Massive kerfuffle coming in Israel

Ultra-Orthodox Jews vote for nationalism and then refuse to fight. Their growing numbers make this untenable. Outrage is mounting as an April deadline looms.

It will surprise few to learn that the costly war in Gaza is causing political upheavals in Israel. But the main issue is not what most might expect — future arrangements with the Palestinians. Rather, it involves outrage over the ultra-Orthodox population’s widespread refusal to serve in the military. An April deadline looms.

On the big issue you read of in the news, the world appears split. Among those who are not ignorant of the facts, there are legitimate arguments both for saying that after the Oct. 7 massacre Hamas must be crushed at any cost, and for believing that Israel has gone too far or gone about it the wrong way. The critics are louder, but polls suggest that in the US at least support for Israel remains quite strong.

But even critics of Israel might be interested in the kerfuffle over draft avoidance by the ultra-Orthodox, who are known in Israel as Haredim (and in the US, somewhat incorrectly, as Hassidim). With seven children on average, this community has grown into a separate sect accounting for a sixth of Jewish Israelis where devotion to a fundamentalist version of the Jewish religion trumps all and modernity is kept at bay.

In the early days of the state, the Haredim were given a quota of several hundred Torah sages who would be exempt from the draft, informally – to preserve scholarly religious learning after its decimation during the Holocaust. Nationalist Menachem Begin came to power in 1977 with a parliament majority dependent on Haredi politicians, and promptly extended the exemption to anyone studying in yeshivas, the Jewish seminaries. Thus began one of the current era’s spectacular scams; it is, in my book, interesting on a global level, because it attaches to everything from economics to demographics to theology to ethics to the most rank of political shenanigans.

It’s a major question facing many nations: What do do with fundamentalists? In parts of the Arab world violent variants have devastatingly run riot; in other parts they have been altogether banned, yielding police states. In Europe, such radicalism is widely accepted on the basis of liberal freedoms; that has a way of backfiring. In the US, Evangelical Christians and the liberal coasts might as well inhabit separate countries.

I have been debating the Haredi issue with religious Jewish figures for years (see a recent effort on these very pages). For a long time, change seemed hopeless. And then came the longest war Israel has known since the founding one, in 1948.