Israel is heading to elections, and the question that should organize every vote and every coalition negotiation is this: Will the next government include parties whose voters carry the burden of defending the country, or will it again include parties whose constituents do not?
The phrase that should define the next Knesset already exists. Brit hameshartim or the “covenant of those who serve,” entered Israeli politics on January 6, 2025, when MKs Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot, and Chili Tropper convened an emergency Knesset conference under that banner to oppose the coalition’s draft exemption bill. Gantz told the gathering that a country in which “so few contribute so much, while so many do not serve at all” could not continue. The slogan stuck because it named something true. After two and a half years of war, with reservists who have spent over 300 days in uniform since October 7, and families who buried sons and brothers, Israelis no longer accept the old arrangement in which one half of the country fights and the other half receives a state-funded exemption to study.
The covenant is not a left-wing or right-wing idea. It is a Zionist idea. It says, in its simplest form, that those who govern Israel must come from communities that serve it.
Last Sunday, former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid merged Bennett 2026 and Yesh Atid into a single party. They called their alliance, as they have for over a decade, brit ha’achim, the “covenant of brothers.” The trust between the two men is real. But the brothers are not enough. The next coalition will need Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar! party. It will need Yisrael Beytenu, whose voters serve among the highest rates in the country. It will need every faction within Likud and Religious Zionism whose own constituents fight, do reserve duty, and bury their dead.
Those factions exist. At the “brit hameshartim” Knesset conference in early 2025, Likud MK Eli Dalal, Religious Zionism MK Yitzhak Kroizer, and Otzma Yehudit MK Yitzhak Wasserlauf walked into a Gantz-led event and stayed. Dalal said publicly that he would not vote for the watered-down draft law his own coalition was preparing. The national camp has its servants; it has its bereaved. The pretense that one cannot be both nationalist and a believer in equal service has been broken by the war itself.
What brit hameshartim requires is straightforward. The next government must exclude any party whose central political contract with its voters is the protection of a broad exemption from the draft. That is the bottom line. Shas and United Torah Judaism, unless they agree to give up that protection, fail to meet it; so does any faction willing to sign a coalition agreement protecting the exemption in exchange for portfolios. Everyone else, religious or secular, Right or Left, settler or Tel Avivian, can join in.
This will be unpopular among the political professionals who have built careers on the old arithmetic, the 64-seat bloc, the 61-seat bloc, the calculation that runs through the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties either way. The old arithmetic produced the exemption law that the Supreme Court struck down in 2024. It is what the country has spent two and a half years rejecting in blood.
Real concessions from every party, no exceptions
A coalition built on this principle will demand real concessions from every party.
Bennett’s religious-Zionist base will accept compromises on religion and state. Lapid’s secular-liberal base will accept compromises on Judea and Samaria. Eisenkot, Avigdor Liberman, and the dissenters in the national camp will accept one another. That is what a covenant is. It’s not a merger of identical views. It’s an agreement that the cost of governing is paid by everyone who governs.
The question before voters is whether Israel will continue to be governed by a coalition built on the exemption of one community from the cost of its own defense. The answer should be no. The first act of any government formed on this principle must be a draft law without categorical exemptions, with personal sanctions for refusal and integration tracks built around the needs of the IDF and the realities of haredi life.
Voters should hold every party in this election to that test. The next Knesset should belong to brit hameshartim, and to no one else.
Source:
www.jpost.com
