Well, this is going to piss off a whole lot of people:
Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that the military must begin drafting ultra-Orthodox Jewish men.... In a unanimous decision, nine judges held that there was no legal basis for the longstanding military exemption given to many ultra-Orthodox religious students. Given the absence of a law distinguishing between seminarians and other men of draft age, the court ruled, the country’s compulsory service laws must similarly apply to the ultra-Orthodox minority.
Honestly, my only question is how this exemption managed to stay in place so long. Or, maybe more accurately, how it managed to survive so long on a purely handshake basis without ever being codified into law.
In any case, after 70-some years it's finally been called out and now Benjamin Netanyahu has to get parliament to change the law. With every other Israeli running the risk of fighting and dying in the Gaza war, that's not an easy ask. But his shaky government depends on extremist conservative support, so he has no choice. Stay tuned.
"Honestly, my only question is how this exemption managed to stay in place so long." According to the CNN story, the supreme court first ruled it was illegal in 1989. It has repeatedly reissued that ruling in the 35 years since that ruling including today. and yet, still not one ultra-orthodox has been drafted. This will not change as a result of today's ruling. The ultra orthodox insist on the right to steal west bank land and provoke the west bank Palestinians while requiring the rest of the nation to defend their utterly useless beings. (It's not just the military where they won't serve, it's having any job as well. The ultimate in parasites. They do expect their women to work like dogs.)
"This will not change as a result of today's ruling."
Your prophecy is noted.
I wouldn't even call that a prophecy. It's more of an observation of historical precedent.
Okay, so this was actually not "news". Thanks for the historical refresher! It sounds like the every five years or so announcement in Albuquerque media about how the local Air Force Weapons Lab (AFWL, pronounced "AWFUL:) is "working on an airborne laser weapon". I first heard that one when I moved into town in the 1970s, and it just keeps coming up every several years.
No flying death rays yet...
And have as many babies as possible.
I think there's also something in the government structure that gives the Ultras some substantial extra say in things. I'm sure someone here knows the facts on that.
As a theorcracy, marriage and many social issues are governed by the torah as interpreted by orthodox and ultra orthodox rabbis.
To paraphrase Bibi's friend Donald:
"When you're ultra-Orthodox, they let you do it."
Israel without the ultra-Orthodox would be a far more likable country and do far fewer objectionable things.
The ultra Orthodox and the right wing settlers are two different groups of people, though I dislike both. The settlers are religiously conservative, but do not follow same restrictions on daily behavior that the Haredi do. The right wing nationalists are drafted, and they strongly oppose the exemption. Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich both objected.
"The ultra Orthodox and the right wing settlers are two different groups of people, though I dislike both." From wikipedia. " The ultra-Orthodox have dominated the process from the beginning: from 2003 to 2007 alone the population of Beitar Illit, whose construction was facilitated by the expropriation of 1,500 dunams of Naḥḥālīn farmland,[147] rose 40%, while Modi'in Illit, built on the Palestinian village lands of Ni'lin, Kharbata, Saffa, Bil'in and Dir Qadis,[148][149] increased by 55%.[150]"
I should probably have been more specific, but your citation mostly confirms my point. About 30% of all Jews living in the West Bank are Haredi, about 125,000 of them. 80% of them live either in Beitar Illit or Modiin Illit. Both are large settlement blocs just across the Green Line. These Haredi don't consider themselves to be settlers. They aren't in the West Bank for ideological reasons, just the cheap housing.
Very few of them are among the set of settlers who conduct terrorism against Palestinians, and those are on the fringes of the ultra Orthodox community. Many Haredi don't consider them to be Haredi at all.
So, the Haredi and and the violent Religious Zionists are pretty much separate groups.
Not necessarily a great idea. Do you really want those lunatics moving up the ranks of the military?
LOL! From what I've read, they are intellectually unmoored from modern reality. I fail to see how a detailed knowledge of Torah will allow them to ascend the ranks of the military.
Mmmm, maybe the military considers them unfit for service, which is why this policy has persisted for so long.
That's actually a good point. No doubt many military brass have been saying "no thank you please" for decades. Hope the legal decision sticks this time though.
