A Minister Said Protesters From Kaplan Street Should Not Fight, and a Bereaved Father Answered With His Son
Amichay Eliyahu said he does not want to draft anyone from Kaplan into combat duty, and the father of a soldier who protested there and died fighting called him out by name.
Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, a member of Itamar Ben Gvir's Otzma Yehudit party, told an event at Ironi Alef High School in Tel Aviv that he does not want to draft someone from Kaplan to enlist in combat duty, adding that in the end they won't storm into battle. Kaplan Street was the site of mass anti government protests in 2023 against the judicial overhaul, and on the right the word Kaplan has become shorthand for anti government activists generally.
Izhar Shay answered with his own son. Staff Sergeant Yaron Shay protested at Kaplan and later died fighting, a fact his father raised directly against Eliyahu's suggestion that Kaplan protesters would not fight when called. Ruby Chen, father of Staff Sergeant Itay Chen, called Eliyahu a lowlife minister. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett demanded Eliyahu apologize at the graves of fallen soldiers.
Eliyahu later said he meant only extremists who had called for refusal to serve, not protesters generally, a clarification that came after the backlash rather than before the remark. The distinction he is now drawing is not the one his original comment made, which named Kaplan itself rather than any specific call to refuse service.
The 2023 protests already carried this exact tension, thousands of reservists who marched against the judicial overhaul while warning they would stop volunteering if it passed, without ever stopping their service itself. Eliyahu's comment revives an argument the war was supposed to have settled: whether opposing a government's policy and refusing to fight for the country are the same act. The fathers who answered him did so with proof that, for their sons, they were not.
