Why Israel Wants to Draft the Ultra-Orthodox Into the Military

Who are Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews?

The ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, branch of Judaism emerged in nineteenth-century Europe in reaction to the social changes that accompanied the era’s rapid industrialization and urbanization. Its adherents, the Haredim, strictly abide by the Torah’s laws and generally live in conservative, isolated communities that limit their contact with non-Haredi Jews and non-Jews alike. Although the movement began among Ashkenazi Jews, who are of Eastern European origin, non-Ashkenazi Jews now make up 33 percent of Israel’s 1.28 million Haredim. Today, Haredim compose only 13.5 percent of Israel’s total population, but given their high birth rate, it is projected that one in every three Jewish Israelis will be Haredi by 2050.

The emphasis that the community places on Torah study leads most Haredi men not to pursue higher education or paid labor, resulting in disproportionately high unemployment and poverty rates. This prioritization of Torah study is also why Haredi leaders have long advocated for policies that exempt the Haredim from the compulsory military service required of other Jewish Israelis.

What role have they played in Israeli politics?

Haredi leaders have long engaged with non-Haredi politicians to advance their parochial interests. Israel’s two main Haredi parties are United Torah Judaism (UTJ) and Shas. The latter specifically represents Haredim not of Eastern European origin, unlike UTJ’s Ashkenazi base. Though neither party has ever won a majority or plurality of seats in the Knesset, the two have been mainstays of government for decades because Israeli cabinets are formed through coalitions, which allow smaller parties such as UTJ and Shas to be kingmakers. Originally established as non-Zionist parties that did not support secular nationalism, UTJ and Shas’ flexibility on policies related to Palestinians historically enabled them to form coalitions with left-leaning parties that placed less of an emphasis on expanding Israel’s West Bank presence, as well as with right-wing, non-Haredi parties who supported settlement expansion but also embraced other Haredi priorities. In both left- and right-wing coalitions, Haredi parties were able to secure key concessions, such as increased welfare benefits for the Haredi community and the continuation of a decades-old draft exemption.

Since Israel’s founding in 1948, the Haredim have been able to avoid mandatory conscription by deferring service while attending yeshivot, schools for Torah study. Until the early 2010s, liberal and conservative prime ministers largely supported the exemption. But as the country’s Haredi community has grown, the number of exempt Haredim has skyrocketed—from four hundred in 1948 to sixty thousand today—and an increasing number of Israel’s non-Haredi Jews, who are required to serve, have complained that the exemption disproportionately burdens them. The exemption has also faced legal challenges from Israel’s Supreme Court, which has struck down multiple iterations of the exemption since 1998 and in 2017 ordered the government to legislate a solution to the Haredi draft crisis. For years, successive governments failed in their attempts to pass a bill on the issue and requested extensions from the Supreme Court as negotiations continued.

Uncertainty regarding the draft exemption and other factors have pushed Haredi parties toward the political right in recent years. While Haredi Jews still broadly disapprove of secular nationalism, the community’s high poverty rate has driven a growing number of them into cheaper West Bank settlements, disincentivizing Haredi parties from forming coalitions with left-leaning parties that have shown an openness to peace processes involving land transfers to Palestinians. There are also demographic considerations. A rising percentage of Haredi Jews are not Ashkenazi and tend to be more right-leaning than Ashkenazi Jews, even on non-religious issues. The Haredim are also the youngest population in a country where right-wing views are most popular among younger Jews.

During Israel’s 2022 elections, returning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu capitalized on those sentiments to reenter government in a coalition with UTJ and Shas, which currently hold eighteen of the coalition’s seventy-two Knesset seats. While some of Netanyahu’s liberal opponents had campaigned on promises to end the draft exemption, Netanyahu offered the Haredim concessions. These included a permanent draft exemption enshrined through his proposed judicial reform, which—had it succeeded—would have neutered the Supreme Court’s ability to block laws codifying the exemption.

How has the Israel-Hamas war affected attempts to draft the Haredim?

Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel scuttled Netanyahu’s judicial reform and moved some Haredim to aid in the country’s military efforts. In the first ten weeks of the war, two thousand Haredim attempted to join the military, a small fraction of those eligible but twice the community’s annual average. Still, Haredi political leaders maintained that they would leave the government, triggering elections, if it did not pass a permanent conscription exemption for Torah students. Despite Netanyahu’s efforts to pass some form of an exemption, infighting prevented his coalition from meeting the Supreme Court’s deadline for resolving the draft issue; the more security-minded members of his government refused to support such proposals given the military’s heightened personnel needs amid the war. In landmark rulings, the Court ordered that the Haredim begin enlisting in the military and suspended government funding to yeshivot where students did not comply.

The ruling will have limited immediate impact though. This year, Israel can only draft three thousand of the approximately sixty thousand eligible Haredi men due to war-related strains on the military’s screening and training capacity and the religious accommodations that the Haredim require, such as gender-segregated units. And despite their threats, UTJ and Shas have yet to leave the coalition, so Netanyahu could still legislate a resolution to the draft crisis before it becomes the undoing of his far-right government. UTJ and Shas likely recognize that calling for elections would almost certainly see them voted out, as recent polling has suggested, giving them an incentive to stay in the government and negotiate.

But time may only harden non-Haredi Israelis’ opposition to the draft exemption. Since October 7, the government has extended the age cutoff for IDF reserve duty from forty to forty-one for regular soldiers and forty-five to forty-six for officers, angering non-Haredi Israelis who have had to increase their own service to compensate for the lack of Haredi military participation. Additionally, the potential opening of a second front in Lebanon could further expose the Israeli military’s manpower shortages, and the Haredi community’s long-standing resistance to help plug this gap would further exacerbate those domestic tensions. Beyond this moment, experts say, the Haredi population growth rate is likely to deepen the societal rifts exposed by the judicial reform crisis, not just between the secular left and an increasingly religious right, but also between Israel’s nationalist right and Haredi right.