Israel cannot win the war by constitutionalizing inequality

The proposed “Basic Law: Torah Study” is not merely an internal Israeli dispute. It strikes at the core of democratic legitimacy, military endurance, and the strategic credibility of a state that is a key partner of Greece, Cyprus, and the West in the Eastern Mediterranean.

A vote that transcends the coalition bazaar

The Knesset’s preliminary approval, on June 10, 2026, of the bill for “Basic Law: Torah Study” is not just another episode in Israel’s perpetual political bazaar. The text, which passed by 56 votes to 43, as reported by The Jerusalem Post, seeks to recognize Torah study as a “fundamental value” of the heritage of the Jewish people, and to deem those who dedicate themselves to it long-term as performing “significant service to the state and the Jewish people.” The clause that explicitly equated the rights of yeshiva students with those who serve in the army was, it is true, stripped out at the last moment, after pushback from within the governing coalition itself; the substance, however, remained. In other words, the bill attempts not simply to protect a religious good, but to reshape, at a quasi-constitutional level, the very concept of obligation to the state.

That is the real stake here. The question is not whether religious study has value; it plainly does, both for the collective memory of Judaism and for Israel’s identity. The question is whether a state that finds itself, as Israel’s own institutions concede, in the third year of an exceptionally demanding war can transform a sectoral exemption into a constitutional principle at the very moment the army is urgently calling for more people and the reservist class is being exhausted.

From “Torato Omanuto” to constitutional immunity

The history of the Haredi exemption from military service is an old one. It is rooted in David Ben-Gurion’s decision, in 1948, to allow a small number of students to devote themselves fully to religious study, in order to rebuild a world that the Holocaust had destroyed. The problem is that an exemption which once covered a few hundred people has been transformed, over the decades, into a structural arrangement for a community that in 2025 numbered some 1.45 million people — 14.3 percent of Israel’s total population — and is projected to reach 16 percent by 2030.

Israel’s judiciary has repeatedly held that this state of affairs violates the principle of equality. The Supreme Court has returned to the question time and again, and in its unanimous ruling of June 25, 2024, it held that, since the relevant legal framework had already expired in June 2023, there was no longer any lawful basis for the blanket exemption of yeshiva students from service. At the same time, it barred the continuation of state funding to institutions whose students were evading the draft.

This is precisely why the current legislation is qualitatively different. It does not merely seek to delay implementation of the ruling or to soften it administratively. It seeks to circumvent it constitutionally, through a Basic Law. And because Israel’s Basic Laws function as chapters of an unwritten constitution-in-the-making and carry quasi-constitutional weight, transferring such an arrangement to that level is not a legal technicality but an institutional operation on a grand scale. The Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) has warned that the move uses the form of a Basic Law to shield a sectoral political choice from judicial review, eroding both the standing of the constitutional structure itself and the principle of equality.

When inequality undermines security

Whoever treats this as a mere culture war between the religious and the secular dangerously underestimates the problem. The problem is a matter of state, and of strategy. The IDI itself notes that the Israeli army has an immediate and urgent need for 12,000 additional soldiers, while the pool of non-Haredi Jews who serve is already very close to its limits. The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), from its own vantage point, has warned that extending mandatory service and increasing the reserve burden, without a meaningful increase in Haredi enlistment, erodes the “people’s army” model and corrodes the motivation to serve.

The enforcement data are just as revealing. A year after the Supreme Court’s ruling, roughly 19,000 draft summonses had been issued; only 996 people reported to induction centers, and a mere 232 were actually conscripted. The same IDI analysis underscores that from the summer of 2026 onward, the army will theoretically be able to absorb the entire annual cohort of Haredi men — about 14,500 young men. The argument that this is purely an operational problem therefore no longer holds. The gap is, above all, political, social, and institutional.

That is why the Supreme Court’s decision of April 26, 2026 — issued in proceedings over the government’s failure to comply with the original ruling of November 2025 — to impose specific economic and administrative sanctions mattered so much. The judiciary shifted the weight from general sanctions to personal measures: housing, daycare and after-school subsidies, discounts on municipal taxes and public transportation. Put simply, the message was that draft evasion cannot coexist with the unimpeded receipt of state benefits.

