Every citizen who sends their loved ones into the hell of the battlefield should understand one thing: put your children in the right societal uniform – white shirt, black pants – and they will have in their hands an instant, legal, institutionalized, fast-tracked exemption from military duty and from the call to arms. It’s that easy.
In a reckless legislative blitz, Knesset committees are now holding feverish and cynical hearings on two parallel bills. Under the guise of concern for the world of Torah, two bills are on the table: the Basic Law: Torah Study on the one side, and the Law of Exemption from Arrests on the other.
These are two heads of the same dragon, and that dragon threatens to devour the nation’s army. These two laws are designed to circumvent the conscription law, better named the evasion law, which already failed to clear the Knesset.
The Women Partnership in Service forum arose a few months after the start of this difficult war, out of the shock and the deep recognition of the urgent, existential need for a fundamental change to the current reality. Our 15 leaders – women from the very heart of Religious Zionism who represent a range of professions – are working tirelessly to enlist the haredi public.
We have come together due to a sense of civic duty and national emergency, determined to secure the country’s future. We see a screaming injustice: an entire sector, now roughly a quarter of everyone eligible for the draft, has exempted itself wholesale from the duty of defending the homeland. It does so through a cold, cynical, and supposedly sacred invocation of the Torah.
The non-conscription of these tens of thousands of young men is no longer a political question or a dispute between communities. It is a direct blow to the country’s national security that endangers our very existence here. We are determined to change this reckless reality.
We are all women from serving homes and serving families. We live with the constant reality of the crushing, inhuman burden that the war has laid on those who serve: the burden of reserve and regular duty that shows no sign of easing in the coming years and has every sign of getting worse.
And so, while our loved ones risk their lives at the front, we sit in the Knesset committee rooms and watch despairingly as a set of legislation gets written with a single purpose: to release haredi society, permanently, from any shared fate, and from any part in defending our home.
Scales of justice
The first bill is the constitutional anchor meant to enshrine this disgrace: the Basic Law: Torah Study. The bill seeks to establish “Torah study as a foundational constitutional value and to create scales of justice alongside the nation’s other Basic Laws.” But this law debases the Torah and those who study it. Its real purpose is to install Torah students as an aristocracy, legally superior to every other citizen of the state.
The remainder of the bill reveals the author’s intent: the return of the clause that grants haredim a blanket exemption from the draft under the definition of “Torah is his vocation” (torato umanuto). The moment this Basic Law is approved, and in the shadow of that “constitutional supremacy,” all the enormous budgets and benefits denied to the haredi public these past two years over its refusal to serve in the military, will be handed back.
Moreover, since Torah study now outweighs everything else on these new “scales of justice,” the door is open to rewarding those who evade the draft more richly than those who actually serve. To turn the Torah into a tool for dodging a civic duty is the greatest desecration of God’s name.
In parallel, a second mutation is under debate: the “Arrests Law,” or, more accurately named, the Total Exemption Law. Out of MK Boaz Bismuth’s original non-conscription framework, far-reaching safe-harbor clauses have been concocted that grant sweeping criminal immunity. Haredi politicians proclaim from every podium that their urgent mission is to stop the arrest of draft dodgers, now and forever.
The images of blocked highways and the anguished cries over those detained serve as instruments of pressure, yet the numbers are an embarrassment: against some 90,000 deserters, the number of draft dodgers who have actually been arrested this year ranges between a mere 16 and 46. Under the pretext that arrests “only drive young men further from enlistment,” the bill now advancing through the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee grants a full pardon not only going forward, but orders existing prosecutions halted and binding verdicts frozen.
This is the wholesale laundering of a lawbreaker, one that will begin as a temporary provision of three months, be extended to six months under cover of the elections, and harden into a permanent, entrenched arrangement that will shield even future draft-age youth who choose to flout the law. All of it comes while canceling the economic sanctions that had begun to take effect and the steps to increase the scope of enlistment. Instead, state funds will be channeled anew into the pockets of the haredim.
We have to ask: what, exactly, troubles the Religious Zionist Party about this moral disgrace? Not the grievous injury to equality. Not the collapse of the nation’s army. Not the reversal of the enlistment trend. And not the abandonment of the soldiers at the front.
Most of the party’s Knesset members have shown that they are loyal to a short-lived political pact with the haredi factions far more than to the covenant made with us at Sinai – a covenant that obligates mutual responsibility and coming to the aid of Israel against its enemies.
Most of them declare openly that they will vote for both bills, offering a feeble and threadbare excuse that they are acting “to protect the Zionist hesder yeshivas.” The claim is patently false, since separate, dedicated legislation already governs the status of the Zionist yeshivas. This is yet another instance in which the Religious Zionist Party turns its back and forsakes the serving, bleeding public as a whole, and on its own religious-national voters in particular.
Under these circumstances, retreating into silence, or casting an “abstention,” is not enough. In practice, both amount to actively supporting the passage of these discriminatory laws. To halt this moral ruin, one must courageously stand up and vote against the laws unequivocally. Anything else will constitute the final moral and ethical bankruptcy of those who take the name of Zionism and religion in vain.
The writer is a leader of Shutafot Lasherut.