Gigantic Israel Story Not About Genocide Or Apartheid— The End Of The Haredi Draft Exemption...

And Why That Matters To Americans

The straight-forward news is that Israel’s Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that “ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students must be conscripted into the Israeli military and are no longer eligible for substantial government benefits, which could result in the collapse of the government’s ruling coalition. The decision follows decades of controversy, in which the once small ultra-Orthodox minority [Haredi, Israel’s fastest growing minority] has mushroomed into a million-strong community that makes up more than 12 percent of the population. Its political parties have provided crucial backing to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalitions in exchange for their exemption from military service... For years, there has been a movement of lawmakers to cut them off, condemning the systems that allow their quasi-autonomous societies to exist within Israel, all while eschewing taxes (because few work) or military service (because few enlist).”

So… that’s the story in a nut-shell. Here’s the context and background. [When Jamaal Bowman was first running for Congress against AIPAC shill Eliot Engel I spent an hour on the phone with him explaining all this so he’d have more context to talk with Jewish voters in his district.] It’s important to understand that the relationship between the state and the Haredi has been contentious and fraught even before Israel gained its independence in 1948. 

The European Zionist movement was primarily secular and, basically wanted to create a modern European state in Palestine. The Haredi community opposed their secular nationalism and believed that the establishment of a Jewish state should come about through divine intervention—the coming of the Messiah— rather than human effort, creating a fundamental rift between the secular Zionists and the Haredi crackpot extremists. The Haredi leaders feared that a secular Jewish state would undermine traditional Jewish laws and customs, leading to assimilation, loss of religious identity (very much including the leaders’ ability to exploit their congregations for their own gain). In pre-state Palestine, the Jewish community was divided into the Old Yishuv and the New Yishuv. The Old Yishuv consisted mainly of ultra-Orthodox Jews who had been living in Palestine for centuries, focusing on religious study and relying on donations from Jews abroad (the halukka system). The New Yishuv, on the other hand, was composed of secular Zionist immigrants who began arriving in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the aim of building a modern, agricultural, and industrial society. 

During the British Mandate (1920-1948), the tensions between these groups was intense. The secular Zionists were actively involved in political and military activities aimed at establishing a Jewish state, while the Haredi community were hostile to their goals and remained— at best— aloof. Many Haredi leaders ratted the independence fighters out to the British authorities, seeing them as a preferable status quo compared to the secular Zionists.They were scumbags; they still are.

Despite their opposition to secular Zionism, some Haredi leaders recognized the need to engage politically. Agudat Israel, a political party representing the Haredi community, negotiated the “status quo agreement” with David Ben-Gurion in 1947, assuring the Haredim that the new state would respect their backward religious principles, such as forced Sabbath observance, kosher food in public institutions, and religious control over marriage and divorce. This compromise was seen as essential in gaining the tacit support or at least the non-opposition of the Haredi community for the new state. The Haredi leaders were granted certain exemptions, such as the military draft exemption for yeshiva students and financial support for religious institutions. 

Once the war for independence was won and the British were kicked out, the tensions between Israel and these primitive Jews persisted, taking a disastrous turn as the Haredi leaders decided to fight back politically, basically ruining the state of Israel with an alliance with the extreme right, which offered them pretty much their own state within the state and allowed their bullshit to infect the whole country and darken its future.

When Ben-Gurion made that deal with the Haredi leaders, he basically granted what was then a relatively small number of yeshiva students exemptions from military service, aiming to preserve the religious scholarship that had been decimated by the Holocaust. In his mind it was meant to be temporary and limited in scope, affecting only a few hundred students. Over time, the number of exemptions grew significantly. By 2024, tens of thousands of Haredi men received exemptions from military service to study in yeshivas, although a significant number are shirkers who don’t study anything. I’ll get to that below. This growth was facilitated by the increasing political power of Haredi parties, which became kingmakers in coalition governments. In exchange for their support, these parties secured a variety of benefits for their communities, including:

• State funding for yeshivas (money in the pockets of crooked community leaders) and subsidies for ignorant bums to  enable many Haredi men to remain in yeshivas well into adulthood.

• Welfare benefits that incentivize large Haredi families with child allowances and other unfair payments, that normal Israelis pay for but don’t partake in— critical for communities where large families and low workforce participation rates are the norm.

• Housing subsidies which contributes to segregation, the development of insular communities, protects exploitation by crooked community leaders and ensure that there will be no assimilation (or even contact with the modern world).

The special treatment of the Haredi community deeply problematic because the extensive state support for these bums, combined with their low participation in the workforce, places a significant financial burden on the state, much of which is covered by U.S. contributions. This creates economic inequality and unsustainable welfare dependencies with an Israeli economy relying heavily on a relatively small segment of the population to support a much larger one, leading to tensions and resentment among secular Israelis who rightfully furious about an unequal distribution of burdens and benefits. The preferential treatment in return for unified support for the right wing government has led to debilitating social fragmentation. 

