Ultraorthodox Israelis must serve in army, court rules

Israel’s supreme court has unanimously ruled that the military must conscript ultraorthodox religious students, in a decision that will test the unity of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition with far-right and religious parties.

The decades-old exemption of ultraorthodox men who attend religious schools from compulsory military service has long been one of the most divisive issues in Israeli politics and has become even more contentious as Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza stretches into its ninth month.

It is a particularly fraught issue for Netanyahu’s government because the five-party coalition contains two ultraorthodox parties determined to preserve the arrangement, and others, including defence minister Yoav Gallant, who are intent on abolishing it.

In a closely watched ruling on Tuesday, the supreme court ruled that because there was no legal basis for exempting religious students from the draft, the military must begin conscripting them. It also ruled state subsidies for religious schools whose students do not perform military service should remain suspended.

“This is a very significant ruling . . . The [Israeli military] was never instructed so clearly by the court to recruit the ultraorthodox. It’s an entirely new situation,” said Yohanan Plesner, head of the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think-tank.

“It creates an open wound within the coalition . . . and therefore it’s a destabilising factor. But, at the same time, there is no direct mechanism that leads from that to early elections.”

Opposition politicians hailed the ruling, while Eliad Shraga, head of the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, which has long campaigned against the exemption, said it put an end to “76 years of unlawful inequality and discrimination”.

“We will no longer agree to the absurd situation where there are those who give to the state, contribute and even risk their lives, and there are those who do nothing,” he said.

Ultraorthodox leaders reacted with anger. Yitzhak Goldknopf, head of the United Torah Judaism party, one of the two Haredi parties in Netanyahu’s coalition, said the ruling was “very unfortunate and disappointing”.

Aryeh Deri, leader of Shas, the other Haredi party in the coalition, said studying the Torah was “our secret weapon against all enemies, as promised by the creator of the world”.

“The Jewish people survived persecutions, pogroms and wars only thanks to maintaining their uniqueness — the Torah and the commandments,” he said. “There is no power to cut off the people of Israel from studying the Torah, and anyone who has tried this in the past has failed miserably.”

The exemption for religious students stems from a compromise between Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, and the ultraorthodox community in 1948. This exempted 400 young Haredi men from military service if they enrolled in a yeshiva, or religious school, instead.

But even before the outbreak of the latest war with Hamas, the arrangement — and the state subsidies for yeshiva students — had become a source of deep frustration for the rest of Jewish Israeli society, as the number of ultraorthodox exempted had soared to more than 60,000, partly because of the rapid growth of the Haredi population.

Israel’s top court ruled in 2017 that the exemption was unconstitutional, and since then, successive governments have tried and failed to pass new legislation on ultraorthodox conscription.

In an effort to break the deadlock, in recent weeks Netanyahu has been attempting to revive a bill from 2022 that would incrementally increase the number of ultraorthodox who serve in the army. However, critics say it is already out of date as it was conceived before the war with Hamas.

Netanyahu’s Likud party said that in light of these efforts, the supreme court’s decision was “strange”, and that the solution to the stand-off was to pass the bill that the government is currently advancing.

Plesner said that if the coalition were able to agree on a bill to give a legal basis to the exemption of ultraorthodox students from military service, it would be able to “resolve the crisis”.

But he said this would be “very difficult” given “the current security circumstances and the nature of the gaps” between the ultraorthodox leadership and the rest of the coalition.