Jerusalem’s sea of black last week was not merely a massive protest — it was a reckoning. An estimated 200,000 ultra-Orthodox men filled the streets that day to demand exemption from the draft, insisting that their sons remain outside the laws that bind everyone else. It was a display of defiance by a community that enjoys every privilege of Israeli citizenship while rejecting one of its most basic obligations. The laws are clear. It is time to enforce them. Enough delay. Enough excuses.
The Haredi draft issue is not a dispute about faith. It is about fairness and the meaning of citizenship. The Haredi establishment draws deeply from the public purse — housing subsidies, stipends, political influence — and yet denies the legitimacy of the very state that provides them. Its leaders call the army impure, even as they insist that it protect their neighborhoods. They denounce secular authority while sitting in cabinet meetings to secure more funding. It is a moral inversion: dependence without gratitude, privilege without duty — all somehow born out of religious entitlement.
The tone of the Jerusalem rally made the imbalance unmistakable. Children were paraded through the streets holding yellow balloons printed with the face of a yeshiva student arrested for draft evasion. The slogan read “Bring him back” — a deliberate echo of the hostage campaign that has become a national cry of anguish. The appropriation was not merely tasteless; it was cruel. At a time when Israel is still burying soldiers and praying for the return of those held by Hamas, equating a lawbreaker with a captive is an act of moral blindness. It captures precisely what has gone wrong: a community so detached from the country’s shared pain that it mistakes self-pity for righteousness.
The roots of this imbalance are long-standing. Former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s postwar exemption for a few hundred Torah students — intended as a humane gesture — metastasized into a political system of dependency. What began as compassion became a lever of power. Over decades, the exemption expanded into an industry of avoidance: a parallel world of schools, subsidies and political deals that drains the state’s resources while eroding its civic core. Tolerance curdled into indulgence.
The remedy is neither radical nor punitive. It is simple: enforce the law. The laws are clear. Service is mandatory. Alternatives can exist, but they must be genuine and enforceable. Institutions that defy the state while accepting its funding should lose that funding. Transparency must replace evasion and equality must replace accommodation.
This is not an assault on Torah study or religious life. It is a defense of civic integrity. A society cannot endure when some fight and others merely pray for their success. The burden of Israel’s survival cannot remain optional for those most sheltered by it.
Haredi leadership will protest. Politicians will plead for patience. But delay is complicity. A state that fails to enforce its own laws erodes faith in the very idea of law. Israel owes its ultra-Orthodox citizens respect — but not surrender. The time for indulgence has passed. Enforce the law. Restore one standard of citizenship — and one shared fate.
Well, to start, ultra-Orthodox is a pejorative term, similar to ultra-conservative. It means “too Orthodox”, and as such insults both Chareidim AND Religious Zionists, as it implies they are less religious. There are no serious religious differences between the groups, except that Chareidim do not consider the State of Israel (as opposed to the Land) part of their religion. (How about right-wing religious?)
According to the “norming” by Ami magazine when running a detailed poll of religious Jews, two-thirds in the US are Chareidi. This is more true in Baltimore; try asking your interviewees. So you have alienated another large sector of your potential audience.
You state that this is a matter of law. But it isn’t. It was started by Israel’s runaway Supreme Court which has destroyed Israeli democracy by acting as a sort of Priesthood for a secular, and largely anti-Jewish, theocracy.
You state everyone must serve. Well, why don’t we start with the Arabs? If there is some reason that they are more draftable than the Chareidim, I want the State of Israel to state it out loud, in front of the world.
You state it drains the treasury. But the Yeshivas and seminaries bring in a great deal of foreign exchange. Their subsidies are dwarfed by the university subsidies. Yet in speaking to my colleagues at work in Israel, they had no idea of the fact that their education was subsidized at all. And unlike the universities, we don’t work to destroy the country from within.
Finally, I wonder how we can keep our religion. Judaism believes in sexual apartheid (see Maimonides), and in particular the more basic Chasidim have a very strong separation. How will this work when the Supreme Court is pushing a strong feminist religion on the army? What, you say? We need to get with the times? Well, that’s what the Hellenists told us in the days of Chanukah. We survived them, and we will survive you.