A Shtetlib Awakening

The Israeli left finally focuses on the true enemy within

After decades of waffling, democratic vote bank games, carveouts and blathering about human rights, our deep state has finally pivoted to the fifth column endangering our national existence. Electrified by the war, the Israeli Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that the IDF must immediately begin drafting the Haredim!

The Old Gray Whore knows the deal

That’s right, Haredim must serve, like it or not. It’s right there in our nonexistent constitution, right next to the article exempting the Arabs from mandatory military service.

Of course, like the Arabs, the Haredim have had an exemption from the draft since the creation of the state. This was part of an extensive set of arrangements between them and the Zionists, based on the Haredim not vocally opposing the state in its self-appointed role as the representative of the Jewish people. For its part, the state understood that the IDF, described by Ben Gurion as a “melting pot” designed to melt its draftees into Israelis, was anathema to the Haredim; they would rather leave the country than see their children brainwashed into vacuous Israeli identity. In short, in a country which runs on understandings and arrangements, the Haredi exemption from the draft was par for the course.

In recent years, as the number of Haredim has grown and the number of secular leftists has fallen, the issue of bringing the Haredim into the IDF has been raised repeatedly. Non-coercive efforts such as Nahal Haredi and other programs failed in their nominal mission. Those who joined them were either Chabadniks (who have never marched in step with the broader Haredi world on this issue), American Haredi kids living out their personal dream of military service, Haredi dropouts or semi-religious arsim (who preferred the advantages of strictly kosher food, not dealing with grrrl soldier instructors and so forth.) The Haredi mainstream preferred not to participate in these programs, often explicitly rejecting them. Their suspicions were far from baseless: recently retired senior generals, like former chief of staff Yair Golan, have made public statements calling Haredim parasites and stating that their children should be reeducated through military service.

For its part, the IDF really didn’t want an influx of Haredim. It finds their requirements onerous. Haredim prefer strict kashrut, will not accept female commanders, instructors or co-ed soldiers, pray three times a day, will not violate the Sabbath or Holy Days except where it is required to save lives (a wide area of activities, but why deal with it?) and so on. Worse, they’re are ideologically problematic. An 18 year old Haredi soldier has spent a decade exposed to studying the Talmud; he has been exposed to millennia of in-depth discussion on a breathtakingly wide range of issues, legal and moral dilemmas, theoreticals, counterfactuals and so on. By contrast, the median secular Israeli draftee has been raised on TikTok and Instagram. It’s not hard to see who is susceptible to subversion by whom. And while 18 year old soldiers may be too busy to do much deep thinking or discussion, 22 year old junior officers and 28 year old field grades are not.

This is not a theoretical discussion. The IDF has already encountered the exact same problem with the Religious Zionist community. Religious Zionist religious authorities dealt with the refusal of their beloved Jewish state to behave in a Jewish way, culminating in the Oslo Accords and the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Gaza. by doubling down. “We will serve in the IDF with such enthusiasm and dedication that we will rise to the top of its ranks, and since this is the path to national leadership, we will use it to drive reform from below,” they said. The commitment of the Religious Zionist sector to this policy can be gauged by the fact that during the current war, the Religious Zionist settlers are overrepresented in the ranks of those killed in action by a factor of three.

The Israeli left immediately identified this as an existential threat. It and its foreign patrons sounded the alarm through dozens of publications in media and academia. The senior leaders of the IDF took measures to ensure that while Religious Zionist soldiers were allowed to serve in the ranks, they wouldn’t feel overly welcome, using the traditional tool of armies all over the world: chickenshit regulations. Religious officer trainees were assured that they would not be forced to listen to women singing (forbidden by halacha) at official functions, and then punished for leaving or blocking their ears when there were in fact women singing at these functions. Kashrut scandals ensued. The most prominent Religious Zionist combat officer, with decades of outstanding performance in combat, was pushed out as his mediocre peers were rewarded for their failure on October 7th and less than stellar performance during the following war with promotions. The family of a religious soldier who was killed in Gaza were given a token of the IDF’s appreciation when their request to have the traditional phrase “May God avenge his blood” engraved on his tombstone was refused. All of this goes on in the context of recently retired generals like Yair Golan issuing statements referring to Religious Zionist settlers as “subhuman” and so on.

