament. Crucial to its success would be to ability to attract coalition partners whose members include sectors where yeshiva study overrides military service. Ashkenazi’s comments will likely add to Blue and White’s difficulties.

Blue and White already faced a big obstacle to forming alliances with such groups is its number two candidate, Yair Lapid, the only one of the top four who is not a former IDF chief of staff, has been a leading advocate of enforced conscription for Orthodox Jews.

In a previous Netanyahu coalition where Lapid served as finance minister, the government passed legislation to curtail exemptions. In the current Netanyahu government, with Lapid in the opposition, those restrictions on exemptions have eased.

Ashkenazi said in his comments that it is “dangerous” for society when “a small number of young people serve the country as opposed to a growing public that does not serve.”