I live in Brooklyn, which may affect my opinion on this.
If everyone else has to serve, the Ultras can serve too, in other ways if necessary to keep their crazy asses off the triggers. It's hard to imagine what damage they could do if they were assigned to clean latrines or scoop food onto trays in cafeterias, for example, so that active duty troops don't have to do it and the IDF doesn't have to pay contractors to do it either.
From what I've read, it's not that the military think the ultra-Orthodox are a vast pool of new recruits, but that the actual recruitment pool is getting pissed off enough about this to start dodging enlistment.
Every army needs cannon fodder. They're perfect for that.
Only takes one, and that's all the inspiration they'll need.
But, you're right, they are, mostly, so pampered real discipline may be beyond them.
I am the very model of a new IDF general,
I’ve knowledge Talmudic, Hasidic and rabbinical …
The drafted seldom move up the ranks.
Alvy Singer: 'I was 4-P. In the event of war, I'm a hostage’.
That should work in so many ways.
i've thought similarly about draft dodger donnie and his bone spurs. there are few people less disciplined, less adaptive, less self-centered, less cowardly than trump. i wonder what the military would have done with him. putting him in combat, assuming he could have made it through training, probably would have cost american lives.
Latrine duty on an Aleutian Island.
It should have read more self-centered, more cowardly
since conscription is socialism republicans will surely insist on ending support for israel
What a sweet gig. Sure, sign me up with the ultra-Orthodox who don't have to fight when they throw their support to Netanyahu and he engineers another war for the not-so-Orthodox Jews to fight.
Israel is 13% chicken-hawks.
Burn!
"Israel is 13% chicken-hawks."
In a discussion of young women being required to register for the draft in the US and Republican outrage:
Of course Republicans don't want to make an 18 year old do anything with her body that she doesn't want to do.
Another good point. But in the case of a modern draft in the US it's pretty obvious that women would necessarily be included.
+10
It is incredibly difficult to make religious welfare queens take some self-responsibility. Young men lounge around all day amusing themselves with their hobbies, eating off the plates of honest workers, being defended by people living in the real world while whining all the time.
They need to learn some self-respect.
They seem to be pretty good at arming themselves and organizing against the people already living in the West Bank and driving them out though.
Different groups. those in the West Bank outposts are overwhelmingly from the Religious Zionism movement, which is distinct from the Haredi. While conservative theologically, the Religious Zionists do not follow the same rules of daily life that the Haredi do, trying to isolate themselves from the rest of society.
The Religious Zionists get drafted and serve in the army. And their representatives in the Knesset, including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, are deeply opposed to the Haredi exemption from the draft. They may make it impossible to pass the exemption bill Netanyahu is trying to push through.
Actually, a very large number of the settlements are haredi. Funded by the religioius zionism movement.
No. I laid this out in more detail above, but the Haredi actually don't inhabit a lot of settlements. They overwhelmingly live in two large settlement blocs just outside the Green Line, rather than in the outpost settlements that produce most of the violence.
Israel is like Britain-- it has no written constitution. That means a Knesset majority theoretically has almost plenary powers, including ignoring, over-riding, or restructuring the supreme court at will, as Netanyahu tried to do before October 7.
But majorities are constantly getting harder to pull together. Unlike in, say, Germany, political parties don't have to reach a threshold percent of the vote in order to get seats. That encourages splinter parties and gives small ones enormous influence. Especially the religious ones, which have very specific demands and have been forcing sweetheart deals like this on the rest of the country for decades. And they're not about to give up that kind of leverage without a fight to the death (as long as they don't have to do it in uniform!).
The Israeli system sets up a different mechanism than ours but it gets to a similar result, way disproportional power for a minority. And both systems keep driving their countries deeper into crisis.
"But majorities are constantly getting harder to pull together. Unlike in, say, Germany, political parties don't have to reach a threshold percent of the vote in order to get seats."