Remember, many Haredi communities live in self-imposed segregation, with limited interaction with secular Israelis, exacerbating cultural and ideological divides and contributing to a polarized society. The distinct lifestyles and values of Haredi and secular Israelis often clash, particularly over issues like gender roles, education, social values and, of course, military service. That the Haredi are bigoted assholes who, in their minds live in medieval Poland and Lithuania, is one thing but their insistence on forcing their vision of the world on the rest of the country has become a problem— especially for women and the LGBTQ community. Hundreds of thousands of secular Israelis have left the country for the U.S. (around 300,000), Canada, Australia, Latin America and Europe (especially Britain, Germany and France) rather that contend with how the Haredi have undermined secular values and principles of equality. The exemption from military service has been particularly contentious, as it challenges the ideal of universal conscription and shared responsibility, a violation of the principle that all citizens should contribute equally to the state.

The focus on religious studies in Haredi education systems leaves many young Haredim without the skills needed to navigate the modern world, including finding gainful employment. The Haredi leaders are rich; the communities are mired in poverty. Today’s Supreme Court ruling is a promising development, although the backlash is likely to be extreme. The Forward’s Susan Greene reported from Bnei Brak that Haredi leaders “are warning of a religious war. ‘If our young men have to stop studying Torah to go fight in the army, this country has nothing,’ Israel Trabelsi, a 70-year-old Torah scholar and furniture salesman told me here in this largely ultra-orthodox community just east of Tel Aviv. ‘Our people aren’t going to stand for it. Just watch.’”

The ruling orders Israel to end government subsidies for Yeshiva students and to start recruiting and drafting them into military service just like normal people. In an earlier posting republished today, Haredi ‘lost boys’ may find themselves drafted into Israel’s army, Greene had written that “some young Haredi men spend days on end, skipping out on their required Torah study [to hang out in secular libraries all day] with access to free Wi-Fi and little chance that anyone they know will spot them. They can stream Tupac Shakur songs while flipping through magazines… Or play chess online with a stranger… The Jerusalem-based Haredi Institute for Public Affairs says those ‘lost boys,’ as they’re sometimes called, make up at 15% to 20% of the estimated 66,000 Haredi Jewish men of draft age (between 18 and 26). The Israel Democracy Institute, a research group that has spent years studying the Haredi exemption, puts the number between 30% and 40%, or more than 20,000.”

“Israel needs soldiers, not reluctant yeshiva bochers,” said Eli Levin, an engineering consultant who is secular and joined thousands of demonstrators rallying in Tel Aviv earlier this month to end the blanket draft exemption. “The government should at least target Haredi guys who aren’t really studying Torah.”

…Haredim now make up 13% of the country’s more than 9 million citizens, and most see the exemption as an essential precondition of life in modern Israel. They believe full-time Torah study— not the Israel Defense Forces— is what actually protects the Jewish people and nation by fulfilling God’s will. Torah learning, they say, is their way of achieving arvus, or collective responsibility for all Jews, just as military service does for other Israelis.

“Nobody’s going to say we don’t need an army,” said Rabbi Tzvi Klebanow, president of Nahal Haredi, a nonprofit that supports Haredi soldiers. “But the army needs to understand that there’s a connection between military success and the will of Hashem. If the army succeeds, it’s because of Hashem. Through Hashem’s spirit we’ll be successful.”

More practically, the draft exemption is a way to keep Haredi young men cloistered in their communities, without exposure to Israel’s mixed-gender army or as much temptation to leave Haredi life after serving.

“We will die and not be drafted,” goes the mantra of Haredi activists who recently have taken to blocking intersections in support of preserving their exemption.

Israeli men over age 18 are generally required to serve 32 months and women 24 months. Many Palestinian citizens, Orthodox women, and a handful of conscientious objectors do civilian national service instead. The number of Haredim doing national service… grew to more than 3,000 in 2017 from about 300 a decade before.

The current crisis comes after some 20 years of political debate and legal challenges over the Haredi exemption, during which a growing but still small number of Haredi men have gone into the IDF,  often facing backlash and bullying in their communities. The military counted 730 Haredi soldiers in 2009, and 1,185 in 2021; thousands tried to enlist after the Hamas terror attack on Oct. 7, though the IDF only accepted a fraction of them.

Critics of the draft exemption have spent decades arguing in the Knesset and courts that it’s unfair that yeshiva bochers don’t share the burden of defending the country. They’ve also argued that keeping so-called “lost boys” in state-funded yeshivas in hopes they’ll mature, marry and someday fall in line with Torah-study expectations is not the government’s responsibility.

“Secular society is not willing to accept this informal agreement,” said Asaf Malchi, a senior researcher at the IDI who studies Haredim in Israel and the nexus between military and society. “They’re getting money from the state to advance their culture, but there’s not a social contract agreeing to subsidize this.”

The draft debate is part of larger tensions over government subsidies for Israel’s Haredim, nearly half of whom live below the poverty line and rely on welfare payments totalling about $2.6 billion a year, according to the IDI. They generally have large families— the average birth rate per Haredi woman is 6.5, more than double the overall Israeli average— yet many of the men study rather than work for most of their lives, and the IDI estimates that adult yeshivas, known as kolels, get about $1.7 billion a year from the government. [The U.S. government— our tax dollars—subsidizes Israel to the tune of about $3.3 billion annually.]

