Likud MK Tally Gotliv blasts draft arrests of ultra-Orthodox draft evaders and calls for protests

Likud MK Tally Gotliv used a Wednesday interview on Radio North to attack Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, oppose enforcement against ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers, comment on internal Likud politics, and criticize Yair Golan, head of The Democrats. She said her clashes with the attorney general show a major shift in the legal establishment’s stance toward the Knesset and the government.

Referring to Knesset committee hearings, Gotliv said, “If Miara still has not understood how to bring her down to her knees, she understood when I interrogated her and hurled harsh things at her in the Knesset committee for many long hours. What no one in the government managed to do for almost four years, I did in a few hours.” She also rejected reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to push her off the Likud slate, calling it “an urban legend,” and said, “The prime minister trusts me, asks my opinion and listens to me very attentively.”

Gotliv dismissed The Democrats as a misleading label and attacked Golan personally. “There is no such party, they asked to change the name and we did not approve it because it is misleading,” she said. “There is nothing democratic about Yair Golan. He is a tyrannical dictator who defames our fighters. The words that come out of his mouth could be slogans at pro-Hamas demonstrations. Soldiers are being called baby killers because of him.”

On the draft issue, she said the arrest of ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers fills her “with disgust,” arguing that if authorities arrested “the 100,000 draft evaders in Tel Aviv,” she would accept it, but that the current arrests are “humiliating” and pointless because the army is not prepared to absorb them. “Stop turning the ultra-Orthodox into the world’s villains and persecuting them,” she said. “Whoever’s Torah is their profession should study Torah.” In a Wednesday night post on X, she urged ultra-Orthodox Israelis to protest “the persecutors and inciters” near the homes of Baharav-Miara, Gil לימון, Isaac Amit, Daphna Barak-Erez and others, saying such authorized protests would be more effective and would disrupt only the lives of those targeting them.