When Supreme Court President Isaac Amit warned this week that incitement, fake news, and personal attacks on judges were no longer remaining in the public sphere but were seeping into their private lives, it sounded grave.
Two days later, it sounded prophetic.
The attack on the home of Deputy Supreme Court President Noam Sohlberg on Wednesday night was shocking, but it was not surprising. That is perhaps the most gut-wrenching part of it.
Dozens of haredi (ultra-Orthodox) protesters arrived outside Sohlberg’s home in Alon Shvut, vandalized the property, smashed windows, damaged his car, and left his family home looking like a scene that no public servant’s home in Israel should ever resemble. Sohlberg and his wife were inside at the time.
This did not happen in a vacuum. It came after weeks of anti-draft protests in which protesters blocked major roads, disrupted train tracks near Ben-Gurion Airport, harassed police officers at their homes, and defied law enforcement.
That matters because the question now is not only who threw which stone, who broke which window, or who boarded which bus. The question is whether the State of Israel is still prepared to say, clearly and without qualification, that the law applies to everyone.
For too long, the state has treated the haredi draft issue as a political problem that can be postponed, negotiated around, softened, delayed, and sent back for another round of coalition talks. But the legal and wartime reality changed long ago.
Words are not enough
The previous draft framework expired in June 2023.
The High Court has ruled that the state cannot continue as though a lawful exemption framework were in place, and Sohlberg himself authored a key ruling requiring the state to move without delay toward effective enforcement against haredi draft evasion, including meaningful criminal enforcement and broader civil and economic measures.
That is the direct context of the attack. It is not separate from politics, and it should not be sanitized as though it were merely an ugly outburst by a handful of young men who lost control. These protesters went to a judge's home because of a court ruling. They vandalized his property because they did not like the legal consequences of a law that applies to them.
They tried to intimidate a judicial officer and his family because they believe, or have been taught to believe, that their cause stands above the state’s democratic institutions.
That is anarchy.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the riot and said law enforcement must apply the full force of the law against the rioters. Justice Minister Yariv Levin, Defense Minister Israel Katz, the Judiciary, the national judges’ representative body, and political figures from across the spectrum also condemned the attack.
The words are important. But they are not enough.
Leadership must now choose where it stands: in a law-abiding country, where court rulings are binding and criminal acts carry criminal consequences; or in a country where every sector, faction, and political camp decides for itself which laws it recognizes and which public officials it is permitted to threaten.
The days of speaking gently about lawbreaking have to end. If draft orders are ignored, they must be enforced. If protesters attack police officers, soldiers, judges, or their families, they must be arrested, prosecuted, and punished.
If organized groups send buses of young men to a judge’s home, the organizers must be found. If elected officials condemn violence in one sentence and then spend the next explaining why the rioters felt persecuted, they should not be allowed to pretend that they are defending the rule of law.
That is precisely what made the statement from Shas and Degel Hatorah, issued shortly after midnight, so disturbing.
The factions did condemn violence, but their statement opened by saying they were “pained and shocked by the ongoing persecution and trampling of Torah students by Supreme Court justices,” and warned that such steps would lead to radicalization and anarchy.
This is the problem in one paragraph. The violence is condemned, but the story remains one of persecution. The judge whose home was attacked becomes part of the machinery of oppression. The yeshiva students are the victims, the court the aggressor, and the law is not the law; it is a campaign against Torah.
But Sohlberg is not an enemy of Torah. He is an observant, learned, deeply serious man who has given his life to the service of the state and the law. Rabbi Yaakov Medan, one of the heads of Yeshivat Har Etzion and a close friend of Sohlberg, described him as “a good and honest man who delivers justice that is righteous and true.”
Rabbi Moshe Taragin, a neighbor and teacher at the yeshiva, called the attack a desecration of Torah.
This is about power, not Torah
And that is the deeper wound here: this was never really about Torah. It was about power, exemption, and the refusal to accept that the state's law applies even when it is politically inconvenient and religiously contested.
The people most harmed by this narrative are first the victims: Sohlberg, his wife, his family, his neighbors, and every judge who now has to wonder whether the next ruling will bring protesters to their door.
But the damage does not stop there. It also harms the attackers, young men who have somehow been brought to a point where they could justify smashing the windows of a Jewish home in the name of Torah. And it harms Israeli society as a whole, already torn by war, grief, exhaustion, and a draft burden that has become impossible to defend morally or practically.
A country cannot send soldiers and reservists to fight month after month while telling an entire sector that their noncompliance is a political bargaining chip.
It cannot demand sacrifice from some families while allowing others to treat enforcement as persecution. It cannot ask judges to uphold the law and then fail to protect them when the law becomes inconvenient.
Amit warned this week that fake news prepares the ground, incitement sows the seeds, and violence grows wild.
The writing was on the wall. On Wednesday night, it was written in broken glass.