Every few years, Israel’s Haredi draft dispute follows the same script. A court sets a legal deadline. The government appoints a committee or introduces a bill. Coalition negotiations produce targets, transition periods and new service tracks.
The resulting compromise either collapses before passage, produces little change or returns to the Supreme Court. Then the process begins again.
This cycle has persisted not because Israel lacked potential formulas. Lawmakers have considered voluntary enlistment, civilian service, limited scholarly exemptions, criminal penalties, financial sanctions and lower exemption ages. The deeper problem was that every proposal was expected to satisfy three competing demands—preserve full-time Torah study, produce meaningful national service and withstand judicial scrutiny.
The legislative struggle began in earnest after the Supreme Court’s 1998 ruling required the Knesset to pass a formal draft law. Over the following quarter-century, successive governments repeatedly altered the balance between voluntary integration, recruitment targets, and financial or individual sanctions.
Each model responded to the weakness of its predecessor, only to encounter the opposite political constraint. Laws strong enough to promise meaningful change threatened Haredi coalition participation. Laws acceptable to Haredi parties failed to produce substantial enlistment or were struck down by the Supreme Court. Transition periods postponed the collision but never resolved the disagreement over the destination.
The Supreme Court did not initially seek responsibility for the Haredi draft dispute. Early petitions were dismissed because the challengers lacked standing or because the issue was considered too political for judicial determination. The deferment system consequently remained within the discretion of successive defense ministers.
By 1998, however, a new trend of judicial activism had come to dominate the Supreme Court. This ideology, which saw a larger role for the judiciary in the governmental process, coincided with a significant expansion of the Haredi draft issue. By then, the number of undrafted Haredim had risen to 28,772, including approximately 8% of that year’s eligible conscription cohort. According to the Court, the defense minister’s decisions had become a national policy determining how military obligations were distributed among large social groups.
The Tal Law
The first serious parliamentary effort to resolve the draft issue was headed by former Supreme Court Justice Tzvi Tal. The Tal Committee sought a middle course between preserving the yeshivah system and reducing the separation of Haredi men from military service and employment. Its premise was that immediate coercion would generate resistance, while alternatives could encourage gradual movement without forcing a confrontation with the Haredi leadership.
The resulting Tal Law was enacted in 2002 as a temporary measure. Men meeting the full-time study requirements could continue receiving recurring deferments, with no fixed national ceiling on their number. The law’s principal innovation was an exit ramp. A student who had received at least four deferments and reached age 22 could choose from an array of options, including a shortened 16-month military enlistment, one year of civilian national service alongside a job or continued full-time Torah study. Completing the designated alternative service permitted individuals to enter the civilian workforce legally.
The model sought to reduce the personal cost of exploring life outside the yeshivah through employment, shortened military tracks and civilian service. The committee described the method as “gradual and cautious … without coercion and by way of agreement.” The Tal model therefore depended on voluntary behavioral change.
Those choices were not equally easy. Remaining in yeshivah preserved a student’s legal status and conformed to the dominant communal path. Military or civilian service required leaving that framework, often without clear institutional or rabbinic support. The alternatives also began only at age 22, when most participants were married with children and departure from the yeshivah system was more consequential.
Furthermore, the Tal Law was operating within a community whose behavior had already been shaped by decades of deferment.
Dr. Gilad Malach, a research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, argued that the earlier draft arrangement had already deeply reshaped Haredi society, making a return to wide-scale service very difficult. “The old policy totally changed the behavior of ultra-Orthodox society and made Torah study the main path for most men,” he told JNS.
Ultimately, the program fell victim to its own gradualism. In 2010, 898 Haredi men entered military service and 1,122 entered civilian service. The 898 military entrants amounted to approximately 1.45% of the deferred population, while the total number of Haredi soldiers was only 2,048, most of whom were performing shortened military service. By January 2011, the deferred population had reached 61,877. The programs were growing, but the number remaining outside service was growing on a much larger scale.
The results also exposed tension between the law’s objectives. Facilitating employment could reduce poverty and dependence without increasing national service, leaving the unequal distribution of military obligations largely intact.
By 2012, the Supreme Court decided to intervene again. The Court stated that the law lacked a realistic capacity to produce “a significant change.” Not everyone accepted the Court’s assessment.
Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer, a prominent Haredi writer and rabbi, argued that “the Tal Law was actually doing a pretty good job by the time the Supreme Court decision was given in 2012; it was gaining momentum.”
Bringing Haredim into the military, he said, “is not an overnight change. It is a process that takes time.”
