Israel’s Chief Sephardic Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef threatened this Saturday that if the Knesset passes a law requiring the ultra-Orthodox Jews to go to military service, they will all leave Israel.
This Saturday, Israel’s Chief Sephardic Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef said that he will command all the 66,000 ultra-Orthodox men to leave Israel for good in case the government forces them to serve in the Israeli military. According to a report by Channel 12 of Israel, Rabbi Yosef said “if they force us to join the army, we would all fly out of the country, buy tickets, and go,”
Blaming Israeli secularists in the government for the proposal, Rabbi Yosef added that the Israeli government “has to understand this, all those secularists, they don’t get it, it puts the state at stake. They have to understand that without the Torah, without kollels and yeshivas (Jewish colleges for Talmudic studies), the army would not be successful.”
An unjust exemption for a small religious group
Debates over whether the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel should, like any other Israeli, serve a time in the Israeli military is one of the hottest topics in Tel Aviv that has created a lot of tension among Israeli politicians in the Knesset.
To read between the lines, demands over putting an end to the exemption from military service that the ultra-Orthodox Jews have, for years, enjoyed have increased especially since the war between Israel and Hamas erupted back on October 7.
The pressure has been indeed so forceful that last month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his government would find a way to end exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jews from Israeli military service; “We will determine goals for conscripting ultra-Orthodox people to the IDF and national civil service,” Netanyahu said at a press conference, referring to the Israel Defense Forces that “we will also determine the ways to implement those goals.”
Israel should expect chaos inside!
Under current Israeli law, Ultra-Orthodox Jews are exempted from military service. The fraction also rejects Israel’s secular education system, preferring to send their children to religious schools (yeshivas). This exclusive privilege for the religious group has caused a lot of mass protests inside Israel in recent months.
What makes matters worse and will probably cause mass street protests inside Israel is that in the coming weeks, the Israeli government and Knesset will discuss two proposed military conscription laws at the same time. One law would extend the service of soldiers in compulsory duty and reservists in order to provide the IDF enough soldiers for routine security missions during the war, and in the tense period that will follow. The second law would allow the defense minister to continue the “work of Torah” arrangement under which 66,000 ultra-Orthodox men registered as yeshiva and kollel (married) students will be exempt from military service.
Since October 7, Israel has launched a massive war against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, killing more than 30,000 Palestinian men, women, and children. And now, after more than five months of fighting, reports indicate that Israel is badly in need of man power to be able to continue the war as it has not yet reached any of the declared goals in the war with Hamas.
But whether the Netanyahu government can finally take the ultra-Orthodox Jews out of their comfort zone and force them to serve in the Israeli military is still room for question and the more the debate grows, the more Israel is prone to internal havoc.
