What Happened to Our Dreams – Part III

In the last “What Happened to Our Dreams?” post I discussed the existential external security threat to Israel. In this post, I will discuss the internal existential threat posed by the undeclared civil war between the ultra-orthodox and secular sectors of Israeli society.

It is important for this discussion, to begin with, a recognition of the fact, painful though it may be, that Israel is ruled by a nationalist, religious government, which announced when formed, that only Jews have rights “in all of the Land of Israel,” which strives to annex the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, to dismantle national institutions and the independence of the judiciary, and to deepen “Jewish identity”. For “Jewish identity” we can only understand that to mean the further formalization and imposition of religious Jewish practices, behaviors, and norms in the public sphere.

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The state of Israel was established, and recognized, more than 76 years ago on May 14, 1948. At the time the state had a Jewish population of 649,600 souls. It is estimated that there were approximately 40,000 Haredi Jews or 6% of the population living in the new state. Haredi, literally translated as trembling [before god] is an umbrella term used to define Jewish adherents to the ultra-Orthodox practice of Judaism. A Haredi is a member of any of various ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects, characterized by strict adherence to the traditional form of Jewish law and rejection of modern secular culture, many of whom do not recognize the modern state of Israel as a spiritual authority.

Ben Gurion and the largely secular zionists who founded the state of Israel expected that the country would be a bastion of Jewish secularism and that the ultra-Orthodox would quietly be assimilated into the secular majority.

The vast majority of the immigrants coming into Israel after its founding, from 1948 to 1980 were not Haredi. By 1980 Haredim (ultra-orthodox Jews) made up 4% of the 3.9 million population or 156,000 souls. By 2023 there were 1.28 million Haredim in Israel, or 13.5% of the total population with Haredim constituting 25% of the total Jewish population under the age of 18. They are expected to constitute 16% of Israel’s population by 2030 and 50% of Israel’s Jewish population by 2059, only 35 years away. This is, of course, if they continue with the current norm of 7-8 childbirths for every Haredi mother.

On June 19, 1947, a status quo agreement between David Ben-Gurion, then the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, informally a government in waiting, and the religious parties in Israel was reached. This was reflected in a letter that stipulated that in the coming state, specific Jewish laws would be protected.  Shabbat will be observed; Kashrut, or Jewish dietary laws, will be kept; family laws, marriage, and divorce will remain under the jurisdiction of the rabbinical courts; and Orthodox Jews will have full autonomy to educate their own as they see fit, as will all Jews. Ben-Gurion also promised that the state would not infringe on the religious philosophy or the religious conscience of any part of the Jewish people.

In 1949, Israel’s fledgling parliament, the Knesset, passed the Defense Service Law, which established military conscription and required that all Israeli citizens be drafted into the Israel Defense Forces or participate in national service from age 18. While additional legislation in subsequent decades modified the length of mandatory service and other procedural aspects of the draft, the system itself has otherwise remained largely unchanged.

Arab citizens of Israel typically do not serve in the military or partake in national service. The exemption for Israel’s largest ethnic minority is not explicitly established through law but rather is implemented through army directives. These directives have not applied to the Druze and Circassian communities, who typically serve alongside their Jewish counterparts. The Defense Service Law does provide explicit exemptions for religious, pregnant, and married women. The army can differentiate between Jews and non-Jews as the state of Israel, through its population registry, maintains a list of exactly who is ethnically Jewish and who belongs to other ethnicities or religions. Attempts by individuals to be defined in the population registry as simply Israeli, rather than Jewish, have been rejected by the courts, while a small number have managed to change their ethnic/religious label from Jewish to unclassified, a label which was traditionally applied to Christian orthodox immigrants from the Soviet Union who are not halachically Jewish but did not declare a religion when arriving in Israel.

The exemption from military service enjoyed by Haredi men has its roots in the birth of the State of Israel. During Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion struck a deal with leaders of the Haredi community to exempt those whose full-time occupation was Torah study from mandatory military service.

