Thousands of ultra-Orthodox (haredi) men flooded Jerusalem’s streets on Thursday to protest military conscription, a perennial issue, but exacerbated much more by the heavy losses incurred in the Israel-Hamas War and the resulting rampant inequality. The demonstration was angry and telling – a mirror held up to one of the most painful fractures in Israeli society.
During the protest, several journalists were attacked. An N12 reporter had objects thrown at her; others were shoved or harassed. The crowd’s rage was aimed not at any one politician but at the idea itself that haredi men should share the burden of defending the state that sustains them.
This is not about faith. It is about a community that has built an entire ideology on separation – social, economic, and civic – as its leadership turned exemption into a sacred principle, weaponizing Torah study to justify withdrawal from national responsibility.
The data are stark; the IDF sent draft notices to 54,000 eligible men this year; only a few hundred responded. Among non-haredi Jewish men, the draft rate is significantly higher. This imbalance has persisted for decades, creating a moral and structural inequality at the heart of Israeli society.
Meanwhile, reservists – many of them observant Jews who adhere to Halacha no less strictly – are losing patience. The haredi establishment defends this detachment as the protection of the Torah world, but Torah study is not the private property of one social group. It is the collective heritage of the Jewish people, sustained through millennia by farmers, laborers, teachers, and soldiers alike.
The modern haredi identity – as a closed, anti-Zionist bloc – is not an ancient constant. It crystallized barely a century ago, a reaction to modernity rather than its continuation.
In truth, many equally devout Jews live fully within modern Israel – serving in the IDF, working, studying, raising families – without feeling that their faith is being threatened. If one cannot live in contemporary society and maintain their faith, then perhaps that faith is not as strong as claimed.
But the deeper tragedy is generational. Haredi leadership has condemned its youth to dependency. Decades of shielding boys from basic education have produced one of the least employable populations in the developed world. The education system denies students math, English, and science – leaving families reliant on stipends and women’s wages.
This policy of enforced ignorance leaves a growing demographic – projected to reach roughly 30% of the population by 2060 – economically and civically detached. The community’s poverty is not accidental; it is ideological.
Even within that framework, cracks are showing. The number of haredim pursuing academic degrees rose 25% last year, and 19,000 are now enrolled in universities – proof that integration is possible when the leadership permits it. The resistance, then, is not about faith but about power.
That power has been sustained by political cowardice. Since 1948, the “Torato Umanuto” (his Torah study is his profession) exemption – originally granted to a few hundred scholars – has ballooned into a mass avoidance clause. Secular and religious politicians alike have enabled it, fearing electoral backlash or coalition collapse. The High Court of Justice has repeatedly ruled that the blanket exemption violates equality laws, but enforcement has been perpetually deferred.
Israeli state and public have run out of patience with Haredi draft
Now, the state, and more importantly, the public’s patience has run out. Reservists are voicing open anger; the coalition is splintering under the weight of its own contradictions. The protest in Jerusalem was not a cry of the persecuted but a display of entitlement: the refusal of one sector to live by the same civic rules as everyone else.
What we see from the anti-conscription protest is a complete disconnect of one sector in society that takes no part in defending the Jewish homeland; the co-opting of religious study, as though Torah were not the shared heritage of the entire Jewish people; leadership that leaves its next generation uneducated, poor, and defenseless; and a political and religious establishment that allowed this drift to fester.
Equality is not a punishment, and service is not a secular imposition. They are the foundation of shared citizenship. The time for appeasement has passed. The time for accountability – and for belonging – is long overdue.