Can Israel survive implementing the Haredi draft?
Haredi conscription could change Israel forever — for better, and worse
Haredi Jewish men in Israel protest against the end of the Haredi exemption from IDF service. Photo by Itai Ron / Middle East Images / Middle East Images via AFP/Getty Images
Columnist Dan Perry July 20, 2024
The Israel Defense Forces are set to begin sending draft notices to Haredi men on Sunday, seemingly imperiling the survival of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, which depends on Haredi parties determined to prevent the change.
This would appear to be a significant development in addressing a major toxicity in Israeli society — but a closer inspection suggests, at least for now, few changes will immediately ensue as a result of a landmark Supreme Court ruling ending the longstanding Haredi exemption from military service. Instead, Israel will continue creeping toward the brink of a chasm that threatens to swallow the whole country.
The military is planning to proceed very carefully with its initial draft notices, issuing only a few thousand callups over the next few weeks. That incremental change will do little to quell agitation among secular Israelis at the unfairness of the arrangement, which mostly will continue as the wars against Hamas and Hezbollah drag on.
The draft exemptions for Haredim, who will soon make up a quarter of 18-year-old men in Israel, are but a symptom of the broader rift between the group and the rest of society. The divergent narratives about the draft — and the ways Haredi and secular Israelis should be treated — were summed up in a remarkable exchange, involving both lawmakers and members of the public, this week at a hearing in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense committee.
Knesset member Yenon Azulai, of the religious party Shas, argued that the military was not “appropriate” for Haredi men who had ”special needs” that include avoiding being in the same room as women. “They have limitations and need a respectful environment,” he said.
He was met by an explosion of anger by non-Haredim in the room, who noted that no such consideration was afforded to them or their children. “Who adapted the army to our children?” demanded attorney Batya Kahane Dror. “Why not for ours, and only for yours?”
That is the overpowering question fueling the anger felt by non-Haredim in Israel. I’ve asked it, too. My two daughters were not asked if they felt like serving when they reached enlistment age. They were drafted by the IDF without discussion, and received no particular respect for their preferences. The very idea of one of them raising demands as outspoken as those of the Haredim would have been so absurd that indeed, it might have gotten them discharged on mental health grounds.
This issue cuts through Netanyahu’s coalition, which, while despised by the rest of the country, has stood strong through the remarkable calamities that have marked its 19 months in office. It threatens to do what the attempted judicial overhaul, disaster of Oct. 7 and the remarkable failures during the war in Gaza could not, and finally push Israel into a post-Netanyahu age.
Netanyahu’s own right-wing Likud party is backed mostly by working class Jews who proudly serve; the rest of his coalition includes far-right parties, whose ultranationalist zealots also mostly serve, and Haredi parties, who are demanding Netanyahu protect them against secular demands for a more equal system. When Netanyahu attempted to pass a law making the draft exemptions formal and permanent, after the Supreme Court ruled last month that the non-drafting of Haredim was a violation of the principle of equality, he could not gain a majority’s support because of a rebellion in the Likud ranks.
To understand what’s going on, we need to take a step back and look at the history informing this moment of potential crisis.
Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, agreed to grant several hundred genuine Torah sages exemptions from the otherwise universal draft for Israeli Jews, in order to replenish the ranks of Jewish scholarly pursuit after the decimation of the Holocaust — and to diminish opposition to Zionism among Haredim, many of whom viewed it as a secular abomination.
When Menachem Begin became the first Likud leader to have a shot at forming a government, after the 1977 elections, he needed the Haredi parties in order to do so, so he agreed to apply the draft exemptions for all yeshiva students, which basically meant all Haredi boys. This was not by law but by fiat — an “arrangement” that the military did not contest, and survived until last month’s challenges at the Supreme Court.
The blanket exemption, while a terrible idea, was a more rational move in Begin’s day because it applied to only a tiny proportion of the potential military inductees each year — and the Haredim could still be viewed by the rest of society as a curiosity, with perhaps even a tinge of admiration. They were keeping the flame of Jewish piety alight in a country that was otherwise no stranger to an impious vulgarity.
But the Haredi birth rate of about seven children per family has made this approach no longer sustainable. It is triple the birthrate of other Israelis. The Haredim now account for almost a sixth of the population of 10 million, and are doubling in proportion every generation or so.
So: What was once a justifiable exemption to ensure political cohesion has turned into a system in which secular Israelis wonder why they must bear the burden of supporting an enormous sector of society that refuses to participate in the vital effort to ensure the country’s security. Rage is especially high because the Haredim are seen as having helped perpetuate various conflicts by being a bedrock partner in the Israeli right-wing, and constituting more than a third of the West Bank settlers, who require constant protection from the non-Haredi soldiers.
And the societal conflict is not just about the draft. Haredi schools generally refuse to teach boys English, math or science, rendering graduates almost unemployable in Israel’s high-tech, export-oriented economy. Thus, Haredi men have only a 50% labor force participation rate, mostly in low-wage work and dubious jobs in the state-funded and bloated “religious services” sector. Haredim expect, and receive, stipends for the battalions of yeshiva students — most of whom are very far from being sages — and state subsidies for each child. Their economic output is minimal; their economic demands, extreme.
And they have used their growing clout to persuade the government to impose religion-based restrictions on everyone else — including tremendous impediments to commerce, public transport and public works on the Sabbath. Leading rabbis have declared that prayer is more important than military service to the national defense — and seem to really believe it. None of this is behavior likely to make the Haredim many secular friends.
All this is — make no mistake — a problem that genuinely could destroy Israel as a modern country. The old workarounds no longer work, because of the Haredi population explosion. So what can Israel do to more permanently solve the problem?
Some think the Haredim will, despite massive opposition to the draft, agree to the call-ups and not need to be arrested, the way my daughters would have been if they resisted. Others feel that they will eventually agree, and should be given a route by which to do so gradually — perhaps through a generous redirecting to “national service” alternatives rather than active military service.
True optimists think that the military will help integrate the Haredim into society as a whole. This “integration” goal amounts to the hope that Haredim who serve will, upon contact with modernity, abandon the Haredi fold — as a small number of those born Haredi actually already do. Indeed, there is some history of this phenomenon among the small minority of Haredim who have served to date, and who have in many cases been shunned by their communities as a consequence.
The Haredi parties and the rabbis who funnel support to them have figured out that integration really means assimilation, which is why they are fighting against the draft so intensively; they see it as a threat to their very existence.
The Netanyahu government clearly has no plan other than trying to wait things out, and continue finding ways to pacify the Haredi parties.
Defense Minister Yoav Galant — who passes for a rebellious Likudnik — says the military will at the moment send out draft notices to only some 3,000 of the estimated 63,000 Haredi men of draft-eligible age. This, even though military officials have stated that the Gaza war has exposed a shortfall of at least 10,000 fighters in its ranks — not to mention the demands of a potential additional war with Hezbollah. Even as the military apparently intends to leave tens of thousands of Haredim undrafted, the Netanyahu government this week approved an extension of the mandatory conscription period for those called up from 32 to 36 months. On top of that, thousands of older reservists have been spending many months of the past year fighting Israel’s enemies in the north and in the south, devastating families and businesses.
Waiting things out might not make the conflict go away. Expect more secular groups to petition the Supreme Court to force the military to lay down its kid gloves. Expect serious problems for Netanyahu’s coalition. And expect this potentially unresolvable kulturkampf in Israel to reach the boiling point quite soon.
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