Instead of consolidating a realistic architecture of obligations — military service or, where necessary, strictly defined national service — the political class is attempting to redefine the very concept of contribution to the state. That is not conservatism. It is the state’s abdication of the core of equal citizenship. And this is precisely why this is not a Left-Right confrontation. In IDI surveys, 85 percent of non-Haredi Jews supported sanctions and the denial of benefits for those who avoid the draft, while 68 percent of Israelis opposed an exemption law even if that meant the dissolution of the Knesset and new elections.

The mass demonstrations of June 1, 2026, when tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox protesters blocked roads and rail lines across the country, as the Associated Press reported, show that the conflict has outgrown the bounds of a parliamentary dispute. This is a confrontation over the very relationship between communal autonomy and state sovereignty. When one part of society perceives national service as an existential threat and another as the self-evident foundation of shared life, the problem is no longer just conscription. It is the common political language of the state.

The view from Israel’s allies and enemies

For Israel’s allies, the question raised by this Basic Law is reliability. Greece and Cyprus, to take the partnership I know best, do not have a circumstantial relationship with Israel; they have an upgraded strategic axis encompassing defense, maritime security, energy interconnection, and the protection of critical infrastructure. The joint declaration of the 10th Trilateral Summit, held in Jerusalem in December 2025, reaffirmed all of it — security and defense cooperation, natural gas, electricity interconnections, the Great Sea Interconnector, regional connectivity within the framework of IMEC — and Reuters reported that the three countries planned intensified joint air and naval exercises for 2026, including the transfer of Israeli know-how for confronting both symmetrical and asymmetrical threats. Every one of those commitments presumes a partner that can sustain its own burdens. An Israel that is militarily overextended and institutionally frayed does not cease to be an ally; it becomes a more difficult one — less predictable, and more vulnerable to its own internal contradictions.

For Israel’s enemies, internal division is not an observation. It is a doctrine. When Hassan Nasrallah stood in Bint Jbeil in May 2000 and declared Israel “weaker than a spider’s web,” he was not boasting about Hezbollah’s arsenal; he was wagering that Israeli society would fray faster than its army could win. He returned to precisely that theme in February 2023, at the height of the judicial-overhaul crisis — Israeli commentators called it “spider web speech 2.” And the internal Hamas correspondence uncovered after October 7 revealed that Yahya Sinwar built his strategy on exploiting what he called Israel’s internal weaknesses, counting on rift and collapse from within. Israel’s own security chiefs spent 2023 warning that domestic division was eroding deterrence and inviting exactly that calculation.

This is the strategic context in which the Torah Study bill must be read. A Basic Law that constitutionalizes an unequal sharing of the burden of defense, in the third year of a war, is not a domestic compromise that outsiders misunderstand. It is evidence — read in real time in Tehran, in Beirut, and in Gaza — for the spider-web thesis, and a question mark placed, in Washington, Athens, and Nicosia, over the cohesion on which every shared plan depends.

The message to Jerusalem

Here something must be said that is too often left unsaid by those who believe that friendship toward Israel demands silence. A serious pro-Israel stance is not tolerance of every internal aberration. It is the clear-eyed reminder that Israel’s strength was never built on technology, air superiority, or intelligence services alone. It was built on the conviction that, for all its countless differences, this remains a polity in which the burden of defense and survival is shared — as far as possible — collectively.

Israel does not need to humiliate the Haredi world in order to defend civic equality. It does, however, need a new social contract with real obligations, real sanctions, and real channels of integration. That may include adapted frameworks for military service, defined forms of civilian or internal-security service, and respect for religious particularities where operationally feasible — but not the constitutional equation of compulsory sacrifice with a voluntary communal choice.

At the end of the day, the story of this Basic Law says something far broader than the conscription dispute. It says whether Israel, under suffocating pressure, will choose to renew its democratic and civic foundations, or to institutionalize an unequal reality in order to serve a short-term coalition arithmetic. And for all of us in the Eastern Mediterranean who want a strong, democratic, and credible Israel as a partner, the answer is anything but indifferent. A state is not weakened only when it loses on the battlefield. It is weakened, too, when it turns the exception into the rule and the political bazaar into constitutional law.