As political pressure mounts, Netanyahu delays controversial haredi draft law - opinion

Since coming to power in late 2022, the coalition has been machinating to make good on its promise to the haredi parties that it would enact legislation formalizing the continued de facto mass exemption of haredi men. The effort continued even as Israel fought its longest and most demanding war in decades and the army warned of a growing manpower shortage, with many other Israelis serving incredible spans of 200 days’ reserve duty a year.

To much of the public, the idea was morally indefensible: that a large and rapidly growing sector of the population could simply be written out of the national obligation to defend the country.

Poll after poll shows roughly three-quarters of Israelis oppose blanket exemptions for haredim. Do the math, and you will find that among the non-haredi public, this opposition approaches unanimity.

Israelis who serve in the reserves, who send their children into combat units, and who have watched this war stretch year after year find it impossible to accept that tens of thousands of young men of military age remain permanently outside the system. The key haredi argument – that prayer is as valuable as combat, and requires full-time devotion to boot – is widely viewed as a blood-curdling insult to the intelligence.

Yet for more than two years of war, the coalition kept searching for ways to formalize exactly that arrangement.

Only now, as elections appear to be approaching, has the proposal quietly disappeared.

Nothing about the underlying political reality has changed. The Netanyahu coalition’s dependence on the haredi parties remains absolute. Without them, the coalition collapses if they so choose. That dependence has shaped policy in ways that extend far beyond the question of military service.

Just this week, the government approved special allocations for haredi institutions worth almost $1 billion – widely understood as political compensation to ensure that the haredi leadership accepts the temporary burial of the draft law without bringing down the government.

That money will flow into institutions that reinforce the very system at the heart of the national dispute.

The vast majority of haredi schools still refuse to teach high school boys core subjects such as mathematics, science, and English. Labor participation among haredi men remains far below the national average – around 50%, much of that in make-work subsidized positions in the religious apparatus. The community’s leadership continues to defend an economic model that relies heavily on state support while discouraging integration into the broader workforce.

The result is a kind of parallel society – one sustained by the taxes and labor of a modern, high-tech economy whose workforce lies overwhelmingly outside the haredi world.

Israel can sustain such an imbalance only for so long – but the haredi insistence on prodigious birthrates averaging almost 7 children per family makes it impossible to tolerate any longer.

The ultra-Orthodox already constitute between  a fifth to a quarter of the country’s youth. A shrinking proportion of Israelis will be expected to shoulder the burdens of military service, taxation, and economic productivity for an ever larger population that participates to a miniscule degree in all three – and truly insists it is doing the others a favor.

The Likud-religious coalition will transform Israel into an impoverished, backward state that is very religiously observant. That is the direction, and whether to continue it is the choice at hand.

I Have recently met with a series of major rabbis in the community to work it out, and while they were uniformly intelligent, welcoming and charming, I found no flexibility – even as I did not hide from them my conviction that the status quo is endangering the viability of the Israeli state.

They understand very well that the Israeli Right will find it very difficult to impose a change. That is because ever since 1977, when the Likud-led Right first came to power, that rested on a Knesset majority that depended on the haredi parties. On occasion Likud led other types of coalitions, yes – but the “victory” that enabled it to lead, under the parliamentary system, was fully dependent on the haredim.

The attempt to legislate permanent draft exemptions was the clearest expression of that dependency – because no Likud politician is blind to the damage it causes the party. They simply had no choice but to comply, because the Supreme Court has ruled that in absence of a formal law the exemptions must end.

The current context – with so many Israelis being impacted by the wars of the past years – made the political price too high, though, and so a finessed delay was needed. But the issue is not going away, and should the Likud-religious coalition win the coming election, the bill will be back.

The shelving of the bill therefore should be seen in context. As elections approach, the government would prefer this affront to decency will disappear from view. The hope is that voters will focus on other matters and forget the anger.

Some will claim the center-left would also bribe the haredim and give them anything they demand, if that option existed – and these are lies. This issue is absolutely coming to a head – the political will (and logic) exists and is extreme. And in any case the haredim have never handed power to the non-Right and never will; Israel’s political history is much misrepresented.