Had a team of behavioral scientists set out to design a law that would prevent Haredim from drafting to the Israel Defense Forces, they couldn’t have bettered what’s now on the books.
The current law, under which almost 90,000 Haredi men are classified as draft dodgers, is so cosmically counterproductive that it looks deliberate.
Because—surprise, surprise—it turns out that Haredim obey normal human signals.
Told that their entire culture, founded on long-term Torah study, must be bulldozed. Drowned in rivers of scorn everywhere from left-wing Ha’aretz to the Shabbat leaflets in national religious shuls. Battered by a relentless government campaign to reduce kollel households to penury. With their menfolk subject to arrest even when they are reporting an unrelated crime (as happened recently), the Haredi world has responded by doing the obvious thing.
It has curled up in the fetal position to absorb the body blows of a bureaucratic assault that affects almost every Haredi family in the land.
And with Israeli society now appearing to confirm every negative stereotype that Haredim have ever harbored about it, years of work on a new modus vivendi between Israel’s majority and the Haredim is up in smoke.
In the process, the only thing achieved has been the radicalization of a generation of Haredi youth. Convinced that Neturei Karta were right all along, they’re further away from drafting than ever.
That shift shows up in the low enlistment numbers for the new Hasmonean Brigade.
But numbers alone don’t capture the narrative shift brought about by the court-ordered hounding. Stick a pin into a Haredi crowd, and you’ll hear mainstream people express views that were once the sole province of the Jerusalem-based Edah HaChareidis.
Take, for example, a conversation overheard a few months ago on a bus. It took place between two young Haredi women, one of whom had just gotten engaged.
“Who did you get engaged to?” asked one.
“You didn’t hear?” answered the other, in a tone of incredulity. “I’m engaged to Ariel Shammai, the prisoner of the Torah world! The bochur whose arrest triggered the massive demonstration!”
That encounter highlights just how senseless the effort to bludgeon the Haredi community into conformity really is.
You can holler till you’re blue that Haredim should be drafting along with everyone else, but you can’t argue with the facts.
Because if a stint in jail is now a badge of pride, the current policy is objectively a disaster.
The sad thing is that it didn’t have to be this way. From the very beginning of this draft law crisis, a number of things were obvious that, taken together, would have shaped a far better policy.
First, that anyone involved in full-time Torah learning was never going to be drafted against his will.
Second, that there was the possibility of a new arrangement when it came to the many thousands of young Haredim already in the working world.
Third, that any such new arrangement would take time and involve the IDF slowly gaining the trust of the Haredi community.
Ring-fencing the yeshivah and kollel worlds while creating credible programs for the many civically minded young Haredim already out in the world of work would by now have led to a totally different picture.
But for too many in the media and politics, incrementalism didn’t suit their agenda.
Mere thousands of extra soldiers wouldn’t do. No, only the entirety of the Haredi world was enough. They wanted it all, and they wanted it now.
Forget the fact that the army had reneged on its commitments to Haredim—and more broadly, to religious soldiers—time and again. Ignore the obvious idiocy in expecting working Haredim to enlist when their own siblings are being treated as criminals. Disregard the fatuousness of expecting to uproot in the course of eight months attitudes that had hardened over eight decades.
At a certain stage, the sheer foolishness of the current approach began to look intentional. As if the point of the draft law was to punish the Haredim, not to find a way forward.
Then it became clear why. The slick campaign placing ads in right-wing newspapers accusing Haredim of draft dodging was funded by left-wing organizations. They saw the draft crisis as the one issue capable of splitting the right and bringing down Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
There were some within the Israeli right, such as broadcaster Yinon Magal, who were clear-sighted enough to see what was happening. Magal, who fronts the Fox News-style “Patriotim” talk show, warned Likud and national-religious politicians that they were falling into a left-wing trap.
Indeed, as Netanyahu’s government expires over that very division, it’s now clear that the campaign worked.
In doing so, it has ensured the victory of the most strident voices, who claimed all along that the draft push was an attempt to destroy the Haredi world itself.
But as right-wing voters may yet discover, there’s a price to be paid for cornering the Haredim.
In the years since the collapse of the Oslo process in the Second Intifada, the Haredim have gone from being a counterweight in Israeli politics to staunch members of the right-wing religious bloc. That, in turn, has underwritten Netanyahu’s rule and ensured years of plenty for the settlement movement in Judea and Samaria.
But despite large communities existing over the Green Line, such as Beitar Illit and Modi’in Illit, Haredim are not an organic part of the settlement movement. Barring a few politicians and smaller groupings, by and large, Haredi instincts are not institutionally as hawkish as others on the right.
For many years, though, as the right-wing religious bloc that has dominated Israeli politics for the past decade and a half has embraced the Haredim, the community has reciprocated. The failure of Likud and other right-wing parties to honor their coalition agreements and pass the draft law may well have sundered that longstanding unity.
While it remains highly unlikely that the Haredim will form a government dominated by the progressive left, politics is never a binary choice, and sitting out the next government is also an option.
Anyone who thinks that the Haredim will automatically join the right again simply has no idea of the extreme condition in which the average such family now finds itself.
That anger grows with every arrest. Every new step taken to hound young Haredi families by removing childcare subsidies or denying access to affordable housing threatens the right’s hold on power—with all that entails.
War, or any other sustained crisis, brings out the best in human nature, and also the worst.
In the immediate aftershocks of Oct. 7, it appeared that the first impulse would dominate. Who can forget the beautiful scenes of unity?
But that all seems so long ago, replaced by something that looks painfully like the old “Beat the Jew and save Russia” slogan.
Indulging the base instinct to flail the Haredim may play well on prime time. It may feel cathartic, and even win votes. But it won’t change anything.
Because delusion always comes at a price—and when delusion becomes government policy, it’s one that we all end up paying.
Originally published in “Mishpacha.”