The pendulum of legislation
The collapse of the Tal Law transformed the debate into a pendulum swinging between harsher and more lenient frameworks. In 2012, the government established the Plesner Committee to draft a replacement. Its members disagreed over how many Haredi men should serve and what penalties should apply to those who refused.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dissolved the committee, saying it had failed to produce an “agreed-upon outline” capable of winning a Knesset majority. Plesner nevertheless published recommendations calling for approximately 80% military or civilian participation by 2016, continued exemptions for roughly 1,500 scholars and individual financial or criminal penalties for noncompliance.
After the 2013 election, Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) and Naftali Bennett (Jewish Home) joined the Netanyahu-led coalition, while the Haredi parties Shas and United Torah Judaism remained outside the government. Without the Haredi parties blocking the legislation, the Knesset enacted a firmer law in 2014. When the Haredi parties returned to government in 2015, the Knesset weakened much of that legislation and shifted back to a more lenient framework.
In September 2017, an expanded nine-justice Supreme Court panel invalidated the amended framework by an 8-1 majority. The Court accepted that reform could be gradual but found the draft law lacked a credible mechanism for “reducing inequality.”
The government’s next proposal came from a committee formed under Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman. The 2018 bill focused on recruitment targets with built-in financial consequences if the community failed to meet them, rather than capping the number of Haredi students exempt from the draft.
The proposal passed its first Knesset reading but never became law. In 2019, disagreement between Liberman and the Haredi parties over this framework was a central cause of the coalition’s collapse and led to a cycle of five elections in as many years.
Why compromise attempts repeatedly failed
The history of legislative failure is more fundamental than faulty drafting. Politicians never agreed on the settlement they were trying to build. The conflict concerned not merely how quickly Haredi enlistment should increase, but what military service, Torah study and membership in the Israeli state were supposed to mean.
The conflict was therefore not simply over numbers. Pfeffer noted that “going into the IDF is not just a question of what you do or how you spend your time. It is a question of which project you belong to. Are you part of the State of Israel project or not?” Successive laws attempted to regulate behavior without resolving that underlying conflict of identity.
For many Israelis, the general principle of “equality” has been central to the debate. The term has largely dominated the rhetoric of Supreme Court rulings on the draft issue. This ideological framing rejects the idea that personal or communal preference should have any place in a discussion about who is responsible for the national defense and who must expose himself to mortal danger.
For most non-Haredi Israelis, national service is both a security obligation and participation in the Zionist national project, binding citizens to the state through shared risk, sacrifice and responsibility. From this perspective, Torah study should reinforce the common identity that also sits at the root of military service.
That demand is not always expressed in the language of equality. Pfeffer distinguished between the Supreme Court’s equality-based framework and a different demand emerging from much of the Israeli right. “It is less about equality and sharing the burden,” he said. “It is more about being partners. You do not all have to come, but you have to, at the very least, be a part of it.”
The concern is that an entire community remains institutionally separate from one of the principal undertakings through which Jewish Israelis participate in the state.
For mainstream Haredi leadership, collective responsibility begins from a different conception. The Jewish people, in this account, do not contribute through identical roles: Some defend the country physically; others preserve the religious life that gives the Jewish collective its purpose.
“When Haredim say that Torah study protects the Jewish people, they are serious,” Gedalia Guttentag, deputy editor of Mishpacha magazine, told JNS. “It is hard to overstate how strongly they believe in this. That is at the core of the Haredi reading of their role.”
Eli Paley, publisher of Mishpacha magazine and chairman of the Institute for Strategy and Haredi Policy, added to this assessment. “From the Haredi perspective, Torah learning is the foundation of Jewishness. Shaking its foundation threatens the very essence of the Jewish people,” he told JNS.
Furthermore, the mass yeshivah system provides religious formation and communal continuity as well as scholarship. Allowing public officials or military authorities to decide who deserves continued protection would transfer control over the boundaries of the Torah world away from rabbis and yeshivah leaders.
The army intensifies that concern because it is not a religiously neutral institution. It regulates schedules, dress, technology, gender interaction and daily conduct under a non-rabbinic chain of command. For many Israelis, the military’s integrating function is part of its value: Service brings otherwise separate communities into a common national institution.
For Haredi leaders, that same function raises the possibility of cultural assimilation and the weakening of rabbinic authority.
“What one side regards as national belonging, the other may experience as institutional absorption,” Guttentag explained. “The worldviews are so different, so divergent. There probably is no way to totally bridge that sense of disconnect.”
Since 1998, this legal back-and-forth has continued with no end in sight as tensions have intensified and the Haredi draft issue has moved steadily toward the center of Israeli political debate.
The watershed moment in this period of political conflict came with the Oct. 7 Hamas onslaught on Israel—not because the debate ended, but because it shifted from an abstract argument over equality, Judaism, Zionism and community into the homes of reservists called up for service and yeshivah students choosing not to go to the front.
This is the third in a JNS series on the Haredim in Israel.
