The Structural Barrier to Equal Burden-Sharing in Israel
If Israel is serious about both integrating the Haredi population and expanding the IDF’s manpower, the problem cannot be reduced to enlistment policy alone. It is fundamentally political.
As long as sectoral parties maintain a near-monopoly over their voters, the elites who lead them have strong incentives to preserve dependence, resist integration, and block reforms that would dilute their control. This is not unique to the Haredim, but part of a broader pattern in which identity-based parties (religious, ethnic, or cultural) prioritize the survival of their leadership structures over long-term societal integration, which would dilute their power. Breaking that monopoly and creating a political system in which Haredi voters are meaningfully courted by cross-sectoral parties competing on economic and national policy is therefore a prerequisite for any real change: both in sharing the burden of service and in integrating Haredim into Israeli society. And in order to achieve that we need to drop the requirement for Haredim to enlist at all.
Throughout history, elites have held power through their access and control of the levers of influence. From there they have used that power in order to legitimize their position. Sometimes they are fractured, sometimes cohesive. Sometimes they are elected, sometimes inherited. But they always, inevitably, work to maintain their power. Not because they are evil but because they are human.
Every argument, narrative, excuse, or speech needs to be read through that lens.
When that legitimizing discourse is successful, we believe that those elites best represent our interests. In democracies, we imagine that elites rise through merit. Which is what is often called the myth of meritocracy. In democracies we also believe that competing elites check each other in a healthy balance while representing different voices and interest groups. In non-democracies, elites often justify their rule through tradition, ideology, or divine right. But across systems, one fact holds true: elites in the long term do not have the same interests as the people on which they depend to maintain their power. Every elite’s goal is their own survival. So, the goal of a proper system is to maintain any given elite for just as long as the goals of itself and the people it represents are aligned.
For society at large, the best way in which such an elite maintains their survival is by depending on the largest number of people possible. In order to maintain said support, they have to funnel back benefits to their supporters. When the number of supporters necessary is low, we recognize that as graft. When the number of supporters is high, we call that welfare: mass transit, public works, and the like as bribing millions of people with a direct cash payment is much less efficient than doing so when the numbers are small. Simple math.
The Haredi Elite act as Neo-Feudal Lords
The Haredi leadership in Israel functions in many ways like a neo-feudal class. For the most part they do not produce economic goods, instead they collect economic rents not only from the state in the form of generous subsidies and exemptions, but also through control over their own community members and via external donations, primarily from abroad.
Their power rests on four core pillars:
1. Control over their community. Through tightly knit religious, educational, and social institutions, leadership exercises immense influence over daily life. Access to schools, matchmaking, housing, even blessings from rabbis, are tools of social discipline.
2. Financial dependence. Most Haredi men are discouraged from working or serving in the army and instead are incentivized to remain in religious institutions. The state subsidizes this lifestyle through yeshiva funding, child allowances, and housing support. Private donations from global Jewish philanthropists supplement this.
3. Political leverage. Haredi parties such as Shas and United Torah Judaism operate as disciplined voting blocs in Israel’s fractured parliamentary system. With high voter turnout and total rabbinic authority, they deliver reliable mandates to any government, making them kingmakers in coalition politics.
4. By monopolizing the rabbinate and its powers over the entirety of the Jewish population they have access to rents through the Kashrut system, essentially functioning like a non-tariff trade barrier.
This will not come as a surprise to anyone even casually interested in Israeli politics. What I want to say here today is that this elite will never willingly participate in its own undoing. Which means it will never agree to a law that forces Haredi men to enlist. It will resist this just as aristocrats of old resisted land reform. No Haredi leader will give up on their support base. Something that will inevitably happen if they integrate into Israeli society. It is not about enlistment, or gender mixed environments. It is about control and political power.
Past efforts to reform this dynamic (Tal Law, the Shaked Committee, the Plesner Committee) have all failed or been repealed. Even when the Israeli Supreme Court ruled mass exemptions unconstitutional, the government postponed implementation. Why? Because they cannot govern without the Haredim. The current government is no exception. It is stuck in a bind: public opinion demands fairness and equal burden-sharing, but without Haredi parties, the coalition collapses. And a government that can rule without Haredim will still have to deal with the ability of rabbis to mobilize protest. A head-on confrontation will not be an easy task.
Thus, what we can expect are cosmetic reforms. Legislation that appears to require enlistment, but offers group exemptions, delays, or symbolic service options. The only thing such “reforms” truly achieve is further entrenching dependence. For example, some proposed sanctions against draft evaders included denying passports, driver’s licenses, and even university access. These punishments don’t inspire integration; they merely increase dependence on internal communal structures. A young man without a license or passport turns inward, not outward. His only path forward is to remain in the fold.
If we view the Haredi leadership not as backward or irrational, but as a rational elite protecting its turf, their behaviour makes perfect sense. The problem is not simply one of culture or religion, but of power. And any legitimizing narrative (such as they are preserving a way of life, Torah study, etc) needs to be seen through that lens.
Real reform would see not just the enlistment of Haredi men but a gradual shift in which Haredim as a societal group start seeing other parties and other elites as representing their interests. The problem is not that Haredi parties represent the interests and values of their voters but that they have a near monopoly on representing those interests. It is the same problem with all sectoral (be it ethnic or religious) parties in Israel, whether Arab, Russian, or Haredi, that organize primarily around identity rather than broader policy platforms. A healthier political landscape would emerge when these sectors are no longer politically siloed but instead are courted by parties that cut across communities and compete on economic policy, governance, and shared national interests. When voters choose based on material priorities and policy outcomes rather than on sectoral affiliation alone, parties are forced to build broader coalitions, and above all become more accountable as voters gain a choice.
If our goal is the integration of Haredim into society and not the short-term goal of more bodies in the IDF we need to ask ourselves whether it is not preferable to let the Haredim officially gain total freedom from enlistment from the army. This move will remove the pressure that they feel to enlist and therefore the pressure to stay in a Yeshiva to gain exception status. It is not fair but in the long term will remove young Haredi voters from the influence of their party bosses, which will create the necessary conditions for integration of Haredim into wider society. Once a Haredi man votes not for his rabbi but for the party that best represents his interests, then we will be able to have a conversation about Haredi enlistment.
.עם בונה צבא וצבא בונה עם
Or in other words, we need to first integrate them politically in order to then integrate them into the army.