If there is one good thing to come from the tragedy of the Israel-Gaza war, it is the prospect that the two-part fraud perpetrated by Israel's ultra-Orthodox Jews – dodging military service while collecting public funds for religious studies – may finally be coming to an end.
The latest development was a unanimous ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court on Tuesday that again declared that the exemption of ultra-Orthodox Jews from military service lacked legal validity. “In the midst of a brutal war, the burden of inequality is heavier than ever and calls for resolution,” the Supreme Court said in its ruling. The ruling was made by a nine-judge panel instead of the usual three, recognizing the importance of the issue. Following the ruling, the Attorney General instructed the IDF to conscript 3,000 ultra-Orthodox Jewish students starting July 1.
Certainly, it's never wise to bet against ultra-Orthodox Jews, also known as Haredim, who have been making good on this arrangement since the state's founding in 1948, when Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion agreed to exempt yeshiva (religious school) students from military service, the idea being that a Jewish community devastated by the Holocaust could revive the study of the Torah and Talmud, the rabbinic discussions of Jewish law.
At the time, there were 400 exempt students. After the 1967 war, the number slowly rose to 800. Today, the total number of exempt students is at an all-time high of 66,000, with the Haredi population soaring to more than 13 percent of the population. Most Jewish Israeli men must serve in the military for 32 months and Jewish women for two years (military service is not compulsory for Palestinian citizens of Israel). But not only are Haredi exempt, they also receive state scholarships until age 26, and the government pays millions more for the yeshivas in which they study.
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To maintain the agreement, ultra-Orthodox Jews have skillfully transformed their growing numbers into political power. Two ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties, Shas and United Judaism, are part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's narrow coalition government and have threatened to quit if the Supreme Court ruling is implemented.
This imbalance between rights and responsibilities has been unacceptable for years, but the war in Gaza and the threat of escalating fighting on the northern border with Lebanon may have broken the spell. Some 360,000 reservists have been called up since October 7, and the IDF has extended the terms of service for conscripts and reservists. Soldiers are dying, families are in fear, and the economy is in shambles.
But many ultra-Orthodox maintain their independence and claim to serve the state through prayer and Torah study. The outrage over this audacity is palpable and widespread. It runs from left to right, secular to Orthodox. A March poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 70 percent of respondents said the exemption should be changed.
Meanwhile, the shock of October 7 has caused a tiny crack in ultra-Orthodox Jews' historic staunch rejection of any form of military service. Military service is not just discouraged among Haredim; they risk alienating themselves from their community, and fewer than 10 percent actually enlist. There is some justification for this opposition: the army is Israel's melting pot, and for Haredim, assimilation is an existential threat. Allowing young people exposure to a different lifestyle risks them being seduced by it.
But that may be starting to change. Thousands of Haredi men have volunteered for military service in the weeks since Oct. 7, and opinion polls within the ultra-Orthodox community have shown growing support for military service.
Yet that is not the mainstream Haredi view. Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef has warned that the ultra-Orthodox would leave the country if the exemption was repealed. “If we were forced to serve in the army, we would all emigrate,” Yosef said. “All the secular people don't understand that without yeshivas the army would not succeed. It is because of those who study Torah that the soldiers succeed.” Again, the word “impudence” comes to mind.
The courts may be the final enforcement tool: Israel's highest court, the High Court, has repeatedly ruled since 1998 that blanket exemptions violate fundamental principles of equality. In 2017, the court gave the government a year to develop an alternative, but the government has successfully delayed changes through a series of legislative and regulatory workarounds.
The latest exemption expired on April 1, and the High Court, rejecting Netanyahu's plea that more time was needed because of the war, ordered a freeze on funding to yeshivas in the absence of a legislative solution. Notably, the attorney general disagreed with Netanyahu, telling the court that the government no longer had a legal basis to continue exempting ultra-Orthodox Jews from military service. (The military service ruling was one of the root causes of the government's failed attempt last year to undermine the independence of the courts.)
I last wrote about this issue 12 years ago during a trip to Israel, when a different Netanyahu coalition government was struggling with how to roll back exemptions. That ultimately didn't happen, but this time, with the pressures of war and new levels of public anger, things seem different. At the time, Yohanan Plesner was a member of the Israeli Knesset and chaired the committee rewriting military service rules. Now he's president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “We thought this issue could grow quickly and quietly grow, and then we could ignore it,” Plesner told me before the latest ruling. “On October 7, this issue has been thrown into the center of the national debate, and it can no longer be ignored.”
So I asked Plesner if time was running out. “Time is something that happens in the movies, not in politics,” he replied, noting Netanyahu's skill in putting the issue off for years. But he said “time is running out for those who want to make the current exemptions permanent.”
And it is a ray of light in a dark time for Israel.
