Opinion | The war in Gaza may end Israel’s unfair draft exemptions for Orthodox Jews

Granted, it’s never wise to bet against the ultra-Orthodox, also known as Haredim. They’ve managed to pull off this arrangement since the nation’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 rabbinical discussion of Jewish law.

At the time, the number of exempted students was 400. It grew modestly to 800 after the 1967 war. Today, the total exempted has risen to a record 66,000, as the Haredi population has mushroomed to more than 13 percent of the population. Most Jewish Israeli men must serve in uniform for 32 months, and Jewish women two years. (Service is not compulsory for Palestinian citizens of Israel.) Yet the Haredi not only are excused — they also receive stipends from the state though age 26, while the government pays the yeshivot at which they study millions more.

To maintain this deal, 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 bolt if the high court ruling is enforced.

This imbalance between rights and responsibilities is untenable, and it has been for years. But the war in Gaza and the threat of increased hostilities on the northern border with Lebanon might have broken the spell: Some 360,000 reservists were called up after Oct. 7, and the Israel Defense Forces has extended tours of duty for both draftees and reservists. Soldiers are dying. Families are worried. The economy is disrupted.

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

Meanwhile, the shock of Oct. 7 has produced a crack, if only of hairline proportions, in the historically steadfast refusal of the ultra-Orthodox to consider military service in any form. Among the Haredim, military service hasn’t just been discouraged — to sign up is to risk being shunned by the community, and fewer than 10 percent do so. This oppositional stance makes some sense: The military is Israel’s melting pot, and for the Haredi, assimilation poses an existential threat. To allow their young people to be exposed to a different way of life is to risk them being seduced by it.

That might be starting to change. In the weeks after Oct. 7, thousands of Haredi men volunteered for duty. Polling inside the ultra-Orthodox community showed increased support for military service.

Still, that isn’t the mainstream Haredi view. Chief Sephardic Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef warned that the ultra-Orthodox would leave the country if the exemptions were ended. “If they force us to go to the army, we’ll all move abroad,” Yosef said. “All these secular people don’t understand that without … yeshivas, the army would not be successful. … The soldiers only succeed thanks to those learning Torah.” Again, the word “chutzpah” comes to mind.

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

The latest exemption expired April 1, and the high court ordered a freeze on funds to yeshivot in the absence of any legislative solution, rebuffing Netanyahu’s pleas that he needed extra time because of the war. Notably, the attorney general broke from Netanyahu, telling the court that the government no longer had any legal basis to continue to excuse the ultra-Orthodox from military service. (The rulings on military service are one of the underlying causes of the government’s unsuccessful efforts last year to undermine the court’s independence.)

I last wrote about this issue during a trip to Israel a dozen years ago, when a different Netanyahu coalition was wrestling with how to pare back the exemption. That never happened — but this time feels different, with the pressures of war and a new level of public fury. Back then, Yohanan Plesner was a member of the Israeli Knesset who chaired a committee to rewrite the rules on service. Today, he is president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “We thought this problem can mushroom and grow silently and we can ignore it,” Plesner told me before the latest ruling. “Oct. 7 hurled it into the center of the public debate, and it can no longer be disregarded.”

So, I asked Plessner, does that mean time’s up now? “‘Time is up’ is only in the movies, not in politics,” he replied, noting Netanyahu’s skill in managing years of procrastination on the issue. Still, he said, “Time is not on the side of those who want to perpetuate the current state of exemption.”

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