A troublesome question splitting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet is what to do about the draft exemption for ultra-Orthodox men.
Currently, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stands victorious on several fronts, notably Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, with still unresolved enmities in Iran and Yemen further away.
With the IDF’s reservists exhausted from a year of war, they need relief.
Heavily dependent on its reserve soldiers, Israel did its largest call-up in history after the Oct. 7 attack, summoning 287,000 soldiers.
In June 2024, the government raised the IDF’s call-up limit to 350,000. Most are still in uniform and absent from jobs, businesses, and families.
Netanyahu’s coalition depends on a significant ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, faction. Its other members, though, say they can no longer justify exempting the Haredi from the military draft.
Strictly religious and living in tight-knit communities that avoid mingling too much with the outside world, the Haredi, sometimes colloquially referred to as “the black hats,” represent the religious freedom for Jews that Israel’s very existence represents. They see themselves as living a pro-family lifestyle that the secular world could learn from.
They think the military seeks to strip them of their religious identity, overturn their separation of the sexes, and forcibly incorporate them into the secular world.
Political Split
In June, Israel’s Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling, held that young Haredi men were no longer draft-exempt. The IDF said it would begin sending draft notices, which triggered mass Haredi protests. In November, new Defense Minister Israel Katz approved drafting 7,000 Haredi men.Leading Haredi figures accused Netanyahu’s Likud party of “declaring war” on their community. Katz responded by issuing 1,125 arrest warrants for Haredi conscripts who had not responded to drafting orders.
His predecessor, Yoav Gallant, said the draft exemption issue was one of three sparking months of tension between him and Netanyahu. The prime minister fired him on Nov. 5.
In a speech a few hours after his firing, Gallant called the Haredi draft exemption “no longer just a social matter.”
“It is the most critical matter for our existence,” Gallant said.
Treasury Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, hardliners allied on many issues, split on this one.
Smotrich, from the national Orthodox community that supports military service, in October slammed the Haredi for holding up the national budget over the draft exemption issue, and said his community was paying “a price disproportionate to its size in the population.”
Ben Gvir said that while he supports military service, “I don’t think that compulsion will help in this.”
Haredi yeshiva students numbered a mere 400 when then-Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, confronted with the question in 1948 in a brand-new country already at war, exempted them.
Economic Pressures
The problem is economic as well as military.Israel’s reservists historically faced only a few weeks of duty at a time. Jobs, businesses, and families could tolerate that. The 1967 war lasted six days. The 1973 Yom Kippur War lasted three weeks.
But the war triggered by Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack is 15 months old now. It killed off 46,000 businesses in 2023, and as many as 60,000 more are predicted to have closed in 2024.
Israel had to lengthen its mandatory military service after reducing it by three months when it thought large-scale war unlikely.
Now, the nation has to put that three months back. Men serve three years, and women serve two.
Treasury officials in a recent report cited a “definite economic need to increase the scope of recruits to the IDF from this population in the broadest possible way.”
Recruiting as few as 1,000 Haredim for combat service each year would give reservists two more weeks off a year. Having them enlist for non-military jobs, such as national service, or for ZAKA—the first responders who handle terrorist victims’ bodies in accordance with Jewish religious law—is not enough, the report said.
They impact Israel’s economy in other ways, Leon Hadar, a fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia think tank, told The Epoch Times. While much of the nation enjoys a standard of living above that of some Western European countries, its economic numbers are dragged down by the poorer Haredi and Arab populations, he said.
He also writes for the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, the Business Times of Singapore, National Interest, and other publications.
By some token, even Israeli Arabs are now doing better than the Haredi at finding their way to good jobs, he said. Many Israeli hospitals have large Arab contingents among their doctors and nurses, he said.
The Haredi, meanwhile, tend to lack math and language skills, such as speaking English. That, plus the requirements of their ultra-strict religious observance, makes it tough for them to compete in a modern economy, he said.
A 2019 report by the Israel Democracy Institute found that only 51 percent of Haredi men were employed, and 76 percent of women. The Haredi poverty rate was 44 percent, double that of the general population, and their average family income was about two-thirds of other Jewish households in Israel.