This arrangement came to be known as torato omanuto (תורתו אומנותו), translating to “his Torah is his occupation,” and was implemented not through legislation, but rather through a Defense Ministry regulation. This mechanism allows Haredi men to “defer” their IDF service by studying in a yeshiva (orthodox Jewish seminary) from age 18 until they reach an established age at which the draft no longer applies. Legally, Haredim out of yeshiva were subject to the draft until age 40, although in practice they could leave yeshiva at age 30 and join the workforce without fear of conscription.

While a cap on the number of exemptions did exist it was ignored in practice and finally removed by Menachem Begin’s Likud government in 1977. As a result of all the above practices, today 69% of Jewish men and 59% of Jewish women are drafted. When one examines Israel’s total population, including non-Jews, then a minority, less than 50% of Israelis who reach the age of 18 are drafted and serve in the military.

Haredi Jews continue to maintain that the practice of large numbers of people continuing to study and recite the Torah is crucial to the defense of Israel from all threats. They compare it to an additional military unit whose role is to defend the people of Israel through prayer and Torah study. In practice, this provides a means for the Haredi community to shirk military service, insulate their young people from the temptations of a secular lifestyle, and receive financing from the public purse to enable their lifestyle. As a result, today approximately 65,000 Haredi men between the ages of 18 and 21 are not drafted.

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In contrast, religious Jewish Orthodox Israelis, who belong to the Religious Zionist community, are conscripted and serve. Many serve in the framework of the Hesder Yeshivah system which combines military service with Torah study.

This issue, of Haredi deferment from IDF conscription, came to a boil in the last year due to the demands of the current lengthy war for more manpower than the IDF had available to fight on multiple fronts. It has however been a thorn in the side of secular Israelis for many years due to the perception of an unjust burden, not equally shared, where the secular pay taxes and give three years of compulsory military service and more in the reserves, while the Haredim do not pay taxes, are subsidized by the public purse, and do not serve in the IDF.

Also at issue is the secular perception, justified by past occurrences, that the religious have control over the secular in many aspects of their private and public lives. This started when the religious, realizing the political power they had gained, brought down Yitzchak Rabin’s government in 1976 due to the ceremony held to celebrate the arrival of Israel’s first F-16 jets. The ceremony, attended by thousands of people, was due to take place on a Friday hours before the start of Shabbat. However, due to a delay in the arrival of the planes, the ceremony was delayed and ended, depending on who you ask, either shortly before or after the sabbath started. In any case, most of the audience at this official government event were forced to violate the Sabbath and travel home on Shabbat.

Since then governments have fallen due to religious issues, been forced to pass legislation favoring religious demands, or forced to take action by religious minorities in the governing coalition. Some examples are a struggle to force secular Jewish mothers to circumcise their newborn baby boys, legislation to ban hametz (leavened foods) from hospitals and other public institutions during Passover when Jews are forbidden to eat leaven, state funding for Haredi proselytizing, and the banning of women singers at public or IDF ceremonies. A US State Department report from 2011 found religious coercion dramatically escalating in Israel. Since then it has only accelerated. All the demands are justified, by the religious parties, as necessary to preserve the Jewish nature of the state of Israel. Lost in these demands is the fact that freedom of religion must include freedom from religion.

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Party-based education in primary and secondary schools was introduced into the Palestinian Jewish communities in the 1920s. It was seen as a means to transmit ideals and provide a general education for the next generation. They were created and administered by the differing political parties with each party striving to transmit its ideals. They differed mainly concerning religion and socialism. At the time of the creation of the state, there were four main educational streams: the General Stream, the Labour (socialist) Stream, the Mizrachi (national-religious) Stream, and the Agudat Israel (ultra-orthodox) Stream. In 1953 the State Education Law codified and regulated all the streams in a somewhat unified state education system, except the ultra-orthodox stream which today receives financing from, but remains separate from the state education system. In today’s Israeli state primary and secondary education system, the majority of state schools fall into one of three categories: Arab where the language of instruction is Arabic, Jewish secular/general, and Jewish national orthodox. The language of instruction in the Jewish schools is Hebrew. As an aside, Hebrew is the only official language of the state and Arabic has a “special” status.