This can't logically be true. I'm not an expert on Israel's electoral system, but all electoral systems have some kind of threshold for gaining power. At a bare minimum, the Knesset appears to have 120 seats, so the threshold presumably is 1/120th of the vote for a political party to be seated. Like if there were 121 political parties in Israel, at least 1 would fail to gain a seat, no? The "musical chairs" of political theory would suggest then that 0.833% (=1/120) is the implicit threshold, absent any other statutory minimum (like they have in Germany and most other proportional legislatures).
This is interesting. It turns out I had old information-- for a long time there was at 1% threshold, effectively the arithmetical minimum you calculated and what I remembered. It's been going up, but slowly. Between 1991 and 2014 it was at or under 2% and since 2014 has been 3.25%, which would give the smallest parties about 4 seats.
That doesn't seem to have made things any more stable than before, though. According to Wikipedia, 40 parties registered for the last election in 2022 and 10 of them now have seats-- from 4 seats up to 32. In the previous election there were 8 electoral groupings that crossed the threshold, but 13 factions in the assembly because of electoral alliances specifically aimed at reaching the threshold.
In effect, it looks like there are ways around the threshold so it isn't really a threshold, and pulling together a majority hasn't gotten any easier. The electoral system seems to feed fragmentation in spite of thresholds.
Pretty much any self-respecting politician in Israel has to head a political party. Reminds me of a comedian I heard making fun of ‘secessionist’ movements in the Hamptons, saying that rich people there were ‘promising their kids a Hampton of their very own!’
"At a bare minimum, the Knesset appears to have 120 seats, so the threshold presumably is 1/120th " It's actually 1 in 239. All you need is 0.417% and that rounds up to a seat.
Israel has so-called Basic Laws, which are very much written and function as a sort of constitution. Some, not all, can only be amended with a supermajority. Most of all, though, they were expressly not designed as stand-alone laws but as guidelines for, and bulwarks against, ordinary laws.
I think the IDF does not want the Ultra Ultras serving.
The UU's don't think Israel should exist.
They think only the Messiah can found the state.
Use the Ultras to do shit the IDF doesn't want its trusted soldiers to do and doesn't want to pay contractors to do: give the Ultras a mop and make them clean latrines, for example.
Only a small set of the Haredi are anti-Zionist.
Mostly because the zionists fund the west bank haredi settlements.
They are a small set. Used to be more, before 1948. Since then, it's been a harder position to take. Most of those who are anti-Zionist don't live in Israel, and see its existence as an affront. Another example of horseshoe politics?
There are a number of ultra orthodox young people who have volunteered to fight:
“Historically, few ultra-Orthodox Jews have served in the Israeli army, a fact that has sparked resentment and contributed to recent anti-government protests. But in the two weeks since the Hamas attack on civilians in southern Israel, more than 2,000 young men from this religious community have volunteered to serve.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/thousands-of-ultra-orthodox-jews-volunteer-for-israeli-military
My assumption is that there are likely many more who are willing to serve. There must be a lot of family pressure that has to be overcome to do that. I’ve read that in this country groups like the Amish were allowed to serve their country by performing non-military tasks. I don’t know what happens with the ultra orthodox in Israel but it appears that they consider studying the Torah to be that service. That sounds absurd to me but since I’m an atheist all that stuff seems pretty strange to me.
Revealed: Since October 7 the IDF Rejected 3,120 out of 4,000 Haredim Asking to Enlist
According to the IDF Personnel Directorate, of the 4,000 Haredi applicants since October 7, 2023, the army rejected no less than 3,120 for a wide variety of reasons, the main one being “medical unfitness.” Even out of the 880 who were found to be eligible, only 540 were recruited.
https://www.jewishpress.com/news/jewish-news/haredim-news/revealed-since-october-7-the-idf-rejected-3120-out-of-4000-haredim-asking-to-enlist/2024/06/06/
What makes that many of them medically unfit, brain damage from tripping over their own beards?
"Update: Discussions on social media are claiming that the Knesset report’s language is inaccurate and incomplete, and the Haredi applicants who were rejected were not 18-year-old conscripts, but rather Haredi applicants ages 26 and up who were applying for shortened service (Shlav Bet) and then to join the reserves after 2 weeks of training."
So 50 year olds trying to extend their period of complete uselessness at government expense.