The Haredi make up about 13 percent of Israel’s population, yet their children make up 26 percent of Israel’s food-insecure population.
However, the researchers found that the poverty rate among Haredi had declined over the previous four years, from 53 percent. They attributed the change to more Haredi women working, more government subsidies, and more public support for yeshiva and other religious school students.
Historical Roots
In explaining the roots of the divide, Rabbi Binyomin Friedman, a Haredi rabbi in Atlanta, points to the tense 1948 confrontation between an Israel seeking to amalgamate vastly diverse Jews coming from all over the world into one modern people, and a sect deeply tied to traditional ways they were determined to keep.Ben Gurion thought the idea of an army was to homogenize the people and assimilate them into a new identity, Friedman said. They would no longer be Polish or Yemenite, but Israeli.
In the confrontation with Ben Gurion, he said, the Haredi were effectively saying: “As a matter of fact, we don’t want to be Israeli. We want to be Jews. We came here to be Jews. And that’s all we want to be, is Jews.”
Israel was using, and today still uses, military service as the “primary portal” into the national system, Friedman said.
“All the youth will go into the army. They‘ll all be taught in a certain way. They’ll be trained in a certain way. They‘ll develop a certain bond. They’ll speak a certain language [and dress a certain way]. There’s a lot of changing of names,” he said.
Other immigrants often drop their old names to adopt modern Israeli ones. David Ben Gurion, for example, was born David Grun in Poland. Benjamin Netanyahu’s family name was Mileikowsky before his father changed it.
“There’s a lot of mixing of male and female and all that, and a lot of, ‘We’re modern now,’” Friedman said.
While modern Israelis were saying this was a new world, no longer the poverty-stricken villages of Poland or Yemen, the religious community “really dug in their heels” and refused to participate, particularly in drafting girls, he said.
“The religious community made it clear to Ben Gurion that ... ‘You’ll have to kill us before you‘ll get our girls,’” he said.
Israel established national service as an alternative to military service, featuring work in social services, hospitals, and the like. Many Orthodox girls nowadays do it.
The ultra-Orthodox, however, didn’t agree. “They didn’t want to submit their daughters to that system and be controlled by that system,” Friedman said.
The government didn’t back down on that. Ultra-Orthodox girls are still subject to a national service draft, but the government doesn’t enforce it.
For boys, the government agreed to exempt yeshiva students, as other governments exempted divinity school students.
He said two conflicts underlie this. The Haredi resist the draft because they don’t want to submit to the control of a state they see as “a non-Torah-based entity.”
Even if the Haredi could get past that and agree that military service was necessary for the common welfare, they don’t think the army would let them lead a Torah-based life in uniform.
Moreover, they see the army as having been designed “to strip the Orthodox of their religious observance,” he said.
Israel’s founders, like Ben Gurion, were predominantly secular, many of them socialist. They saw Orthodox Judaism as symbolic of the world they had left behind, something they saw as likely, in any case, to die off in modern times.
In recent years, the IDF has worked to accommodate the Orthodox, Friedman said, but it has a long way to go to accommodate the religious on issues like segregating the sexes.
The army sees its operations as a matter of life and death, he said.
The religious say, “What you’re really asking us to do is check our religion at the door, and then we'll come and pick it up again when we leave three years from now. And so the religious community is not willing to buy into that,” he said.
Friedman acknowledges that some young Haredi men dodge the draft, enrolling in yeshivas but not really studying and instead just “hanging out.”
Others have finished their studies and now have jobs. The first round of draft notices targeted them.
He called that “a good, pragmatic start.”
Some in the government, he said, were determined to overturn the exemption for all the Haredi, including legitimate yeshiva students.
The national Orthodox, who Smotrich represents, adjusted their theology in Zionism’s early years to accommodate a state not being reborn according to Jewish Messianic teachings, he said.
They believe the state is a precursor, an initial stage toward Messianic redemption, he said, and will become more religious over time. That allows them to see the state as part of God’s plan.
Friedman and Hadar both noted that today, the national Orthodox not only serve in the military, but distinguish themselves in it, often emerging as leaders. They’ve suffered a higher casualty rate than other groups during the war, Hadar said.
