The High Court of Israel ruled this Tuesday, unanimously of its nine judges, that the Government has the obligation to enlist ultra-Orthodox who study in yeshivot (religious seminaries) and are exempt from the mandatory military service that the rest of the country’s Jews complete. The decision has potential consequences for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, because his coalition depends on the support of two parties that represent this population group and categorically reject enlistment.
The judges mainly echo one piece of evidence: there is no “legal framework” for the general exemption, so the Executive lacks the power to order the Army not to call them up, which represents discriminatory treatment. The Supreme Court also confirms its temporary decision last March to force the State to stop transferring funds to those seminaries whose students should enroll.
The decision is not a surprise, but it is a blow to Netanyahu, who would be in the minority without the support of his two ultra-Orthodox partners: the Sephardic Shas and the Ashkenazi United Torah Judaism. They have been part of his coalition since 2022, along with the extreme right, and have been his allies for years.
In March, the prime minister announced that he had not been able to reach an agreement to renew the exemption and the Supreme Court entered the scene. Now, if he pushes for compliance with the court ruling, he will lose the ultra-Orthodox and will be forced to call early elections that a majority of Israelis demand and that he describes as a “gift to Hamas” in time of war. Already at the beginning of the month he lost the support of Benny Gantz due to differences over the course of the Gaza invasion. He was a minister from the opposition who joined the unity Executive created to manage the war for eight months and which has been dissolved because it no longer made sense.
The magistrates do not indicate how the decision should be carried out, nor how many ultra-Orthodox should be enlisted. It is estimated that the sentence affects between 55,000 and 67,000 people between 18 and 24 years old.
Already before the ruling, a representative of United Torah Judaism, Moshe Gafni, assured that the court has never ruled “in favor of the students of the yeshivot” because none of their judges “understand the value of Torah study [Pentatéuco] and the contribution they make to the people of Israel in each generation.” Already in 2002 there was a law to regulate the conditions for their enlistment and exemption, but the Supreme Court struck it down a decade later.
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Division
The exemption – an issue that divides the country socially and politically and has been the subject of a legal battle for more than a decade – has returned to the foreground with the massive mobilization (the largest of reservists in the history of Israel) on the occasion of the invasion of Loop. The court itself alludes to a “concrete and urgent” military need that requires establishing a legal framework for their enlistment and that did not exist when the founding father, the secular David Ben Gurion, agreed to the exemption ―when the country was created, in 1948― for just 40,000 people, 5% of the population.
Today, the ultra-Orthodox make up 13% of the nearly ten million Israelis and – with almost seven children on average – they will reach 32% in 2065 (according to projections by the Central Statistics Office). Their exemption from joining the ranks outrages, in a very emotional way, the most Jewish and secular Israel, which has been asking in demonstrations for years for what it calls “equality in the burden”: that they enlist (or do substitute social service). , pay taxes and have the right to the same public funds as them.
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