Background
Five consolidated petitions challenged Amendment No. 28 to the Defense Service Law, a temporary measure enacted in July 2026. The amendment barred arrest, investigation, and enforcement proceedings for draft evasion, desertion, or unauthorized absence against qualifying yeshiva students. Although it left their statutory duty to serve formally intact, it suspended the criminal mechanisms for enforcing that duty, including retroactively for certain reporting dates beginning July 1, 2023.
The legislation originated in a 2022 government bill intended to increase ultra-Orthodox enlistment, reduce inequality in military service, promote civilian service, and support workforce participation. After continuity was applied to that bill, the Knesset committee considered broader conscription frameworks for years. Shortly before enactment, however, the committee chair introduced a substantially different proposal focused solely on halting enforcement against yeshiva students. The Knesset’s legal advisers, the attorney general, and the military chief of staff raised serious procedural, constitutional, and operational objections. The amendment passed its second and third readings on July 14, 2026, and the Court prevented it from taking effect while the petitions were pending.
The Court’s Holding
A nine-justice panel unanimously declared Amendment No. 28 void. Deputy President Noam Sohlberg’s lead opinion concluded that the amendment suffered from a defect going to the root of the legislative process. The measure enacted at the second and third readings was a fundamentally different arrangement from the proposal approved at first reading: its principal objectives, operative provisions, and regulatory method had changed. It therefore constituted a “new subject” beyond the permissible scope of committee amendments and had not completed the legislative stages required by the Knesset Rules and Basic Law: The Knesset.
The lead opinion also held that the amendment violated the constitutional right to equality and failed the limitation-clause requirements of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. By preserving the criminal duty to serve while prospectively disabling enforcement only for a religious-sectoral group, the amendment created explicit inequality before the criminal law and aggravated inequality in bearing the military-service burden. The Court found the measure unsuitable and disproportionate, particularly because it relied heavily on declarations, lacked effective enforcement safeguards, and offered no adequate balance between recognition of Torah study and the rights of those required to serve.
The justices agreed on invalidation, though their reasoning varied. Justice David Mintz relied solely on the fatal procedural defects and did not join the substantive constitutional analysis. Other justices emphasized equality in criminal enforcement, the rule of law, mutual responsibility, or alternative constitutional foundations. The Court made the conditional order absolute, annulled the amendment, and issued no costs order.
Key Takeaways
- A Knesset committee may revise a bill after first reading, but it may not replace it with a fundamentally different legislative scheme under the guise of amendment.
- Temporary legislation remains subject to constitutional and procedural review, even when its limited duration may affect the proportionality analysis.
- Leaving a legal duty intact while selectively disabling criminal enforcement for a defined religious group violates equality before the law and undermines the rule of law.
Why It Matters
The ruling reinforces judicial limits on using legislative continuity and committee-stage amendments to bypass a first reading and the accompanying parliamentary and public scrutiny. A bill’s general connection to the same policy area is insufficient when its purpose and operative architecture have been replaced.
Substantively, the judgment treats equal criminal enforcement as a foundational constitutional principle. In the politically charged context of ultra-Orthodox conscription during an extended war, the Court held that the legislature could not preserve universal service obligations on paper while granting one sector advance immunity from the mechanisms used to enforce them.