Opinion | Gaza war could end Israel’s unfair military exemption for Orthodox Jews

The latest development is the unanimous ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday, which again found that the military exemption for ultra-Orthodox Jews was not legally justified. “In the midst of a grueling war, the burden of inequality is greater than ever and demands a solution,” the Supreme Court said in its ruling. Recognizing the importance of the issue, the ruling was made by nine judges instead of the usual panel of three. Following the ruling, the Attorney General ordered the Israel Defense Forces to draft 3,000 ultra-Orthodox students starting July 1.

Admittedly, it is never wise to bet against the ultra-Orthodox, also known as Haredim, who have managed to push through this agreement since the founding of the state in 1948, when Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion agreed to exempt students in yeshivot – religious schools – from military service. The idea was that the Jewish community, decimated by the Holocaust, could revive the study of the Torah and Talmud, the rabbinical discussion of Jewish law.

At that time, the number of exempted students was 400. After the 1967 war, it rose modestly to 800. Today, the total number of exempted students has risen to a record 66,000 as the Haredi population has grown to over 13 percent of the population. Most Jewish men in Israel must serve in uniform for 32 months, and Jewish women for two years. (There is no compulsory service for Palestinian citizens of Israel.) But Haredi are not only exempted from the obligation—they also receive scholarships from the state until age 26, while the government pays millions more to the yeshivot where they study.

To maintain this deal, the ultra-Orthodox have cleverly converted their growing membership into political power. Two ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, are part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s narrow governing coalition – and are now threatening to quit if the Supreme Court ruling is enforced.

This imbalance between rights and responsibilities is untenable, and has been for years. But the war in Gaza and the threat of increased hostilities on the northern border with Lebanon may have broken this spell: some 360,000 reservists were called up after October 7, and the Israel Defense Forces has extended service periods for both conscripts and reservists. Soldiers are dying. Families are worried. The economy is devastated.

And yet the ultra-Orthodox largely maintain their segregation, insisting that they serve the state through prayer and Torah study. Anger at this, well, chutzpah is palpable and widespread. The bitterness ranges from left to right, from secular to Orthodox. A poll conducted in March by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 70 percent of respondents thought the exemption should be changed.

Meanwhile, the shock of October 7 has created a crack, albeit a razor-thin one, in the ultra-Orthodox’s historically steadfast refusal to consider military service in any form. Among the Haredim, military service is not only frowned upon—those who enlist risk being shunned by the community, and fewer than 10 percent do so. This oppositional attitude is entirely understandable: the military is Israel’s melting pot, and for the Haredim, assimilation is an existential threat. Allowing youth to be exposed to a different way of life risks them being seduced by it.

That could now change. In the weeks following October 7, thousands of Haredi men volunteered for military service. Surveys within the ultra-Orthodox community showed increasing support for military service.

However, that is not the prevailing opinion among the Haredi. Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef warned that the ultra-Orthodox would leave the country if the exemptions were abolished. “If they force us to join the army, we will all go abroad,” Yosef said. “All these secular people do not understand that the army would not be successful without … yeshivas. … The soldiers are successful only thanks to those who learn Torah.” Here, too, the word “chutzpah” springs to mind.

The court may be the ultimate coercive mechanism. Israel’s Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled since 1998 that the blanket exemption violates fundamental equality principles. In 2017, the court gave the government a year to develop an alternative, but the government was able to prevent changes through a series of legislative and regulatory workarounds.

The last exemption expired on April 1, and the Supreme Court, in the absence of a legal solution, ordered a freeze on funds for the yeshivas, rejecting Netanyahu’s pleas that he needed more time because of the war. Notably, the Attorney General broke with Netanyahu’s opinion and told the court that the government no longer had a legal basis to continue exempting the ultra-Orthodox from military service. (The military service rulings are one of the causes of the government’s unsuccessful efforts last year to undermine the court’s independence.)

I last wrote about this issue 12 years ago, during a trip to Israel, when another Netanyahu coalition was grappling with how to scale back the exemption. That never happened—but this time feels different, given the pressures of war and a new level of public anger. At the time, Yohanan Plesner was a member of Israel’s Knesset, heading a committee to rewrite the service regulations. Today he is president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “We thought this problem could grow and expand without being noticed, and we could ignore it,” Plesner told me before the latest ruling. “October 7 brought it to the center of the public debate, and it can no longer be ignored.”

So I asked Plesner: Does this mean that time is up? “‘Time is up’ only in movies, not in politics,” he replied, pointing to Netanyahu’s skill in overcoming years of delays on the issue. Still, he said, “time is not on the side of those who want to maintain the current state of exception.”

And that is a glimmer of hope in an otherwise dark time for Israel.