Ya’akov Cohen ignores the prospect of a new law that will force ultra-Orthodox youth like him to abandon full-time study of the Hebrew scriptures and serve in the Israeli army.
“I can promise you that none of us students will leave the seminary,” he said. “We will continue to do what our people have done for hundreds of years: study the Torah.”
Cohen is one of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews who study in seminaries – or “yeshivas.”“- exempted from compulsory military service. A provision that has become increasingly controversial in Israeli society now threatens to blow up Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
The exemption has long rankled secular Israelis, who all must serve nearly three years in the army followed by years of reserve service. But with the war in Gaza dragging on and with more than 250 soldiers killed in combat, that irritation has turned to anger and determination to change the status quo.
The issue has exacerbated political divisions. Secular parties insist that “Haredim,” or ultra-Orthodox Jews, share Israel’s military burden, while religious radicals have threatened civil disobedience and war against the state if they are forced to enlist.
“There will be a rebellion like never before,” said Rabbi Avraham Manks, a hardline Haredi leader. “They are throwing grenades into our neighborhoods, into our homes. And they are doing it in a country that is at war.”
Thursday saw a dramatic escalation in the standoff when Israel’s Supreme Court issued an interim order freezing state benefits to ultra-Orthodox students eligible for conscription, triggering a protest from the Haredi community. Leaders fear it is a harbinger of a full draft.
Secular groups were jubilant. Eliad Shraga, head of the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, which had petitioned the government for excluding Haredi people, called it a “solid and courageous response.”
“Sharing the burden equally is an existential necessity for Israel,” he said. “We will not allow them to discriminate in this way between different groups of people.”
The current system has been the subject of frequent legal challenges, one of which was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2017. But successive governments have delayed implementation in search of a compromise. The latest extension expires on Monday.
“If Netanyahu doesn’t find a solution in the next two days that protects yeshiva students and appeases the Haredim, the government will fall,” said Moshe Roth, a lawmaker from United Torah Judaism, one of the ultra-Orthodox groups. parties in Netanyahu’s coalition. “This is a defining question.”
The Prime Minister faces a delicate balancing act that will test his vaunted survival skills to the limit. If he were to revoke the exemption, Haredi parties could leave his government. But if he tries to preserve it, he risks losing the support of centrists like Benny Gantz, a former general and member of the war cabinet, who wants it abolished.
A collapse of the coalition could accelerate new elections that polls indicate Netanyahu would lose.
For weeks the prime minister has eluded a final decision, but Thursday’s order showed that judges were losing patience with his prevarications.
“They basically said: enough, we can’t joke anymore, we have to find a solution that satisfies us,” said Eliezer Hayun, a researcher at the school of social and political studies at Tel Aviv University and an expert on the Haredim.
Ya’akov Cohen, who studies at the Beit Matityahu yeshivah in Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox suburb of Tel Aviv, would be one of those affected by a change in the law. Speaking during a break between study sessions, he said secular people fail to recognize the unique contribution that Haredi scholars have made to society.
“We sacrifice our whole lives,” he said. People like him, she added, could earn well as doctors or lawyers, or in academia. Instead “they have eight children and earn very little”.
Dressed in the standard white shirt and black pants of a yeshivah student, Cohen denied that Haredim lack a sense of solidarity with other Israelis.
“We pray three times a day for the soldiers, we respect them, we rejoice in their successes and mourn their losses,” he said. Their prayers, she added, are helping the Israeli war effort. “The Haredim believe that the strength of the Torah is strong and great. It has enormous power.”
The exemption has its roots in an agreement that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founder, made with ultra-Orthodox leaders in the state’s early days, which allowed 400 yeshivah students to devote themselves to full-time Torah study . In exchange they agreed to support the Zionist project.
But Haredim now make up 13 percent of Israeli society. Many Haredi men receive a government stipend into adulthood, studying Torah rather than holding paid jobs. Critics say the deal is economically unsustainable, considering how quickly the ultra-Orthodox population is growing.
But Israel Cohen, a Haredi journalist and commentator, said Israelis have failed to understand how challenging the issue of the draft is for Haredi rabbis who are desperately trying to protect their young people from the temptations of secular society and preserve the way of life traditional of the community.
“Ben-Gurion wanted the army to be a melting pot that would create a ‘new Israeli,’ and the Haredim are afraid of that,” Cohen said. “They say the yeshivahs protect them from this.”
He fears that any decision to impose conscription will end up radicalizing more moderate and traditional elements of Haredi society who are open to compromise. “Do they really want a demonstration of a million people who refuse to serve?” she asked.
Hayun said a compromise is possible. The state could enroll those Haredi youth who are formally enrolled in yeshivahs but who do not actually attend classes. There is also the option of letting men serve in their own communities, such as in religious charities or Haredi hospitals.
But the stakes are high. “It’s very difficult for rabbis to show flexibility on this issue,” she said. «For them it is a religious question, not just a cultural one. If they harm religion, they will answer for it in the afterlife.”