All of these measures caused pushback and condemnation from Religious Zionist soldiers, politicians and leaders. One can assume that the pushback from the Haredim, who are as a whole more stringent and committed to Judaism, would be far worse. Rather than have to fight this battle with Haredi draftees, the IDF’s leadership preferred to address the issue in its traditional way: by lying. A decade of steadily increasing Haredi volunteer soldier numbers turned out to have been fake news, inflated severalfold. Fortunately, the IDF’s investigation of itself revealed that these lies were just accidental, not at all pre-planned. And thus things continued as they always had, until now.

“Lessons have been learned”!

So, what happened? Why is this such an urgent issue now, in the middle of the war? Did the IDF run out of troops? Or were there not enough Haredi volunteers? The IDF has hundreds of thousands of undrafted reservists, tens of thousands of whom are combat soldiers. And of 4,000 Haredi volunteers for service since the beginning of the war, the IDF has turned away 70%.

The urgency of the Haredi draft is purely political. The attempts of the Israeli left to overthrow our mediocre right wing ruling coalition have all failed. First at the ballot box. Then through the courts, as cases against Netanyahu dragged on and fell apart. Then on the streets, as months of demonstrations, airport shutdowns, road closures and riots turned out to hurt the core constituency of the left more than that of the right. The, the military attempt to create regime change, through mass refusal to serve and a proxy banana civil war courtesy of Hamas, backfired. Finally, the wartime attempt of the left to re-cast the Kaplan Force demonstrators as demanding an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal from Gaza on behalf of the hostages held by Hamas failed to find mass support, along with their campaign to pin complete responsibility on Netanyahu; the general public understands that the current and former leadership of the IDF is at least as complicit, if not more. The upcoming elections are not looking too promising, either: most of the population either has served in the war or has close friends and family who have served, and understands that the IDF is being hamstrung by its leftist leadership and the institutions of the left; while they’ve been circumspect about it, recent statements by senior military leaders make it clear that they’re looking for a way to throw the war.

“What do you want from us? It’s like fighting Euclidean geometry, man!”

In this context, the Haredi draft can only be seen as a wedge issue designed to bring down the coalition, leveraging the judiciary which is sovereign over the other branches of government. Since the constituencies of the other parties in the coalition has some level of resentment of the Haredi exemption from bearing the burden, it should be an easy sell to them-”why should your children die when theirs sit safe at home?” But ultimately the strategy relies on the Haredi parties chimping out and bringing down the coalition. There are some promising signs in that direction: the Sefaradi Chief Rabbi has promised that a Haredi draft would cause mass emigration, causing wild enthusiasm among the left.

In this gambit, the left is being typically shortsighted. For all the histrionics, the vast majority of Israeli Haredim have no intention of leaving. They also understand that the current coalition is far better than what stands to replace it. The Haredim will adjust, as they always have; those who truly do not wish to serve will use the same tools as the secular (whose deferment numbers are currently equal to those of Haredim)-psychiatric exemptions and conscientious objection. The prison system, which is currently releasing “low risk” terrorists due to its inability to deal with the numbers of Hamas prisoners from Gaza, will certainly not deal with imprisoning thousands of Haredi draft dodgers. In short, the attempt will fail.

In the long term, the Haredim will not forget the judiciary blatantly attacking them; the next attempt to reform Israel’s judicial system will find mass Haredi support. More generally, as the left breaks the multidecade unspoken arrangement of Haredi political quietism in exchange for carveouts, exemptions and subsidies, it may find that a politicized Haredi public is more than it bargained for.