Tips | Gaza war could end Israel’s unfair exemption from military service for Orthodox Jews

If anything positive can come from the tragedy of the Israel-Gaza war, it is the prospect that the double defrauding of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox population – clawing back public money for religious studies and avoiding the military service – can finally end. .

The latest development is Tuesday’s unanimous ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court, once again declaring that the proposed exemption for the ultra-Orthodox had no legal justification. “In the midst of an exhausting war, the burden of inequality is heavier than ever and demands a solution,” the Supreme Court said in its ruling, by nine judges instead of the usual three, in recognition of the importance of the question. After this decision, the attorney general ordered the Israeli army to enlist 3,000 ultra-Orthodox students starting July 1.

Certainly, it is never wise to bet against the ultra-Orthodox, also known as haredim. They have managed to secure this arrangement since the country’s founding in 1948, when Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion agreed to exempt students at yeshivot – religious schools – from military service. The idea was that the Jewish community, decimated by the Holocaust, could revive the study of the Torah and the Talmud, the rabbinical discussion on Jewish law.

The number of exempt students at the time was 400. After the 1967 war, it increased modestly to 800. Today, the total number of exempt students has reached a record 66,000, while the Charedi population has increased to more than 13 percent of the population. population. Most Israeli Jewish men must serve in uniform for 32 months and Jewish women for two years. (Services are not obligatory for Palestinian citizens of Israel.) Yet charedi are not only excused: They also receive state benefits even at age 26, while the government pays for the yeshivot, to which they contribute millions more to study.

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To maintain this agreement, the ultra-Orthodox have skillfully converted their growing numbers into political power. Two ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, are part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s narrow governing coalition – and now threaten to leave it if the Supreme Court’s ruling is upheld.

This imbalance between rights and responsibilities is unsustainable and has been going on for years. But the war in Gaza and the threat of intensified hostilities on the northern border with Lebanon may have broken the spell: some 360,000 reservists were called up after October 7, and the Israeli army extended periods of service for conscripts and reservists. Soldiers are dying. Families are worried. The economy has been disrupted.

And yet, for the most part, the ultra-Orthodox continue to cling to their separation, insisting that they serve the state through prayer and Torah study. The anger over this chutzpah is palpable and widespread. Resentment stretches from left to right, from secular to orthodox. A March poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 70 percent of respondents thought the exemption should be changed.

Meanwhile, the shock of October 7 created a fissure, if only of a minimal magnitude, in the historically steadfast refusal of the ultra-Orthodox to consider military service in any form. Among the Haredim, military service is not only discouraged; By signing up, you risk being rejected by the community, and less than 10% of them do this. This oppositional position makes sense: the army is Israel’s crucible, and for the charedi, assimilation is an existential threat. If we introduce our young people to a different way of life, we risk seducing them.

Perhaps this is starting to change. In the weeks following October 7, thousands of Haredi men volunteered to serve. Polls within the ultra-Orthodox community have shown growing support for military service.

Yet that is not the prevailing view among Haredi. Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef has warned that the ultra-Orthodox party would leave the country if the exemptions were ended. “If they force us to join the army, we will all go abroad,” Yosef said. “All these secularists do not understand that without … yeshivas, the army would not succeed. … Soldiers succeed only because of those who learn Torah. Once again, the word ‘chutzpah’ comes to mind.”

The court may be the ultimate coercive mechanism. Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly since 1998 that the blanket exemption violates fundamental principles of equality. In 2017, the court gave the government a year to develop an alternative, but the government managed to prevent the changes through a series of legislative and regulatory solutions.

The last exemption expired on April 1 and the Supreme Court ordered the freezing of yeshivot funds in the absence of a legislative solution, rejecting Netanyahu’s arguments that he needed more time because of the war. The attorney general notably broke with Netanyahu and told the court that the government no longer had any legal basis to continue exempting the ultra-Orthodox from military service. (Rulings on military conscription are one of the underlying causes of the government’s failed attempts last year to undermine the court’s independence).

I last wrote about this issue during a trip to Israel twelve years ago, when another Netanyahu coalition was fighting to bring back the exemption. This has never happened – but this time the situation is different, with the pressure of war and a new level of public anger. At the time, Yohanan Plesner was a member of the Israeli Knesset and chairman of a commission tasked with rewriting the rules for service delivery. Today he is president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “We thought this problem could quietly get worse and we could ignore it,” Plesner told me before the final decision. “October 7 propelled him to the center of public debate and he can no longer be ignored.

So I asked Plessner if that meant time was up. “Time is up, it only happens in movies, not in politics,” he replied, emphasizing Netanyahu’s skill in managing years of delay in this area. However, he added, “time is not on the side of those who want to perpetuate the current state of exemption.”

And it’s a glimmer of good news in an otherwise dark time for Israel.