Charged scenes unfolded Thursday in the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee during deliberations over the Basic Law on Torah Study, after a combat veteran attending the hearing turned to lawmakers with an emotional appeal to include IDF combat soldiers and combat trauma victims within the framework of the legislation.
The veteran told the committee that alongside the psychological difficulties combat trauma survivors face, there are also social and criminal consequences stemming from their condition.
He said that when certain elements of post traumatic stress surface, outbursts follow, and that a person in that state does not truly intend the actions he takes, describing it as a kind of temporary loss of composure. He said that a lack of familiarity with the condition among law enforcement personnel has, in his account, led to arrests and hospitalizations, telling the committee that police do not know how to understand people in his situation, resulting in what he called extremely aggressive arrests and lengthy hospital stays. He said he personally spent a month and a half under involuntary psychiatric hospitalization over what he described as nothing, calling the experience painful.
He also criticized delays in receiving services he said combat trauma victims are entitled to by law, telling the committee he had been waiting nearly a month for a referral for taxi transportation to psychological treatment that he is legally owed, saying that without the referral he cannot reach treatment at all.
He closed his remarks with a personal appeal to committee members, saying they were simply asking to receive what they are entitled to, that no one there was seeking to get rich, and asking lawmakers to see them as they would their own family members. He said that if, God forbid, an event like October 7 were to happen again, they would stand shoulder to shoulder, together, each wounded in a different place but sharing the same essential experience, and asked lawmakers directly for help.
The combat veterans who took part in the hearing had sought to have their inclusion added to the arrangements under discussion in the law, which would for the first time explicitly reference IDF combat soldiers and combat trauma victims, coverage they said had previously been promised to them by the prime minister and the defense minister.
Tensions in the committee escalated toward the end of the hearing after representatives of the combat veterans realized their request to be included in the law's framework was not expected to be accepted. In response, they interrupted the proceedings, protested loudly, and made clear that in their view the legislation could not move forward without also addressing IDF combat soldiers and combat trauma victims, declaring that they would not accept the law passing without them.
