Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/25/israels-supreme-court-orders-army-to-start-drafting-ultra-orthodox-men.html
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That opened a can of worms bigger than the Vehicle Assembly Building!
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I hope this spells the end of Bibi’s rotten coalition of religious fundies and ultra-nationalist terrorists and with it his position as PM. Right now he’s probably begging his partners to stick with him on the basis he’s already been trying to undermine the court in service of his own parasitic activities.
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This gif is getting a workout lately, and with reason:
Ultra-orthodox anything is generally bad news.
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Just FYI for those that are curious and don’t know the history:
Personally I’m very sympathetic and supportive of anyone who refuses to fight in the military on the basis of a sincere conscientious objection. But this specific religious exemption was never about that. Back in 1948 in the wake of the Holocaust there were only 400 or so Orthodox religious scholars in Israel, and protecting that group was seen as vital for the future of a Jewish state, so the exemption was created. It makes much less sense today, purely from a numbers standpoint.
Apparently the Israeli courts do allow for conscientious objectors to avoid serving if they’re total pacifists, but they don’t let them pick and choose which duties/orders they’ll comply with and which they won’t.
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It’s seems rather obvious so some of us that an absolutely necessary first step to backing away from the current daily murderous horror of Gaza is Netanyahu has to be removed from office. And this is simply because he is completely convinced that waging horrific distracting continuous war is his ticket from being convicted of bribery, fraud, and “breach of trust”. As long as Netanyahu is running things then things will be unimaginably hideous. So, “drafting of the ultra-orthodox” could help (besides being more equitable), but only if that’s on the path to getting rid of Netanyahu.
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Agreed. Though I would say there is no downside to drafting the ultra-orthodox. There may be a great upside (Bibi goes bye bye), but otherwise is, at worst, nothing.
It won’t make things worse (and maybe a little better because the ultra-right voting block will start to feel some of the direct consequences of their political voting).
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While I don’t think that there’s justification for exempting them from the draft, I admit that handing over military weaponry to religious fundamentalists who are sometimes less likely to see their adversaries as being worthy and deserving of human rights has not always worked out well.
Not that the current soldiers and military leadership have shown a lot of respect for human rights, mind you, but it can always get worse. 
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There’s a great article on this subject with lots of historical context in the New Yorker a while back:
Until 2002, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community (known in Hebrew as haredim—those who tremble before God) was largely exempt from military service so long as they could prove that they were enrolled in a school for Talmudic study. Ultra-Orthodox women were released entirely from service. The men would initially get a six-month postponement of service that they could then renew again and again, until they were past the enlistment age of twenty-nine. The reasoning behind the exemption was that just as Israel’s top athletes, musicians, and artists could be exempt from the military, so too could those who dedicate their lives to the study of the Scripture. The legal definition for this arrangement was: “Their Torah is their art.” (This argument, however, was mostly rhetorical; the exemption quota for artists, musicians, and athletes in Israel is minuscule.) But if the exemption was somehow justifiable in the nineteen-fifties, when it applied to only four hundred yeshiva members, last year it topped fifty thousand and accounted for thirteen per cent of the military-age population. Every ultra-Orthodox man who so wished, it seemed, could avoid serving the mandatory three years in the army.
A decade ago, Israel introduced something called the Tal Law, which was supposed to correct this lopsided burden. Under the new legislation, a haredi man who turns twenty-two is faced with a choice of either continuing his rabbinical studies or entering the workforce. If he chooses the former, he is exempt from service; if he chooses the latter, he can search for work, but, unlike under the previous law, he can do so only after enlisting in the army for a shortened period. This may have sounded like a reasonable compromise at the time, especially given the strong, disproportionate influence that haredi parties exert over the political process in Israel. The assumption was that a small minority would choose to pursue rabbinical study while the rest would choose to work, and therefore, inevitably, serve. Instead, what has ended up happening is that an overwhelming majority of ultra-Orthodox men who would otherwise have entered the job market decided to stay on in yeshivas in order to avoid conscription. Sixty per cent of ultra-Orthodox men are currently unemployed. The rest of the country is working and fighting; the ultra-Orthodox are reading the Torah and cashing government checks
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A question: Are any of the Ultra-Orthodox also members of highly-armed militia groups?
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Well said. A widespread complaint from the majority secular Israeli population is the Haredi have for a long time received government subsidies and exemptions (along with incentives to produce large families) while wielding outsized political influence in the Knesset in order to pass more extreme right wing policies. Netanyahu made a Faustian bargain with these groups in order maintain power but that’s starting to unravel.
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It is a shanda that Israel is doing the right thing in service of a much more serious wrong thing.
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They did constitute 30 percent of settlers.
But that was in 2017.
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Any? I think the answer is almost certainly yes. (And, to be fair, there are also a decent number of Ultra Orthodox who do voluntarily serve in the IDF.)
But I don’t know the answer as to how many are in those milita groups, or whether those groups are disproportionately weighted towards any specific demographics.
Anyway, regardless of who is doing it, these settler/militia group rampages are pretty damn awful:
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So… unconscientious objectors?
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I predict a sharp uptick in the number of cases of bone spurs.
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I am generally in favour of people who support a war being among the first to have to participate in that war. I just wish that people who did not support the war could not participate.
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I wonder if this means there will no longer be orthodox groups hassling and mocking the guards at Horse Guards in London anymore. That would be a plus.
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faustian implies ( to me at least ) he was tricked in some way.
but netanyahu faces multiple criminal charges of his own doing. not mention that before october 7 he was caught bolstering hamas to undermine any hope at peace, that he’s completely abandoned the israeli hostages, and that he has committed obvious war crimes… oh yeah, and was trying to change the constitution to give himself more power
he’s no innocent in any of this
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From what I’ve read, the Israeli government already hands out weapons to illegal settlers in the West Bank, and condones their predations upon Palestinian villages and farms.
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