After a party defection from his governing coalition, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a majority in parliament of only one seat. Another defection could sink his control of the country. Anusha Rathi reports for Foreign Policy:

An Israeli ultra-Orthodox party, United Torah Judaism (UTJ), announced on Monday that it would quit Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government over a long-running dispute relating to the country’s new conscription bill. The move leaves Netanyahu with a parliamentary majority of just one seat; if more parties also resign, it could severely limit Netanyahu’s ability to govern and bring Israel a step closer to holding new elections.

Israeli ultra-Orthodox religious students have long been exempt from the country’s mandatory military service that applies to most other young Israelis. However, those exemptions were scrapped last year after the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that they amounted to discrimination against the country’s secular majority and ordered the government to begin drafting the religious students.

That decision sparked outrage within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, whose members argue that their men serve the country through their intensive religious studies and that mandatory military service would threaten that tradition and their way of life. Netanyahu has since worked hard to resolve the issue by pushing for a new military conscription bill in the parliament. The new bill lays out a plan to gradually integrate the ultra-Orthodox into the military while potentially cutting public funding for individuals or religious schools (known as yeshivas) that fail to participate in the program. Even still, UTJ lawmakers said that the proposal is too harsh.

In a statement announcing its resignation from the coalition, Degel HaTorah, one of the two factions that make up the UTJ, cited the “repeated violations by the government of its commitments to ensure the status of holy yeshiva students who diligently engage in their studies.”

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