Twice since 1998, civil libertarians have managed to convince Israel’s High Court that the Haredi draft exemption violates the right of the majority to equal treatment under the law. Yet the policy has essentially stayed in place as one government after another promised, but failed to pass, a military draft scheme that would motivate Haredim to join the army without coercion.

…Netanyahu— whose coalition depends on two Haredi parties that control 17 of the Knesset’s 120 seats— was expected to extend the exemption indefinitely while also protecting it from future court challenges by codifying Torah study as a core value of the state.

Then came Oct. 7, when Hamas’ attack on Israel triggered the largest military mobilization in the country’s history, with a call-up of 300,000 reservists. The toll has already been the heaviest since the first Lebanon War in the 1980s, with 600 Israeli soldiers killed and about 3,150 wounded. Plans for a prolonged IDF presence there and the potential for a full-blown war with Hezbollah in Lebanon have prompted the government to consider extending the amount of time conscripts and reservists must serve and have brought resentment over the Haredi exemption to an all-time high.

An IDI survey published earlier this month showed 70% of Israeli Jews want to end the Torah-study exemption, up from 60% in 2018. Notably, nearly 20% of Haredim polled in the February survey supported changing the policy.

…An untold number of lost boys drop out of yeshivas and their communities altogether, yet aren’t allowed to hold tax-paying jobs, pursue secular academic study or get vocational training because doing so would cost them their military exemptions. Those requirements, some rabbis and educators told me, push many to work on the black market, including selling drugs.

Others are officially enrolled in mainstream yeshivas, but don’t put in the 45 hours of Torah learning required per week— or, in some cases, study at all. And some attend what are called “light,” “soft” or “dropout” yeshivas that, with or without government approval, expect less than 45 hours of study.

Several of these yeshivas— derided, too, as “places for bums”— offer much-needed vocational training or basic academics their students lack because Haredi boys often stop general studies around 8th grade to focus on Talmud full time.

Rabbi Mordechai Kornfeld, who works with Nahal Haredi, said some of these light yeshivas are in fact “glorified babysitting services.” He and other rabbis told me that Israel’s education ministry, which helps fund the yeshivas, and the IDF don’t do much to monitor or regulate them. Some said they know of yeshivas that are gaming the system to keep government money rolling in.

Israel’s Channel 12 News ran an investigation earlier this month detailing schemes in which certain bogus yeshivas that don’t really exist sell young men certificates vouching that they are attending full-time Torah study. Those operations pocket half the money the government gives them per student and kick back the rest to their so-called students, the station reported.

“We know that there is this phenomenon, but we can’t measure it,” Malach, the researcher at the IDI, told me. “It’s a secret. It’s a scam. Like black money.”

Haredi leaders universally insist that serious Torah learners should continue being exempted from the draft. But a growing chorus of them support conscription for those who are not actually studying 45 hours a week.

I want to remind DWT readers that the financial exploitation of the Haredi community by its leaders involves a combination of economic dependency, limited educational opportunities, control over charitable funds and social pressure. These factors work together to maintain the crooked leaders' control over the community and ensure its members remain reliant on their support. It’s a dynamic designed to create a cycle of poverty and dependency, making it difficult for many Haredi individuals to achieve financial independence and a better quality of life.

Haredi leaders— in Israel, just like in Brooklyn and Rockland County— emphasize the importance of religious study over secular education and employment. This emphasis results in large segments of the Haredi population relying on state welfare and community support, which is controlled by the community leaders. The Haredi community survives on state welfare programs and subsidies. Crooked Haredi leaders generally control significant charitable funds (tzedakah) that are crucial for supporting families in need, financing religious institutions, and other community needs. The outrageous lack of transparency and accountability in the management of these funds almost invariably leads to misuse and exploitation, with the leaders misappropriating funds for personal gain and using them to enforce loyalty and control over the community. They also exercise control over government-built and subsidized housing projects intended for Haredi families, a source of significant financial gain for those in control, as they can manipulate housing allocations and prices. Obviously, this control over housing reinforces dependency on financial predators. They stigmatize Haredi men who seek employment outside the community, discouraging them from pursuing economic opportunities that could lead to financial independence and expose them to secular influences that would undermine their control.

Anyway, the ruling has placed Netanyahu's government in a precarious position. The internal divisions within the fragile coalition, combined with public support for draft equality and the strong opposition from Haredi leaders, create a volatile political environment. While it is not certain that this issue alone will cause the collapse of Netanyahu's government, it significantly contributes to the instability and increases the likelihood of a political crisis before he’s due to address Congress. The Shas and United Torah Judaism parties have a vested interest in maintaining the draft exemptions and other benefits and they’re foaming at the mouth. UTJ head Yitzhak Goldknopf labeled the ruling as “severe harm to those who toil in Torah” and described it as “a stain and a disgrace”  and Shas leader Aryeh Deri accused the court of leading a “harmful approach against Torah students” and vowed to continue fighting. Netanyahu's inability to deliver a compromise acceptable to both his Haredi partners and the secular public threatens his government in a big enough way to make new elections— which he would lose— likely.