I heard on a Israeli focused podcast exactly what you stated. Many want to volunteer but are afraid of being ostracized by their community
I thought Bibi had the court rigged to do his bidding. What happened?
Now the Ultras need a favor from Bibi, so they are motivated to support him politically. I'm not sure the court is that much in Bibi's pocket, but I doubt he is upset about this ruling (though he will certainly pretend to be upset about it in public).
The takeover of the judicial system is still in the development stages. Parts of it were passed last July, but the Supreme Court ruled that they couldn't strip the Supreme Court of its powers.
For much of Israel's history the Orthodox were relatively small in number and apolitical. They just wanted their schools to be funded and their members to be exempt from contributing to society (except of course by studying the Torah, which they saw as the greatest contribution to society). This served an oddly positive role in their democracy since the Arab parties were considered illegitimate having the Orthodox parties willing to support who ever otherwise got the most votes meant that the government could be formed by whichever party otherwise had the most Jewish support.
The idea of the Orthodox being exempt from military service sprung up under these conditions. But since then the Orthodox have grown, making them more of a drag on the state. They have gotten more political as they favor control of the West Bank without any modernist constraints about rights of the people who live there. And the biggest population influx has been immigrants from Russia who are ethnically Jewish but not at all religious. And they have prioritized the end of special favors to the Orthodox. Additionally the center and left, such as it is, no longer have any reason to humor the Orthodox since they won't get their support anyway.
It should be noted that the Orthodox here refers to only a subset of the Jews who consider themselves orthodox. The Modern orthodox, for example, I believe have accepted all of the responsibilities of citizenship. We are really talking about a subset of the orthodox in Israel.
Also, my understanding is that originally the exception only covered the top students/scholars but eventually morphed into all.
More meat for the grinder...
And what constitutes an Ultra Orthodox? Assume it's the Haredim).
Asking, as many seem to equate them with Zionist or West Back settlers. The reality is many Ultra Orthodox Jews are anti/non-Zionist and some even against the idea of an Israeli state.
I don't know enough to give a good answer. I just know that there are complicated factions and shadings of opinion among various Orthodox groups about Zionism that range from the state of Israel being the fulfillment of prophecy to the state of Israel being a usurpation and defiance of God's will (there were Orthodox scholars living in Palestine who went into mourning when statehood was proclaimed). I think Lon Becker upthread gives good background on the political influence issue.
Most of the Haredi are now Zionists. Only a small faction reject the creation of Israel.
The ultra Orthodox are distinguished other Orthodox Jews in two ways. The first is that they follow a very strict reading of Jewish religious law, moreso than even other conservative Orthodox Jews. And, flowing out of the first, the second is that they do everything possible to cut themselves off from secular society. They run their own schools, with curricula that do not teach "secular" subjects, including most math. They largely don't participate in the larger economy, surviving through government subsidies and making their women get a job so that the men can spend all of their time in Torah study.
In one of my past reads, one of Bibi’s sons is aTorah ‘scholar’ possibly an ultra orthodox. Maybe this is a revenge move against Bibi…
On How to be a Chicken Hawk, by Israel's Orthodox Jews
What's the expression, "skin in the game"?
Much like "Never get involved in a land war in Asia.", countries should never pander to religious fundamentalists.
"Honestly, my only question is how this exemption managed to stay in place so long. "
Because when David ben Gurion created it, there were hardly any ultraorthodox in Israel so it was an easy way to score points.
But mostly because it's impossible to form a Knesset majority without either the Haredi parties, or the Arab parties. The latter is considered unthinkable by Jewish Israelis. There have been exactly two Muslims that have ever been a full minister (as opposed to the mostly powerless position of Minister without Portfolio) in an Israeli government, and neither lasted more than 18 months in the position.
So, the ultra Orthodox are necessary to a governing coalition. Their parties really have only two priorities: the draft exemption, and subsidies for the yeshivas. If you don't agree to both, you don't get to be a part of a majority coalition.
And not only did the High Court kill the draft exemption BUT it also killed the welfare payments to the same men. So in the army AND get a real job.