The Futility of Haredi Conscription

“Mankind .. makes a poorer performance of government than almost any other human activity. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? … Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role…” – Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly, 1984

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Much discussion and media attention has been devoted to the question of Haredi conscription and the lack of Haredi support for the shared military burden.

Israel finds itself in the difficult position of not having enough manpower to face the military challenges before it. Let us ignore for this discussion the fact that diplomacy alternatives could produce solutions that would not require such a heavy military burden. There currently are simply not enough ground forces, both in the regular and the reserve forces combined, to simultaneously fight ground wars on multiple fronts. As a result, public and government attention has focused on the tens of thousands of Haredi men who could be conscripted to serve in the IDF but have historically been exempt from doing so.

As a result of recent supreme court decisions, the IDF issued call-up orders for the first thousand Haredi men to report to the induction center (Bakum) for the first step in the conscription process. The Israeli conscription process starts with a series of physical and psychological tests designed to evaluate the potential recruit’s suitability, fitness, and fit for his or her future military service. The results of the tests are used to assign conscripted recruits to suitably different units and positions commensurate with their abilities.

The Haredi reaction to the call-up orders has been one of vociferous protest and outright refusal to report. This is an active refusal to cooperate, but there is also the option of a passive refusal to cooperate which is demonstrated by refusal to cooperate when being psychologically and physically examined.

Many if not most psychological and physical examinations require the active participation of the subject to produce accurate results and categorizations. If the examined subject refuses to participate, for example in a test for lung capacity where one has to blow into a machine as hard as possible, the subject can just blow softly, or in a hearing test, pretend one does not hear, or in a sight test, pretend one does not see small print, or in a psychological or intelligence assessment one simply gives false or nonsensical answers. In such a case, when the tested subject refuses to cooperate, no accurate or reliable results can be obtained.

How then, in the case of an uncooperative recruit, does one assign them for duty in the military? Even more so, when assigned for any duty the uncooperative recruit can simply opt to do a bad job or not do his job at all. Forced conscription of unwilling Haredi recruits is doomed to fail spectacularly as the only potential punishment for uncooperative recruits is jail time. It is obviously possible, but not practical to jail thousands of uncooperative Haredi recruits every year, and so the drive to forcefully conscript unwilling Haredi men is doomed to failure. One of the hidden secrets of the IDF is the large number of recruits who are either exempted or discharged early due to “unsuitability”. These are the recruits who display passive resistance to the recruitment process with minimal if any, cooperation. As a result, the IDF is forced to either not conscript or release such recruits from service who passively refuse to cooperate in the process.