A Draft for All, Equality for Some: The Limits of Israeli Democracy
One of the central promises advanced by Israel’s opposition parties is the enactment of a universal draft law. Against the backdrop of the sweeping military exemptions and extensive state benefits granted to the ultra-Orthodox community under successive Netanyahu governments, the proposal is often presented as a long-overdue step toward equality. After all, who could oppose equality?
Yet behind this appealing slogan lies an uncomfortable truth. A universal draft law does not necessarily create civic equality. At best, it equalizes obligations while leaving inequalities of citizenship untouched. Rather than dismantling Israel’s existing hierarchy, it risks legitimizing it.
Put differently, it seeks to increase the number of people who serve without increasing the number of people who are treated as equals.
In any democracy, equality begins not with obligations but with rights. Only a state that recognizes all of its citizens as equal can legitimately demand equal burdens from them. It is therefore worth paying close attention to the language used by Israel’s opposition leaders. They speak of “a draft for all” and of “sharing the burden”, yet they rarely speak about equal citizenship. This omission is hardly accidental. Since Israel’s founding, successive governments have avoided explicitly enshrining the principle of equality in a Basic Law with constitutional status. As long as equality itself remains absent from Israel’s constitutional framework, calls for “equal burden-sharing” deserve careful scrutiny.
The debate over military service is therefore not fundamentally about defense policy. It is a debate about citizenship. Before asking who must serve, one must ask who is recognized as an equal member of the political community. A state that demands equal sacrifice while maintaining unequal citizenship risks turning the language of equality into a justification for inequality.
The deeper problem is that Israel does not function as a society of equal citizens. Rather, it operates through a hierarchy of citizenship. At the top stand sectors of society that enjoy broad exemptions and privileges, most notably the ultra-Orthodox communities, which benefit from extensive public subsidies, broad communal autonomy, and sweeping exemptions from military service. In the middle stands the secular Jewish majority, which bears most of the country’s military and economic burdens and effectively finances the existing system. At the bottom stand various minority groups, among whom Arab citizens occupy the most disadvantaged position. For decades they have faced discriminatory policies ranging from unequal allocation of resources and infrastructure to systematic exclusion from centers of political power. More recently, many have come to feel that the state has retreated from its most basic obligation: guaranteeing their personal security and property rights.
The Netanyahu governments did not create this structure; they merely stripped away its disguise and sought to grant it constitutional legitimacy. The Nation-State Law and recent proposals to elevate Torah study to constitutional status are not deviations from the system but expressions of its underlying logic. They reflect a political vision in which some citizens are entitled to greater privileges, others are expected to bear the costs, and still others remain only partially accepted members of the political community.
This is why the opposition’s promises are so attractive – and why they are potentially misleading. The problem is not that they simply reproduce the current government’s policies. The problem is that they preserve the same underlying assumptions while presenting them in the language of fairness and reform.
The debate over ultra-Orthodox military service illustrates the point. Discussions typically begin with the assumption that the military must adapt itself to ultra-Orthodox demands: guarantees that religious observance will not be compromised, extensive gender separation, expanded religious supervision, and proposals to exempt a fixed percentage of each cohort as exceptional Torah scholars. Regardless of whether one supports these proposals, they rest on a broader assumption: that one sector of society is entitled to privileges, accommodations, and exemptions unavailable to others.
No comparable concern is expressed regarding secular Israelis. No one proposes protecting secular lifestyles from religious influence within military frameworks. No one suggests exemptions for exceptional academic, scientific, or cultural talent. A secular student who postpones military service in order to pursue higher education is still expected to return and fulfill that obligation in full.
Yet the most revealing contradiction concerns Arab citizens. How can a state that refuses to constitutionally guarantee equality demand military service from a population whose equality remains contested? How can a political system that often treats cooperation with Arab parties as illegitimate demand full civic loyalty from Arab citizens? And how can a society that struggles to regard Arab citizens as equal partners ask them to share equally in national obligations?
These questions are not new. In 1788, Emperor Joseph II demanded that the Jews of the Habsburg Empire serve in the imperial army. Many Jewish intellectuals viewed the proposal as a sign of impending emancipation. One young Jewish thinker, Saul Ascher, saw the matter differently. Drawing on the principles of the social contract, he argued that the emperor had no right to demand civic obligations from Jews while denying them equal civic rights. Ascher insisted that equality of duties could not precede equality of citizenship. In his view, the emperor’s demand arose not from a commitment to equality but from the practical needs of war.
More than two centuries later, the lesson appears to have been learned in reverse: Before speaking about a draft for all, one must speak about equality for all. Before speaking about equal burdens, one must secure equal citizenship. Before demanding military service from Arab citizens, the state must recognize them as full and equal partners in the political community.
The principle is simple: a state that refuses to guarantee equal rights cannot legitimately demand equal obligations. As long as Israel declines to constitutionally enshrine equality, and as long as full political partnership with minority communities remains controversial, a universal draft law should not be mistaken for a project of equality.
It does not transform the excluded into equals. It merely expands the circle of those expected to bear the burdens of a system that still does not regard them as equals.
For that reason, the slogan of “equal burden-sharing” should not be understood as a solution to Israel’s inequalities. It risks becoming something quite different: a new language for preserving an old hierarchy. A society cannot draft its way to equality. Equality must come first. Otherwise, universal obligations become little more than a mechanism for preserving unequal citizenship.
Equality is not the reward for fulfilling civic obligations. It is the precondition that makes those obligations legitimate.
