If Israel isn’t headed to elections within the next week, the same issue that brought us to the brink will surely come back like a wave – in a week, a month, or at any point before the slated elections in 2026.
What’s been happening is that the same core domestic issue has been shoring up, threatening to break up nearly every coalition: religion and state. This time it is the extreme case of draft dodging by the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community.
If creativity isn’t utilized and care taken to tend to this core contradictory issue, elections will come back around with a vengeance, and what they represent – an unbridgeable gap in Israeli society – will grow unfettered.
Recordings obtained by Channel 13 and published on Wednesday placed the truth out plain for everyone to see: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that the dismissals of two major political and security players – former defense minister Yoav Gallant and former IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi – were done to remove them as “obstacles” for the desired blanket draft exemption.
Put aside, for a moment, the shock and disgust that exempting haredim from service for the sake of the coalition’s lifespan is at the top of the priority list. Even if this works, even if the coalition doesn’t fall apart this week or next, the core issue will not have been resolved. Rather, it will have been kicked down the line for future leadership to deal with.
This is both cowardly and abhorrent, serving only to hurt the majority of people involved and affected, while making it more comfortable for a select few at the top.
Haredim cannot continue to live hermetically
That haredim can’t continue to live hermetically while their community – ironically – has representation in the secular Israeli parliament has been glaringly true for years and even more so over the past two, with the Israel-Hamas War demanding more manpower.
Educational reforms and brave leadership must rise to pave the way for a better future for the next generations so that Israel doesn’t become a welfare state years down the line.
The deeper issue of the tension between religion and state, however, does not only manifest itself in the haredi draft issue; it splitters across the board. A smaller example is the holdup of an appointment for the head of the conversion office within the Prime Minister’s Office. This has meant that the technical signature needed for a conversion certificate has been impossible, holding up hundreds of such proclamations.
This is due both to the issues surrounding the appointment of a permanent Civil Service commissioner and to a stalemate within the coalition on the identity of the person in charge of the conversion office. It came down to a standoff between a man proposed by Religious Zionist Party chairman Bezalel Smotrich and someone from a different camp.
Religious influences bleeding into state functions hurt citizens when they do things like hold up appointments.
Speech writers and leaders love to say that Israel is harmonious in how it is both democratic and Jewish. But the truth is that some of the aspects of each must bow before the other.
Israel certainly isn’t a democracy in practice to the men and women who have had to fight in the army for more than a year and a half now. If haredim had been integrated into society and into the IDF sooner, it might have meant less strain on them. The military draft is a requirement by law.
Leadership must, at some point, deal with the question of Israel’s Jewish nature and democratic aspirations. Those questions haven’t even been properly asked in the political arena. Only the fires have been put out – and lately at the last minute.
Perhaps a silver lining of these times is that it brought these issues more into the limelight. With the coalition currently scrambling for survival, perhaps now is the time to ask the harder questions and begin to look for answers.
