JERUSALEM: Reminiscent of last year’s large-scale street demonstrations, tens of thousands of protesters protested Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the exemptions given to ultra-Orthodox Jewish men from military duty on Sunday.
Protest organizations, some of which spearheaded the large-scale protests that shook Israel in 2023, planned the gathering in front of the Knesset, the parliament, and demanded that the current administration be replaced by a new one.
In addition, the demonstrators demand a more equitable distribution of the army duty that binds the majority of Israelis. Since October 7 and the subsequent conflict in Gaza, some 600 troops have lost their lives—the largest number of military casualties in recent memory.
A long-standing social unrest that is also troubling Netanyahu’s coalition administration has been exacerbated by Israel’s incursion into Palestine: the exemptions given to ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students from serving in the nation’s conscript military.
Netanyahu submitted a plea for a 30-day postponement to the Supreme Court last week, with a deadline of March 31 for the government to draft legislation ending a decades-long impasse over the matter.
