The Knesset is set to hold a preliminary vote on Wednesday to trigger an early election — and crucial partners in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition are threatening to support it.

For the past week, Haredi parties have said they would vote in favor of legislation that would dissolve the Knesset and schedule an election for this fall. The parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, are threatening to jump ship because the coalition has not passed a law to continue the long-standing exemption for full-time yeshiva students from IDF conscription.

Without Shas and UTJ, Netanyahu’s coalition would be left with 50 members, far short of the 61-seat majority he needs to keep his government afloat.

As such, Netanyahu and his allies have been frantically trying to negotiate a compromise that will keep the Haredi parties in the fold. 

Past laws exempting young Haredi men from military service have expired and a new one has not been passed, leading the High Court of Justice to order the government last year to actively conscript them.

Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Yuli Edelstein, who is responsible for ushering a bill to a vote that would codify the status of young Haredi men and set rising enlistment targets for the coming years, has said he will not move it forward unless it includes significant penalties for yeshiva students who refuse to serve. These reportedly include canceling daycare and housing subsidies and bans on leaving the country and receiving a driver’s license before age 29. 

Likud and other parties leading Israel over the past half-century allowed the Haredi exemption to continue out of political expedience. But that position has become politically and militarily untenable in the more than 600 days since the war in Gaza began and hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been called for reserve duty, with some serving for hundreds of days. 

In addition to Edelstein, several other coalition lawmakers and Cabinet ministers have similarly said they will not support a bill that would continue to allow the vast majority of Haredi men between the ages of 18-24 to decline IDF service without sanctions.

Those sanctions are a red line for the Haredi parties, for whom maintaining their communities’  practice of yearslong full-time yeshiva study has become a key political issue. As such, the parties’ spiritual leaders instructed their politicians to force new elections if penalties for avoiding IDF service are put in place. 

While the gaps between the sides are significant and the disputes are serious, Netanyahu has managed to keep coalitions afloat in seemingly hopeless political situations before.

Several factors are working to his advantage. Most significantly,the Haredim are not likely to find themselves in a better situation after a new election. Opposition parties are even more opposed to yeshiva students’ exemption from the draft than those currently in power, and they favor more liberal policies on other religion and state issues that are important to Haredim. 

As such, the best an election can do for the Haredim is to buy time, hope the war will end and bet that public pressure to draft their young voters will abate. One senior Shas rabbi predicted that the current coalition parties will “come crawling” back to the Haredi parties after an election. 

The leading rabbi of one of the Hasidic sects within United Torah Judaism, Belz, opposes holding an election during wartime, and his representative, Jerusalem Affairs Minister Meir Porush, has also been working to try to stop the dissolution of the Knesset.

In addition, the vote on Wednesday is a preliminary one, which means that in order for the Knesset to call an election, three more votes on the matter would be necessary. While it would be possible to go through the whole process in a day, Netanyahu and his coalition would likely drag out those votes for as long as possible, at least past July 23, when the Knesset’s long summer recess begins. 

If the bill is voted down, it cannot be brought to a vote again for six months, though a different party could put forward a similar bill days later.

If the law passes, an election would have to be held after a minimum of 90 days and no more than five months after the Knesset is dissolved.

During that time, a caretaker government would comprise the current Cabinet members, who would still be led by Netanyahu. There are few limits in Israeli law to what a caretaker government can do, and the High Court has been inconsistent about the kinds of decisions a government can make after the Knesset is dispersed.