Gov't secretary: Attorney-General overstepping authority in haredi draft involvement

The Attorney General’s Office’s ruling that the IDF must act to draft all haredim – and not prioritize the draft of those who are already working – is a breach of the IDF’s authority to decide how to draft haredim, Government Secretary Yossi Fuchs argued in a letter to Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara dated August 5 and was published in full on Wednesday.

The letter is another step in a long-simmering feud between Fuchs and the A-G’s office over the boundaries of the government’s authority on several issues, including the haredi draft.

Fuchs’s letter focused on a ruling by the High Court of Justice in late June that the state was constitutionally required to act immediately to draft haredi men of military age since the legal basis for their exemption expired already in July 2023. The court, however, did not set a timeline, writing that it accepted the government’s pledge to draft approximately 5,000 haredim in the coming year. It stressed that constitutionally, defense authorities were not allowed to exempt a group with certain shared characteristics, such as haredim, but were allowed to exempt individuals based on criteria that are equal to all Israeli citizens.

The court also noted in the ruling in response to a different petition that the Attorney General’s Office was the sole statutory body responsible for interpreting the law and the High Court’s rulings, and therefore the government was legally required to adhere to the A-G’s legal opinions.

A number of weeks after the ruling, the IDF announced its plan to begin drafting haredim by sending out 3,000 summons in three waves of 1,000 each with two-week intervals, beginning on July 21. It also revealed that its policy was to draft haredim it believed had a high potential of respecting the orders, and that it therefore targeted haredim who were either listed as employees or as students in academic institutions.

Several days after the ruling, Deputy Attorney-General Gil Limon wrote in a letter to the government that it was now required by law to draft all haredim of military age without creating criteria to differentiate between them, such as between yeshiva students and those who have joined the workforce. However, in consecutive opinions, Limon permitted the IDF’s first batch of 3,000 summons to target working haredim due to the IDF’s acute and immediate need for human resources, but that in the second batch, expected in November, the military would no longer be permitted to make such a distinction.

Legally required to obey ruling

Fuchs argued that this ruling was a breach of authority and a violation of the High Court ruling, as it overruled the IDF’s authority to set its own workforce policy. This would force the army to summon full-time yeshiva students, a step that haredi leaders have strongly opposed. Such a move could lead to a boomerang effect where even haredim who were willing to enlist will no longer do so since the state will be perceived as aiming to harm the world of yeshiva study.

Baharav-Miara responded to Fuch’s letter on Monday. In an unusually sharply written tone, made out to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the attorney-general accused Fuchs of “flawed” work processes, including issuing unauthorized legal opinions. Further, she wrote that Fuchs’s letter was intended to “prevent the attorney-general from ensuring that the government’s steps on the issue of drafting and funding haredim were legal,” and remind the prime minister that the attorney-general was the government’s only legal interpreter of the law and of High Court rulings.

“The general principle is that the government secretariat must act in a professional and stately manner to ensure the properness of the government’s work. A central duty of the government secretary is to ensure that the government makes decisions while maintaining proper and systematized work procedures, for the benefit of the public. This would have prevented a significant portion of the failures that occurred,” Baharav-Miara wrote.

The attorney-general noted another incident on July 31, in which Fuchs wrote what she claimed was an unauthorized legal opinion on a top-secret issue with “serious ramifications in the security field.”

On Tuesday, Fuchs responded that the issue in question did not in fact have “serious ramifications in the security field,” and accused the A-G of unfairly accusing him of something without him being able to refute the claim due to its top-secret nature.

Drafting a summons to yeshiva students could also destabilize the government if its two haredi parties decide to leave it. Fuchs, representing the government in debates on a new haredi draft bill in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee (FADC), has expressed opposition to drafting full-time yeshiva students and is advocating for a bill based on one that passed its first reading in 2022 under the Bennett-Lapid government and is widely viewed as irrelevant to the IDF’s current human resources needs.

The exchange of letters this week indicated a deterioration in the already tense relations between the government secretary and the attorney-general. Many ministers, coalition MKs, and government supporters have argued that the attorney-general was intentionally tripping up the Knesset in order to cause it to topple.

However, the opposition and other opponents have claimed that the attorney-general was forced to repeatedly intervene in the government’s operations because it keeps attempting to carry out legally problematic or illegal actions – and that if the government adhered to the law, the A-G would not need to intervene as much.