Advice | The Gaza War could end Israel’s unfair draft exemption for Orthodox Jews

If anything good can come from the tragedy of the Israel-Gaza war, it is the prospect that the two-pronged scam of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox population – scooping up public money for religious study and avoiding military service – might finally comes to an end.

The latest development is Tuesday’s unanimous ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court, again declaring that the draft exemption for the ultra-Orthodox had no legal justification. “Amid a grueling 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 panel of three, in recognition of the importance of the issue. After the ruling, the attorney general ordered the Israeli army to draft 3,000 ultra-Orthodox students starting July 1.

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

The number of exempt students at the time was 400. After the 1967 war, it grew modestly to 800. Today, the total number of exempt students has risen to a record 66,000, while the charedi population has grown to more than 13 percent of the population. Most Jewish Israeli men must serve in uniform for 32 months, and Jewish women for two years. (Services are not mandatory for Palestinian citizens of Israel.) Yet the charedi are not only excused – they also receive state benefits even at the age of 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 are now threatening to leave if the Supreme Court’s ruling is upheld.

This imbalance between rights and responsibilities is unsustainable and has been so for years. But the war in Gaza and the threat of increased 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 has extended tours of duty for both conscripts and reservists. Soldiers die. Families are concerned. The economy has been disrupted.

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

Meanwhile, the October 7 shock has created a crack, if only of hairline proportions, in the ultra-Orthodox’s historically steadfast refusal to consider military service in any form. Among Haredim, military service is not only discouraged; signing up puts you at risk of being shunned by the community, and less than 10 percent do so. This oppositional position makes some sense: the military 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.

That may be starting to change. In the weeks after October 7, thousands of Haredi men volunteered for service. Polls within the ultra-Orthodox community showed support for military service increasing.

Yet that is not the prevailing Haredi view. Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef warned that the ultra-Orthodox party would leave the country if the exemptions ended. “If they force us to join the army, we will all move abroad,” Yosef said. “All these secular people don’t understand that without … yeshivas, the military would not be successful. … The soldiers only succeed because of those who learn Torah.” Once again the word ‘chutzpah’ comes to mind.

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

The last exemption expired on April 1, and the Supreme Court ordered a freeze on yeshivot funds in the absence of any legislative solution, rejecting Netanyahu’s pleas that he needed extra time because of the war. Notably, the attorney general broke away from Netanyahu and told the court that the government no longer had any legal basis to continue exempting the ultra-Orthodox from military service. (The 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 struggling to roll back the exemption. That never happened – but this time it feels 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 committee to rewrite the rules for providing services. Today he is chairman of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “We thought this problem could grow quietly and we could ignore it,” Plesner told me before the final ruling. “October. 7 has thrust it into the center of public debate, and it can no longer be ignored.”

So, I asked Plessner, does this mean time is now up? “’Time is up’ only happens in the movies, not in politics,” he replied, noting Netanyahu’s skill in dealing with years of delay in this area. Still, he said, “Time is not on the side of those who want to perpetuate the current state of exemption.”

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