Political correspondent Sam Sokol and environmental reporter Sue Surkes join host Jessica Steinberg for today’s episode. Sokol speaks about the Knesset voting on a bill to extend reservists’ service, in order to keep reservists keep serving because of exigencies of the war, and an ongoing manpower shortage. Sokol discusses how this bill feeds into the ongoing ultra-Orthodox draft issue, generating a backlash of anger as it backs into what is sometimes called an evasion law for the ultra-Orthodox draft, allowing exemptions for young yeshiva students while the burden falls on other parts of Israeli society. He also looks at another bill that would allow the government to appoint hundreds of new state-funded rabbinical posts in towns and local councils, creating a kind of jobs program for members of the coalition’s religious parties. The bill was stalled during the earlier months of the war, is now being pushed by the coalition partners and Sokol said that a major political scrap could emerge from these two controversial issues on the docket.
