The most veteran, corrupt, and profane deal ever struck in the Jewish state is ready to die.
The 47-year-old pact, whereby ultra-Orthodoxy got wholesale draft exemptions, budgets, and subsidies in turn for joining Likud’s coalitions will next month come to an end, due to a rare alignment of juridical, political, and social stars.
The juridical part is the High Court of Justice’s ruling last month that since the government has not amended the unconstitutional Conscription Law, and since the deadline for its amendment is this month, the government must explain why it won’t conscript ultra-Orthodox men, and also stop funding their yeshivas.
The political part is Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s demand, announced dramatically last week, that the law will be amended through an agreement with Benny Gantz’s National Unity party.
Gantz wants an amendment that will make most ultra-Orthodox young men, gradually over a decade, serve either in the army or in civilian alternatives. Gallant concurs.
“All must get under the stretcher,” he said, using the Israeli metaphor about soldiers’ helping each other. “Without physical existence, there is no spiritual existence,” he said, echoing what every Zionist thinks.
An alternative bill, one that would sideline Gallant, is impractical since a bill concerning the military must be introduced by the defense minister.
Gallant, a former commander of the Naval Commando, may not be particularly eloquent, but he sure is brave. He has his idea of justice and is prepared to run with it no matter what the political risk, the way he did last year when he demanded that Benjamin Netanyahu halt his judicial reform, arguing that the disunity it was fomenting was strategically unaffordable.
Now Gallant’s move is forcing Netanyahu to woo the very political center that his longtime alliance with ultra-Orthodoxy disparaged and abused. Worse, from Netanyahu’s viewpoint, the deal he so cherishes is now ready to explode socially, because of the war.
The war, which will be recalled as the Netanyahu era’s aftermath and emblem, is exacting an exorbitant price from Israeli society: physically, economically, and emotionally.
Millions of citizens follow anxiously the IDF’s announcements of fallen soldiers’ names. Mainstream Israelis have personal acquaintances among the war’s fallen, wounded, hostages, and their families. Ultra-Orthodox Israelis do not. That gap alone pushes ultra-Orthodoxy out of the social pale. Now add to this the army’s need, because of the war, to make those who do enlist serve even more, and you get the wrath that ultra-Orthodoxy’s non-service now evokes.
The ultra-Orthodox absence
Ultra-Orthodox Israelis’ absence from the funerals and the hospital wards where thousands of other Israelis arrived over the past five months is making a critical mass of Israelis fume. And this fury is no longer about people ultra-Orthodoxy can dismiss as virulently anti-religious or knee-jerk liberals. It’s everyone, including rabbis who previously avoided confrontation with their ultra-Orthodox peers.
“It’s the numbers,” said Ilai Ofran, the rabbi of Kibbutz Yavne, referring to the war’s high rate of casualties. “That transformed the debate from theoretical to existential,” he told Yediot Aharonot.
Rabbi Haim Navon of Yeshivat Har Etzion was harsher. “Ultra-Orthodox draft dodging is a disgrace and its excuses don’t hold any water,” he wrote in Makor Rishon. “We never agreed for the deal whereby we get killed and they identify our bodies,” he wrote, referring to ultra-Orthodox volunteers’ dominant role in that thankless work following the October 7 massacre.
Even so, as of this writing, ultra-Orthodoxy’s leaders are failing, along with Netanyahu, to fathom their deal’s corruption and detect its approaching collapse.
“WE WON’T agree to anything concerning the [yeshiva] boys’ enlistment,” said Rabbi Meir Zvi Bergman, 95, the head of the Council of Torah Sages, last week. “No one is sovereign to give up the Torah, and nothing will help them,” he said – “them” being us.
With all due respect to Rabbi Bergman’s scholarship and age, his statement is based on a brazen lie. No one is out to make anyone “give up the Torah.” The Jewish state is not Emperor Hadrian’s Rome.
First of all, conscription is only about ages 18-21. The rest can study day and night. Secondly, thousands of Modern Orthodox soldiers have proven, empirically, that military service is no obstacle to Jewish scholarship. Some of this generation’s outstanding Talmudic scholars, for instance, rabbis Re’em Hacohen, Yuval Cherlow, and IDF Chief Chaplain Eyal Krim, were combat officers.
The ultra-Orthodox politicians who make a living crafting the crooked deals that their elderly rabbis then have to defend, are making them lie. Moreover, they make the ultra-Orthodox population violate Jewish law, three times:
First, they ignore Moses’ question to those he suspected of draft dodging: “Are your brothers to go to war while you stay here?” (Numbers 32:7). Second, they violate the sages’ law that “in mandatory wars” – that is, wars of defense, like today’s – “everyone goes, even a groom from his room and a bride from her wedding canopy” (Sota 8:6). And now, as their brethren risk their lives in Gaza and Lebanon, they violate the command “You shall not stand against the blood of your neighbor” (Leviticus 19:16).
BACK WHEN this government was created, this column warned that Netanyahu’s nonchalant delivery of ultra-Orthodoxy’s redoubled demands in budgeting and legislation will ignite civic rebellion (“The Middle Israeli revolt,” December 9, 2022). Now the revolt is here.
Chances that Netanyahu will change course after his lifelong tango with ultra-Orthodoxy are nil. At 74, he is too old to overcome his addiction to what he calls, absurdly, “Likud’s natural allies.”
Well, ultra-Orthodoxy is not Likud’s natural ally. The political center is. And now that center, embodied by Gantz and Gallant, is telling Likud: Your draft-dodging deal was all along a celebration of lies, hypocrisy, and deceit, and next month, with or without you and your Bibi, it will come to its end.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.