'The worst of both worlds'
A
scathing critique of the new Haredi draft law from both sides:
The result is a widespread consensus against
the law, with Haredim uniting with many advocates of a Haredi draft to
argue that the law effectively offers the worst of both worlds.
Haredi
yeshiva students are given full exemptions from military service for
several years, then in 2017 will suddenly be told that the demands of
their religious studies and lifestyle are criminal offenses.
The Times of Israel tried to obtain a response
from MK Ofer Shelach (Yesh Atid), the co-chair of the Shaked Committee
who led the insistence on criminal sanctions, but Shelach’s staff
declined repeated requests. A Yesh Atid party spokesperson also declined
to comment.
“There’s no doubt this bill is ineffective in
advancing equal service, which is the reason we went to the last
elections,” noted Prof. Yedidia Stern, vice president of research at the
Israel Democracy Institute and a former dean of Bar-Ilan University’s
Law Faculty.
Stern was a key expert adviser to the Shaked
Committee which drafted the new law, and was a member of the Plesner
Committee, which worked on a different version of the law in the last
Knesset and whose work led to the last government’s fall and new
elections.
The final draft law “is ineffective because it
starts operating, de facto, only in 2017. But it immediately absolves a
large group of some 50,000 Haredi men of service,” since, by replacing
the previous Tal Law which the High Court of Justice called
unconstitutional last year, it removes the obligation to continue their
religious studies or face the draft.
...
“The Welfare Ministry says 20 percent of
Haredi men drop out of yeshiva. If only they were to go to the army,
we’d meet the [new law’s] quota. But that’s not why we started working
on this.”
Even after several years of operation, “the
law doesn’t achieve equality. At the same time, it insults the Haredi
public profoundly, symbolically, because in 2017 it institutes criminal
sanctions” for each man who avoids the draft – if the quotas are not
met.
“In reality, these sanctions won’t be
enforced, because the draft goals aren’t high. But the law now says that
if Haredim don’t meet these goals, people will be taken from their
Torah study and sent to prison for two years,” notes Stern.
“A wise state doesn’t institute a law it
doesn’t intend to carry out. This law is a gun without bullets, a dead
letter. The state can’t take thousands of people to prison for
ideological reasons. There just isn’t such an animal. So the criminal
sanctions are a strategic mistake. If we get to the point where Haredim
decide to force the state to implement this law, the state won’t be able
to.
Other groups, such as Arabs or settlers who may face similar
situations, will learn that the state isn’t able to enforce its rule.”
And the law is already creating blowback,
worries Stern. “My calculated guess is that Haredim won’t take advantage
of their right [under the new law] to leave yeshiva to work because
their rabbis know that the entire integrity of the Haredi world is being
tested.”
Now that they don’t have to study Torah to
avoid military service, everyone is watching to see if avoiding military
service was the original reason they were studying Torah in such
numbers, Stern explains. “Rabbis will do their best to keep students in
their studies, to prove that Torah study is an authentic Haredi impulse.
We’re already hearing that some rabbis, such as [the leaders of the]
Vizhnitz [Hassidic sect], are telling their young men not even to
register with the army,” as all Israeli 17-year-olds are required to do,
even those who receive draft exemptions. “That’s a criminal violation
already today – not just in 2017.”
Stern’s dire worries are shared by none other
than MK Ayelet Shaked (Jewish Home), the chair of the eponymous
committee that wrote the law.
...
It’s up to Haredi leaders to decide if the law will lead to integration or a culture war, she says.
“Now everything depends on leaders of the
Haredi community,” she believes. If Haredi rabbis, as Stern fears,
oppose the new system as a matter of principle, “I think that’s a
disaster. If they don’t [oppose it], it can succeed.”
...
The Haredi world is willing to compromise, Rabinovich insisted.
“As soon as a [young man] isn’t learning Torah
and isn’t in the yeshiva, there’s no question he’s like any other
citizen. There’s no question here, and all the religious authorities,
including Rabbi [Elazar] Shach, have said so,” Rabinovich said.
Rabinovich is careful to note that problem
with a military draft remain even for those who leave the yeshiva. “The
army needs to build frameworks for absorbing these people. I’m not going
to tell any Haredi young man to go to the army unless I know that I can
be sure he’ll be in an environment that won’t force him to abandon his
way of life.”
The current tensions between the Haredi and
mainstream communities, he said, were due to the fact that the secular
public “simply doesn’t accept the value of Torah study as the essential
value of the Jewish people. It’s hard to explain this to someone who
doesn’t see it. It really is. It’s a question of faith and a way of
life.”
The result of that culture gap is an unfair demand on Haredi men.
“Only 20 percent of draftees are warriors who
face real danger,” noted Rabinovich. “But the parents of those warriors
don’t complain about the 80% of soldiers who go to the army in the
morning in Tel Aviv and then return home at night to sleep. We’re asking
people to understand that yeshiva students are like the 80%. Studying
in yeshiva is not easy.”
Read it all.
Labels: draft, God, Haredim, IDF, Torah
1 Comments:
I noticed that in the article, even Shaked and Stern, both of whom were very involved in drafting the law, can't seem to agree on whether the 5,200 figure is per year, or in total. Does the law even clarify one way or the other?
As for that last paragraph you brought, truer words were never spoken. But Lapid and Bennett were never about sharing the burden and everything about forcing their hashkafos onto the Chareidi world.
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