NEWS SIDEBAR: Military Service Separate Ultra-Orthodox, Secular Israelis

c. 2000 Religion News Service JERUSALEM _ When Prime Minister Ehud Barak campaigned for election last year, his slogan “One People, One Draft,” captured the imagination of secular Israelis embittered by the two-tiered military system in which nearly 70,000 ultra-Orthodox young men receive annual deferments for yeshiva study. This week, however, Barak was forced to […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ When Prime Minister Ehud Barak campaigned for election last year, his slogan “One People, One Draft,” captured the imagination of secular Israelis embittered by the two-tiered military system in which nearly 70,000 ultra-Orthodox young men receive annual deferments for yeshiva study.

This week, however, Barak was forced to renege on his promise to draft ultra-Orthodox youngsters for a standard three-year tour of duty. Instead, he backed compromise legislation that would give young ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students the option of choosing an abbreviated four-month tour in the army and then join the work force.


“This is like telling the secular public that their blood is cheaper,” charged the secular Knesset member Tommy Lapid in the debate that preceded the vote Monday and in which the legislation won tentative approval.

“I want everyone to remember the banner that Ehud Barak carried before the voters,” said a gaunt Boaz Nul, of the Awakening movement, who staged a week-long hunger strike protesting the proposal opposite Barak’s office. “I want to ask if Barak has honored his commitment.”

Historically, ultra-Orthodox objections to military service are deep-rooted in the community’s ambivalent attitude towards the modern Zionist entity. God, not the army or the state, the rabbis often said, was the real defender of traditional Jewish society.

Even after Israel gradually won acceptance as a living reality, praying was viewed as even more important than fighting in ultra-Orthodox theology, particularly in the early days of the state when the community was small and struggling to recover from near-destruction in the Holocaust.

As a gesture to the rabbis and to tradition, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, granted about 400 ultra-Orthodox men exemptions from the near-universal obligation of army service so they could devote themselves to full-time yeshiva study.

A military exemption designed to preserve a scholarly elite, however, over time expanded into a system of wholesale draft evasion within an ultra-Orthodox community of hundreds of thousands of people. The exemption, however, also keeps them on the sidelines of mainstream Israel.

Young ultra-Orthodox men were routinely enrolled in the yeshiva, not so much because of the physical risk military service might entail but because of the moral risk of exposure to secular society, said Professor Menachem Friedman, an expert on the ultra-Orthodox world at Bar Ilan University.


“Look at any military film clip, beginning with `From Here to Eternity,’ and you can see that armies around the world are usually a concentrated expression of a culture’s mainstream secular life,” said Friedman. “In particular, Israel’s mixed army of men and women expresses a sexual moral ethic that is not accepted by ultra-Orthodox religious leaders.”

Separated from female society throughout childhood, and betrothed in late teens or early 20s in arranged matches, ultra-Orthodox youth still live by a sexual ethic far removed from most Israelis.

“The truth is that as a whole ultra-Orthodox society does resist the draft,” said Rabbi Shmuel Jakobovits, son of the former Chief Rabbi of England and a prominent ultra-Orthodox philosopher. “The secular elite wants to impose its value system, and as long as this root problem is not treated then the instinct of the society is to resist. If, on the other hand, the state would recognize ultra-Orthodox ideology as legitimate, then within a short time, I think we would find an arrangement whereby the ultra-Orthodox would also participate in the defense of the state.”

The legislation that won tentative approval last week falls far short of any such ideal. Still, it has gained grudging support in ultra-Orthodox circles because it would recruit men into the army in their mid-twenties, rather than at the age of 18, when secular Israeli men and women are usually called up for the draft.

“By 24, most haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men are married. They have already founded a home on the basis of intense Torah learning … and are sufficiently mature enough not to be intimidated into violating their religious beliefs in the army,” said ultra-Orthodox social critic Jonathan Rosenblum.

DEA END FLETCHER

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!