The ultra-orthodox schools, currently containing 25% of Jewish Israelis under the age of 18 fall outside of the state-administered system and are a law unto themselves. The ultra-orthodox rabbis have banned the internet and do not allow their adherents access to the internet through the schools, banning computers connected to the internet from their homes, and even ensuring no access to the internet by banning smartphones, only allowing their members “kosher phones” which have no internet access. The schools emphasize religious and Torah studies and neglect the teaching of English, mathematics, and science-based courses. As a result, the school graduates are woefully under-equipped to earn a living in a modern technologically driven environment and are not prepared to enter the tertiary education system which requires minimal fluency in English. This has led to prevailing poverty in the ultra-Orthodox community with many full-time Torah scholars dependent on the state for financial stipends. The leaders of the community, the rabbis, continue to make public statements denigrating the need for mathematics, science, and English in education. In a 2021 public lecture the chief rabbi, Yitzchak Yosef, called the core curriculum subjects, maths, science, and English, “nonsense” and not necessary for an education. It would appear though, due to both internal and external pressures, some rabbis are considering augmenting religious studies with secular subjects under the right supervision.

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This is an unsustainable system, given the exponential growth of the Haredi community, which many demographic researchers have raised alarms about. While the secular community in Israel has continued to protest the inequity and discrimination, the secular proportion continues to shrink in relation to the religious community in general and particularly the ultra-orthodox community due to the wide differential in birth rates. According to a Pew Research report of 2016, 45% of Israeli Jews defined themselves as secular, while one-third of the secular believe in god and 18% do occasionally attend prayer services in the synagogue. All in all about 20% of Israeli Jews are atheists while 15% claim to observe no religious practices. 

The secular Israel we dreamed of and wanted to commit our lives to in the 70s has slowly become subsumed by a religious, orthodox community dominated by the ultra-orthodox. The rate at which the ultra-Orthodox have come to dominate and control Israeli society is only set to accelerate shortly as more young ultra-orthodox come of age and vote.

The impact of an Israel that becomes more religious and more right-wing is being felt already with the discussions and plans for migration by the secular elites. Israel’s economy and its high-tech miracle is driven by a small number of tens of thousands of secular leaders and innovators. It would take the departure of not more than 40-50,000 key leaders to effectively bring the startup nations’ technology leadership to an end. The rate of emigration increased in Israel before the current war for many reasons but against the backdrop of the proposed judicial reforms. Added to the growing religiosity of the state is the failure of the current government to keep its citizens safe on October 7, combined with the lack of a strategic long-term goal for the governance of Gaza, as well as the realization that current and future generations will have to live by the sword in a hostile violent region. All these factors together are increasing Israeli feelings of insecurity, fueling the desire to look elsewhere for a more secure future for them and their families in a progressive liberal state not controlled by the religious.

Herzl in his book Der Judenstat (The Jewish State) put forward a vision of a model society which was to adopt a liberal and egalitarian social model, resembling a modern welfare society. While Herzl was a nonpracticing secular Jew, did not speak Hebrew or Yiddish, nonetheless supported freedom of religion. He wrote the following in a letter dated 4 May 1896: “I know very well what gratitude Judaism owes to orthodoxy, because the latter, with its steadfastness, has contributed much to the preservation of Judaism. But allow me to hope that in our State when we achieve it, there will not be any falling out on matters of faith among us Jews. Everyone should serve God in his own way. Within himself, he should be as free as he wishes and as he is able to be.”

One would hesitate to think what Herzl’s reactions would be to the modern state of Israel dominated by Ultra-orthodox Jews.