A war stretching into its sixth month with no end in sight, more than 100 hostages still held by Hamas, nearly 120,000 evacuees from towns along the Gaza and Lebanon borders waiting to return home, and a sputtering economy. Any one of these issues should be enough to bring down Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but the greatest threat hanging over his government today is the question of whether the ultra-Orthodox should be conscripted into the military, an affair that has been simmering unresolved for more than 20 years.
A war stretching into its sixth month with no end in sight, more than 100 hostages still held by Hamas, nearly 120,000 evacuees from towns along the Gaza and Lebanon borders waiting to return home, and a sputtering economy. Any one of these issues should be enough to bring down Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but the greatest threat hanging over his government today is the question of whether the ultra-Orthodox should be conscripted into the military, an affair that has been simmering unresolved for more than 20 years.
At first glance, it might seem strange that in the Jewish state, the most intensely religious Jews refuse to serve in the military. But the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredim, have always had a problem with a Jewish state created by human action rather than by divine decree. To help win them over, Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, made a series of concessions to them around the time of independence in 1948, including exempting from conscription young men for whom “Torah is [their] occupation.” In other words, men spending their lives engaged in the study of religious texts.
It seemed like a minor issue at the time. Many Haredim were fighting in the war. Europe’s ultra-Orthodox community had been decimated by the Holocaust, and its numbers were tiny and expected to decline with assimilation. The total number who were to be exempted was about 400.
By the end of the 1990s, however, that concession no longer looked so minor. Thanks to an extraordinarily high birth rate, the Haredi population was growing rapidly. Today, it comprises about 13 percent of the population and by 2042 it may reach more than 20 percent, by the government’s own estimates. Meanwhile, state subsidies for the Haredim grew immensely after Menachem Begin and his Likud party took power in 1977, enabling the community to realize its ideal of a lifetime of Torah study for males. Even as they took money from the state, refusal to serve in the military became, for the Haredim, as sacrosanct as keeping kosher or the Sabbath.
The first serious challenge to this arrangement came in 1998, when the High Court of Justice ruled that it violated the legal principle of equality among Israelis—in this case, the “equality of burden” in regard to military service. That began a two-decade saga of legislation that failed to correct the problem, more court challenges, and foot-dragging. While the draft issue periodically became headline material, it quickly faded. Politicians from the left and the right were loath to touch the issue for fear of losing the support of Haredi political parties, which often hold the balance of power.
The fact that the controversy has suddenly been reignited is due to a confluence of events.
The first and most important is the war in Gaza, which has made the fact that some Israelis are fighting and dying while others are not more glaring than in many years past. Since Israeli ground forces entered Gaza in late October, more than 240 soldiers have been killed and thousands wounded. More reservists have been called up than at any time in the last 40 years. The sacrifice they have made has been underscored by the fact that most Israelis see the Gaza campaign and the fight with Hezbollah in the north as a war of survival unlike any the country has fought since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. The sense of national unity that emerged after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre has made it harder for the ultra-Orthodox to explain their unwillingness to share in the sacrifice.
That imperative for public sacrifice will not go away when the war ends. Oct. 7 has fundamentally altered Israel’s national security thinking of the last 20 years, which held that threats from Hamas and Hezbollah could be contained and that technology could replace boots on the ground. To ensure it has enough soldiers, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) plans to increase mandatory service and the number of days reservists may be called up every year. Even now, it is reportedly short some 7,000 soldiers in the standing army—which numbers around 170,000.
Before the war, the Netanyahu government promised the Haredi parties it would pass legislation shielding the Haredi exemption from future court challenges. Among the wilder ideas was to pass a quasi-constitutional law that equated Torah study with military service, thereby getting around the equality-of-burden problem. However, preoccupied with its judicial-overhaul drive, the government failed to act. Instead, the cabinet voted to give itself what has turned out to be an inauspicious deadline of March 31 to come up with a solution. It is now asking the High Court to give it another three months, but at a Feb. 26 hearing, the justices showed little sympathy for further delays. If they don’t extend the deadline, young Haredi men will, in principle, be liable for the draft starting April 1.
If Haredi political leaders recognize that the public’s attitude has changed, they have shown no signs of it. There was a brief flurry of news reports at the start of the war about ultra-Orthodox men signing up for military service, but it turned out to be overblown. The IDF’s Personnel Directorate told a Knesset committee last month that just 540 had actually enlisted. By comparison, a record 66,000 Haredim received an exemption over the past year. In a December survey of Haredim by the Jewish People Policy Institute, 70 percent said the war had not changed their opinion that they should be exempt (another 12 percent said they felt even more strongly about it). “We won’t agree to anything in regards to drafting yeshiva students. … Nobody can force us to abandon the Torah,” Rabbi Meir Zvi Bergman, an influential member of the rabbinical advisory panel of the United Torah Judaism party, vowed last weekend.
Haredi apologists offer up a variety of justifications for the draft exemptions. They claim that the military doesn’t actually need them and point out that many Haredim volunteer for civilian rescue services. Ultra-Orthodox rabbis contend that Torah study is no less important than military service because it ensures Israel’s divine protection.
But even many believers acknowledge that some of the men who shirk the draft are enrolled on paper in yeshivas but don’t actually study. The real reason the Haredi leaders fear the draft is that it threatens the barriers they have so carefully erected: In the military, young enlistees would encounter non-Haredim in a serious way for the first time in their lives; see the outside world; perhaps learn a useful skill or trade; and, worst of all, meet secular women. Many may never come back.
For Netanyahu, the Haredi case for exemption or the military’s personnel needs are secondary at best. What concerns him is keeping his coalition intact. If the two ultra-Orthodox parties quit over the draft and take their 18 Knesset seats, the coalition won’t survive. Yet Netanyahu cannot, as he has in the past, assume his party and far-right coalition partners will do as commanded. Ordinarily spineless Likud backbenchers have said that a solution involving at least some Haredim being drafted is unavoidable. Even Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, an extreme rightist sympathetic to ultra-Orthodox interests, has picked up on the change. “The current situation is outrageous and cannot continue,” he said during a visit to a yeshiva for more moderate Orthodox students who do enlist.
In the end, most of these renegades will fall in line with Netanyahu; they, too, are focused on their political survival. But that may not be true in the case of the National Unity, a centrist party that joined the coalition at the start of the war, and in the case of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a Likud politician. Gallant laid down the gauntlet on Feb. 28 when he said he would not back any conscription bill that did not have National Unity’s support. The party has laid out a relatively moderate plan for drafting Haredim, but nothing Haredi leaders would ever consent to.
As a result, Netanyahu is boxed in. On the one side is Haredi obduracy; on the other, Gallant’s position raises the risk of National Unity and even Gallant leaving the coalition if they don’t get what they want. Technically, the prime minister doesn’t need National Unity or Gallant to stay in power. But their exit from the coalition would leave him in a difficult position, running a complicated war with mostly inexperienced and extremist ministers. The Haredim may feel boxed in as well, in which case they might force an early election—as a way of buying time. A caretaker government would not be allowed to deal with such a critical issue, putting it off until the formation of a new government.
Netanyahu may try to kick the can again by giving the High Court a plan for a Haredi draft that looks good on paper but is designed to fail. If it’s vague enough and impractical in the long run, the Haredim might be willing to go with it. The problem is that in the post-Oct. 7 reality, almost no one else would accept it.
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