“If they don’t serve, they shouldn’t get a shekel.” This line has become a staple of the High Court of Justice rulings, attorney-general opinions, Knesset speeches, and WhatsApp groups. It is no longer rhetoric. Since the High Court ruled in June 2024 that there is no legal basis for exempting yeshiva students from the draft, the sanctions have only grown.
Yeshivas lose funding for draft-age students, and the Labor Ministry’s daycare criteria now deny the subsidy to any family whose father is classified as a draft evader, even if he is employed. Draft bills go further: National Insurance benefits, housing programs, property tax discounts, driver’s licenses, and travel abroad.
For a kollel family of six, “benefits” is a bureaucrat’s word for groceries. Stripped of euphemism, the proposal is that the state will help feed a haredi (ultra-Orthodox) father’s children if he serves, and not if he doesn’t.
Whether haredim must serve (many already do, in the Hashmonaim Brigade) is a hard argument between citizens. Settling it by controlling who eats is not an argument at all. It is a tactic, and it has a history.
Lenin made “He who does not work, neither shall he eat” a principle of state in May 1918, calling it the “root principle of socialism” in a letter about seizing grain. Within months, Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) was rationing bread by class.
Stalin wrote the slogan into his 1936 constitution; Mao’s 1975 constitution adopted it too. Each makes the same move: the state decides what counts as work, then feeds those who comply. Trotsky saw where that leads: where the state is the sole employer, the principle becomes, “Who does not obey shall not eat.”
The slogan has been used on Jews before. The 1918 Soviet constitution disenfranchised clergy, creating the lishentsy. Rabbis, kosher slaughterers, and cantors were counted as non-laborers; from 1929 they were denied ration cards, evicted from state housing, and their children barred from universities.
The Yevsektsiya shut cheders (schoolrooms) and yeshivas on precisely the grounds now heard in Jerusalem: that men who sit and learn produce nothing.
The Nazis followed the same path, stripping Jews of their professions, their children’s schooling, and public welfare before reaching for anything worse. Every clause of the argument is now being said, in Hebrew, by people who would be horrified to hear its Russian original.
A democracy enforces its laws on individuals; it does not ration bread to communities. If the Knesset passes a draft law, the state may summon, try, fine, or jail each man who refuses, as it would any secular evader. Sanctions on the evader himself – a fine, his license, his passport – are ordinary tools of law. But the state may not make children answer for their fathers.
A three-year-old in Bnei Brak did not dodge the draft. Cutting her daycare subsidy enlists no one; it punishes her. A sanction that falls on a child is a child’s lunch withheld until her father complies.
Israel should reconsider its tactics with the Haredi draft
Jewish law refuses to condition food. The Talmud (Bava Batra 9a) and Shulchan Aruch (Yoreh De’ah 251:10) rule that one who asks for food is fed at once, without investigation.
The Torah’s model of the citizen who does not fight is not the parasite but the Levi, whom the Rambam (Hilchot Shmita v’Yovel 13:12-13) described as set apart for God’s service and fed by the nation, a “standing open” to anyone whose spirit moves him. The vocabulary of “parasites” is not Jewish. We borrowed it.
Welfare states condition benefits on need and income; the Soviet way was conditioning them on obedience, and on a father’s obedience for his child’s food. The daycare rule, applied even when the father works, shows what Israel is doing.
Israel should also consider who it is pulling the lever on.
There are about 1.4 million haredim, with a birth rate near six and a half, and a quarter of Jewish first-graders – on CBS projections, a third of Israel’s Jews within a generation. Squeezing a 10th of the country’s consumers is not a policy but a recession. And they are the keepers of what held the Jewish people to this land through two thousand years of exile.
Nor are they unwilling to fight: Hashmonaim soldiers have fought and fallen in Gaza, not because their children’s daycare was threatened, but because the state built a framework that kept their kashrut, prayer, and rabbis intact. Israel can have the Hashmonaim or the ration book. It cannot have both.
Coercion does not integrate; it disintegrates. Stalin’s Gulag, where rations were graded by output, should have produced perfect compliance. Solzhenitsyn records the opposite: the special camps forged a solidarity that erupted in strikes and revolts, culminating in the 40 Days of Kengir uprising. A sanction felt at the kitchen table binds families to their community.
Every lost daycare place becomes evidence for those who call the state an enemy of Torah, and the young man who might have enlisted must now do so as a defection from his besieged neighbors. The Talmud (Sotah 47a) teaches that the left hand pushes away while the right draws near.
Integration succeeds by making membership worth having: units like Hashmonaim whose soldiers leave as observant as they entered; respect for those diligently learning; career tracks that honor the beit midrash; and a public language that treats Torah as a shared treasure rather than a debt.
The High Court has never affirmed the haredim’s right to serve in such a unit. If it will not, its call for integration is not sincere; it is an attempt to uproot haredi values. Alienation produces radicals; belonging produces citizens.
“Her ways are ways of pleasantness.” A Jewish state that wants its most devout citizens beside it should try those ways first.
The writer is an attorney in Jerusalem and principal of David Page Law, a full-service law firm with an emphasis on real estate, wills, trusts, and estates. He has taught law at the Hebrew University at the Faculty of Law and made aliyah after a judicial clerkship and a year in Washington DC’s largest law firm. He is also a member of R’ Daniel Belsky’s Kollel and the author of Rav Gustman, on the Rosh Yeshiva who was the last Dayan of Vilna, and the creator of the podcast The Kings of Israel.