As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the coalition he leads once again crash against the rocks of the draft law, each for their own reasons, it is worth returning to some basic truths. The Israeli Left tends to recoil at what it sees as the moral deterioration of the people of Zion, and especially at what it perceives as a growing indifference to death in wartime.
Let us set aside the moralizing for a moment. It is impossible to ignore the fact that one of the natural processes societies undergo during wartime is a degree of desensitization toward enemy casualties.
But no less natural, and something the current coalition is discovering time and again, is that during war the public loses its patience with those who do everything in their power to evade service: people who refuse to take part in the collective defense while demanding full access to the security, prosperity, and resources of the state.
No one is claiming these are admirable tendencies in themselves. But they are entirely natural. To perform deep shock at the fact that a society at war grows less sympathetic toward those who fight against it and less tolerant of those who try to free-ride on its back is disingenuous at best. And yet the familiar refrain keeps coming: “You can’t really draft haredim [ultra-Orthodox], so the whole issue is pure populism.” This is precisely where the problem needs to be reframed.
The structure of the system
The question is not how many haredi young men can be put on buses to the military induction base tomorrow morning, though given the right sanctions, that too would happen faster than expected.
The question is almost always structural. It concerns the architecture of incentives: Is the system built so that those who share in the burden of sustaining the state receive its full embrace and support, while those who choose to disengage from that partnership, or worse, to impose a one-sided arrangement in which they contribute nothing but receive everything, pay a serious price for that choice?
This is not an abstract argument. Consider the Swiss model. Switzerland has long maintained that citizens who do not serve in the military pay a special compensatory tax to the state. Without getting into the mechanics or the precise rate, it is clear that Israel would do well to adopt similar logic, and sooner rather than later. The Swiss option rests on a simple principle: A state fighting for its survival needs soldiers. The default is universal service. Those who opt out must pay a steep personal price, because turning your back on the Israeli partnership carries a cost.
A legislation proposal
Consider a straightforward proposal: legislation requiring a supermajority to repeal, stipulating that any citizen who chooses not to serve must pay a cumulative tax of roughly NIS 200,000 by age 30.
This would not compensate for the structural damage caused, nor resolve the moral problem of treating some lives as worth less than others. But it would begin to give those who opt out a tangible sense of what a system with genuine reciprocity between partnership and rights actually feels like.
Furthermore, if a particular community sees the preservation of a draft-exempt class as a supreme value, that community is welcome to open its own pockets, or those of its philanthropists, and fund that exemption itself. This is not a perfect solution, and nothing here implies that money can substitute for blood. But it is an excellent starting point for testing whether those who declare “we will die before we serve” are also willing to pay a heavy financial price to stand by their word.