My son just joined the army. Why doesn’t the government care?

My youngest son enlisted in the army this week.

This is the third time I’ve gone to the enlistment center (the bacum), and watched a son disappear on a bus behind the army gates. You’d think it would get easier. In fact, this time was the hardest of all.

Since October 7, I have come to understand clearly what the army means, how vital it is to Israel’s survival, and how goddam dangerous for the soldiers who fight in it. It’s not a rite of passage or some patriotic slogan, the army is a wall of young people standing between us and the people who want to kill us.

My two oldest boys, one of whom fought in Gaza, have lost friends and team mates since the war began. It’s been 17 months of loss, of funerals, shivas, and memorials. But this week, as my youngest son, with his pale, freshly shorn head, was signing away the next three years of his life to protect a nation he still believes in, a video went viral.

In the video, Israel’s Housing Minister Yitzchak Goldknopf is seen dancing and smiling, surrounded by young Haredi men — all of enlistment age — singing the words: “We will die and we will not enlist. We do not believe in the rule of the infidels, and we do not report to their [enlistment] offices.”

Housing Minister Yitzchak Goldknopf dances with other attendants at his nephew’s wedding, March 23, 2025. (Screenshot: X; used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)

I watched the footage in my suddenly silent home, the mess of packing for the army still around me. This was a government minister — a man who enjoys the protection of the very army he was mocking — swaying along to music that spits in the face of every sacrifice my son and our family are making.

Goldknopf later apologized and said he didn’t want to offend the bride and groom by walking off the dance floor. Apparently, offending the soldiers who defend him — and the parents who send them — was easier for him to live with.

It wasn’t just tone-deaf. It was a moment that for me summed up the moral collapse of this government.

Where is the accountability? In a functioning democracy, a minister who mocks a citizen army would be dismissed. But this is not that Israel anymore. In this fragmented and compromised Israel there are no consequences. It’s only about survival of the politically convenient.

Because this isn’t about one man. It’s about a government that has stopped even pretending to represent us all. A government that protects those who refuse to serve, while exploiting those who do.

The truth is ugly: the ultra-Orthodox do not serve in the army. They do not send their sons to the frontlines. And yet they demand, and receive, more and more from the state: vast budgets, expanded exemptions, and now – if we can’t somehow prevent it – full legal immunity from national service.

The rest of the Jewish population, however, must serve. They have no choice. In fact, if they don’t, they are likely to face jail. The stress and burden taken on by these young men and women is extreme.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has built his coalition around constant appeasement to anyone who threatens to leave. In exchange for political loyalty, and his own survival, he will give his ministers whatever they want.

We pay the price for this — with our tax shekels, our democratic institutions, and our children’s lives.

This same government has spent two years dismantling Israel’s judicial independence. It has passed laws to weaken the Supreme Court, to erode oversight, to neuter the institutions meant to guard our democracy.  Anyone who stands up for democracy is quickly brought down. Now it’s the turn of Shin Bet head Ronen Bar and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara.

We see it happening, and we fight it, we go out to protest. We’ve been protesting for so long. But we are also exhausted. Over the last year and a half, we have spent so much energy fighting Israel’s external enemies to keep this country safe, that we don’t have enough strength left to fight the most dangerous and frightening enemy of all — the one from within.

The government knows this. Why else do you think we are at war again? Partly it’s appeasement to the far right, and partly it’s just to keep us quiet.

While my son and hundreds more like him put on stiff uniforms, and nervously stuff everything they need in their brand new backpacks, Netanyahu’s coalition is not only drafting more laws to protect itself, but more battle plans that will send our soldiers into a spiral of danger and conflict while they and their communities stay safe at home.

As a mother, a mother of a new soldier, what am I supposed to do with all this?

I just handed over one of the dearest, most precious beings in my life to an army controlled by a government that does not care about him, or me, or anyone else but their own narrow interests.

I need to know they will keep him as safe as they possibly can. I need to know that they are working in the best interests of all the people of Israel, not just a few. I need to know that my beautiful boys are not just pawns that can be put in danger to keep a prime minister in charge and out of jail.

I feel betrayed. That is the bottom line.

I am the mother of a soldier and two reservists, and this government has betrayed us. And I am not alone in thinking this.

Where exactly do they think this will lead?