Why is Netanyahu's government about to fall?

Benjamin Netanyahu is considered the ultimate political survivor in the cutthroat world that is Israeli politics. After a chaotic first term in the 1990s that ended in failure, his triumphant return in 2009 presaged the longest running premiership in Israeli history save that of Ben Gurion's, with only a brief break during the Bennet-Lapid government.

Even the current government has weathered multiple crises, including the fight over judicial reform, the failure to foresee or prevent the October 7 massacre, and multiple controversies related to the government's ability or inability to free the hostages or eliminate Hamas. Multiple criminal trials have also not stopped King Bibi from running the country.

Now, the ultimate survivor may finally fall, due to a long-standing controversy in Israeli life: the draft crisis.

To make a long story short: ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, for a variety of cultural and especially political reasons, have been granted sweeping exemptions from being drafted into the IDF, on grounds of their importance as Torah scholars and to prevent them dropping their religious observance in a majority secular army.

Multiple court cases, protests, and different kinds of coalitions and even laws have failed to resolve the problem. At heart is a fundamental divide between the Haredi minority - which considers the community's own religious and economic survival to be paramount above all else - and the non-Haredi Jewish majority, which considers IDF service to be a baseline societal obligation, important not just for military survival but also social solidarity.

Things have come to a head in the past year due to a Supreme Court case which ruled that without a compromise law acceptable to the court, all Haredim must be drafted - and thus, any and all government budgets or tax breaks given to people eligible for the draft must be ended. Furthermore, anyone dodging the draft must be arrested or subject to sanctions.

For a community as large as the Haredi one, with hundreds of thousands of people, large families, and living close to or just above the poverty line - this is close to an economic catastrophe. Efforts to raise funds from abroad have staved off disaster for now, but time is running out.

The problem for Haredim and the non-Haredi majority of the coalition is that both sides have hunkered down into maximalist positions: Haredim want absolutely no-one, even those not learning Torah, to be subject to the draft, which means tens of thousands of eligible draftees will be exempted at a time when the IDF needs every soldier it can get, as it is fighting on multiple fronts.

This is unacceptable to the majority of even Netanyahu's coalition, let alone the majority of the country. Regular and reserve troops have been fighting to defend the country against terrorists on multiple fronts, and the idea that so many of their brethren get to avoid that duty rankles badly.

Nevertheless, all the Haredi parties, which together have the power to force the government to fall, have threatened to vote for a law on Wednesday to disperse the Knesset if the government does not propose a bill it considers acceptable.

Meanwhile, MK Yuli Edelstein, the powerful Likud MK who chairs the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, insists that any such law must include sanctions on those who do not heed the law and real numbers of soldiers from the get-go.

Netanyahu, Edelstein, and Haredi party leaders have been working hard to ensure a compromise is reached before Wednesday, but as of right now, the Haredi parties said that they are set to vote to disperse the Knesset if things don't change.

Will the Israeli political wizard pull the ultimate rabbit out of his hat or will this bring him down? We'll know in a few days.