United Torah Judaism MK Yisrael Eichler will be appointed deputy communications minister in a move by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to prevent the MK from voting against the government’s draft regulation bill for yeshiva students.
Ministers are expected to approve the appointment Thursday in a telephone vote, a spokesperson for Eichler told the Times of Israel.
Under the agreement, Eichler, who is a member of UTJ party leader Yitzhak Goldknopf’s Agudat Yisrael faction, which opposes the current draft law, will resign from the Knesset and be appointed to the cabinet.
This will allow Yitzhak Pindrus, a former UTJ Knesset member from MK Moshe Gafni’s Degel Hatorah faction, which supports the bill in its current form, to reenter the Knesset and vote in support of the measure.
Agudat Yisrael and Degel Hatorah are the two factions that make up the United Torah Judaism party.
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Pindrus was one of three UTJ MKs pushed out of the Knesset in July under the Norwegian Law, following the resignations of the party’s ministers when UTJ quit the government over the failure to pass a draft regulation bill that would largely continue the exemption of the Haredi community.
That led Agudat Yisrael to hold four seats within the Knesset while Degel Hatorah had only three, causing tensions within the party over faction control. The new arrangement is a compromise that restores balance between the two.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks with MK Yisrael Eichler at the Knesset, February 19, 2024. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
More significantly, it allows Netanyahu to both neutralize an opponent of the bill and secure another vote in its favor. In one single move, he seems to have reduced opposition from the ultra-Orthodox UTJ party enough to pass both the draft bill and the budget, the latter of which the party refused to support until the former was passed.
Some 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men aged between 18 and 24 are currently believed to be eligible for military service, but have not enlisted, causing widespread resentment among non-Haredi Israeli Jews. The Israel Defense Forces has said it urgently needs 12,000 recruits, due to the strain on standing and reserve forces caused by the war against Hamas in Gaza and other military challenges.
For the past year, the Haredi leadership has pushed for a law keeping its constituency out of the IDF, after the High Court ruled that decades-long blanket exemptions from army duty traditionally afforded to full-time Haredi yeshiva students were illegal.
The government has until March 31 to pass the budget. If the budget does not pass by that deadline, the Knesset will dissolve automatically, triggering early elections that would take place in June instead of October, meaning that passing the draft bill has become a matter of life and death for Netanyahu’s coalition.
Tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox men attend a protest against mandatory military conscription, in Jerusalem, October 30, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
As part of his role, Eichler will reportedly be given authority to oversee the Lag B’Omer pilgrimage to Mount Meron, which draws hundreds of thousands of participants largely from the ultra-Orthodox community.
Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi congratulated Eichler in a post on X, writing that he “welcomes the move.”
“Together we will work resolutely to complete the government’s central tasks – the draft law, the communications reform, the budget, and other issues – for the sake of the people of Israel,” Karhi said.
The move has been criticized by opposition lawmakers as a quid pro quo, amounting to a bribe by the prime minister to secure votes for his draft bill and the survival of his government.
United Torah Judaism MK Yitzhak Pindrus speaks during a committee meeting at the Knesset, February 10, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
“Netanyahu is advancing draft evasion together with Knesset members who do not believe in the existence of the State of Israel,” said Opposition Leader Yair Lapid in a post on X, adding that the prime minister was “once again betraying IDF soldiers and reservists.”
“The appointment of Eichler as a deputy minister – a man who has called Israel an ‘enemy state,’ a historic national disaster, and said there is a ‘Hebrew ghetto’ here – solely to pass the draft-evasion law is a disgrace that cannot be erased,” he continued.
Yisrael Beytenu chair Avigdor Liberman condemned the appointment as a bribe.
“Government ministries are not a gift or a bribe; there is actually a country here to run,” Liberman wrote in a post on X, calling the appointment “disgraceful” and “absurd.”
“Eichler is someone who opposes the very existence of the state and, broadly speaking, is also quite opposed to the very existence of the media,” he continued.
“Netanyahu is so captive to the extremists that he is willing to appoint a man who opposes Zionism and blames it for not preventing the Holocaust as a useless deputy minister, just to push through a draft-evasion law and cling to his seat for a few more months,” says Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz.
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