Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid sharply escalated his rhetoric on Monday against the chareidi public and its rabbinic leadership, accusing them of delegitimizing the Israel Defense Forces and demanding what he described as unequal treatment in the wake of the October 7 attacks.

Speaking at the opening of a faction meeting of his Yesh Atid party, Lapid addressed the ongoing controversy surrounding remarks made by Yitzchok Goldknopf, chairman of United Torah Judaism, as well as statements by chareidi rabbinic figures opposing military conscription. Lapid claimed that chareidi leaders are “not asking for an exemption from army service, but for an exemption from bereavement.”

Lapid said Goldknopf appeared before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee a day earlier and compared sanctions on draft evaders and deserters to the yellow badge imposed on Jews during the Holocaust. “My father wore a yellow badge,” Lapid said. “A 13-year-old Jewish boy sitting in the Budapest ghetto while the Nazis wanted to kill him. My grandfather was murdered in the cold and snow in a concentration camp. My grandfather never harmed a single person in his life. He was a small, overweight man, not important at all. They put a yellow badge on him and murdered him because he was a Jew.”

He went on to cite a gathering of roshei yeshiva that took place the same day, where Rav Menachem Tzvi Berlin reportedly said that the Israel Defense Forces and those who support enlistment were “no better than Hitler.” Lapid said no senior rabbinic figures present objected to the comparison. “Hitler murdered a million and a half Jewish children,” Lapid said. “And he stood there and compared him to the IDF, and no one stood up and said, ‘Sir, Jews do not speak this way.’”

Lapid delivered some of his harshest words directly at the chareidi leadership. “How dare you?” he said. “How dare you compare the Israel Defense Forces to the Nazis? If there were no IDF, we would all have been dead long ago like my grandfather. What kind of Judaism is this? What happened to ‘Its ways are ways of pleasantness’? Since when do Jews speak to one another like this?”

Addressing the broader national burden of military service, Lapid said, “At some point you’ll have to understand: we’re not trying to fight with you, we’re trying to live with you. But it’s impossible to continue when our children are dying and yours are not.” He added, “You’re not asking for an exemption from enlistment. You’re asking for an exemption from bereavement. You’re asking for an exemption from the knock on the door at four in the morning. We can’t give you that anymore. Not after October 7.”

Lapid also focused on the economic dimension of the dispute, claiming that draft evasion imposes a massive financial burden on the public. “We also can’t continue with a situation where we fund draft evasion to the tune of 60 billion shekels every year,” he said. “Every working family transfers 1,700 shekels a month to draft evaders.”

Concluding his remarks, Lapid said his party was offering an alternative vision. “What we’re proposing instead is shared lives and a shared Israeli story,” he said. “We have no problem with you being chareidi. That is your full right. But it does not exempt you from the obligations that apply to every Israeli citizen — to serve, to study, and to work. It does not exempt you from sharing the fate of this people. And stop talking about the Holocaust. It does you no honor, it does not honor the Torah, it cheapens the Holocaust, and it gives ammunition to antisemites against the Jewish people.”

{Matzav.com}

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