In an act of astonishing tone-deafness, the haredi United Torah Judaism Party on July 25 tabled a bill to enshrine the value of Torah study as a basic law.
This move aimed to prevent the High Court of Justice from striking down future legislation granting blanket exemptions from IDF service to haredi men.
Why was this so tone-deaf? Because just a day earlier the government passed the first component of its contentious judicial reform and canceled the court’s use of the “reasonableness standard” in judicial review, triggering widespread protests across the country.
With half the nation feeling that Israel’s very foundations were being shaken, it was hardly an opportune time to propose further changes that strike at the heart of the nation’s identity.
The very tabling of the law caused an uproar, including among Likud lawmakers who realized this was the last thing the country needed at this tense moment. UTJ consequently withdrew the bill.
The party, together with Shas, should act similarly regarding the bill seeking to exempt haredi young people, and only them, from mandatory military service – a bill they are demanding the Knesset pass immediately after its summer recess.
Few issues in the country are more loaded than this one, and any effort to push through this legislation – which would enshrine in law a glaring inequality – would drive tens of thousands of more people into the streets in protest at a time when what is needed is to lower the flames of societal tensions, not turn them sky high.
Nevertheless, UTJ has threatened Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that if he does not prioritize this issue and get this legislation passed, they will quit the government.
The new law would drop the age of exemption from the IDF for yeshiva students from 26 to 21, enabling them to transition into the workforce without having to do any army duty after leaving the yeshiva.
On its own, this legislation establishing a sweeping haredi exemption from military service would be a bitter pill for the general public to swallow. But this law does not stand on its own.
In addition to the wide-ranging IDF exemptions, the haredi parties are also pushing for significantly increased budgets for yeshivot and funding for schools that do not include English and math in the core curriculum.
The result of all the above is that the haredim will get an exemption from the army but will, in many cases, not be equipped with the necessary skills to find jobs when they can legally leave the yeshivot and start working.
In the long run, given the rapid growth of the haredi population, this model is simply unsustainable.
The desired model for the haredim in Israel is unsustainable
On Wednesday, the Brothers in Arms movement, one of the myriad groups behind the anti-judicial reform protests, was among the petitioners to the High Court to force the government to begin conscripting haredim after an arrangement preventing this expired a month ago.
“Israel’s security is dependent on a people’s army, and in order to sustain a people’s army, everyone needs to share the burden,” the organization said. “We demand a new contract with our haredi brothers because their blood is not redder than ours.”
One of the lessons to be learned from the judicial overhaul protests of recent months is that measures that fundamentally alter the state of the nation cannot be pushed through the Knesset based on a parliamentary majority stemming from a razor-thin 30,000 margin of victory – the number of votes by which the pro-Netanyahu bloc beat the anti-Netanyahu bloc in the last election.
On issues that go to the core of how life is organized in this diverse land, there needs to be buy-in from a substantial majority of the population, and for the haredi parties to push through this legislation now would breed tremendous resentment and further strain this country’s already very taut social fabric.
Israel will need to mend the divides when it emerges from the judicial reform crisis. Pushing through legislation that enshrines in law a blatant inequality is definitely not what this country needs at this time. Quite the contrary: it pours salt into one of this country’s most long-standing societal wounds at a time when what we need more than anything is to heal.