OP-EDS & REVIEWS
By Gil Troy, Jerusalem Post, 7-3-12
The Keshev Committee seeking to replace the unconstitutional Tal Law which protected most Ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews from Israel’s universal draft has imploded, apparently due to tensions regarding potential personal sanctions on draft-dodging Yeshiva students. Haredi Knesset members reportedly threatened “all out war” if Ultra Orthodox 18-year-olds are drafted along with their Israeli Jewish peers. These extortionist threats are despicable while imposing group-think and rejecting individual rule of law here is unacceptable.
I am not anti-Haredi, but I am pro-liberal democracy. I respect the Ultra-Orthodox lifestyle. I appreciate the challenge of maintaining their traditional values and rituals amidst modernity’s seductions. The children of my Haredi friends serve in the army. I have written in The New Republic and elsewhere rejecting what we at the Shalom Hartman Institute Engaging Israel project call the Demography of Fear, and I abhor the rampant stereotyping caricaturing this segment of Israeli society. Threats of a Haredi demographic takeover of Israel are exaggerated — and the attendant hysteria is demonizing. But democracy entails more than consent of the governed expressed through mass voting rights. Every Israeli citizen should have individual rights and responsibilities – even as certain group indulgences occasionally have to be granted too, but under extreme circumstances, and as infrequently as possible.
In the spirit of compromise, I accept different educational systems for Haredi children and Israeli Arab children, even as it offends my Zionist sensibilities and strains Israeli democracy. As a realist, I understand that Israeli Arabs should not be drafted and that a small symbolic group of Haredi Jews may hold onto their community’s historic draft exemption. But every young Israeli should be compelled to serve in the army or complete national service as an individual obligation to the nation, with some getting rare free passes for compelling reasons.
And yes, the need to insulate Israeli Arabs from the complexity of Israel’s military conflict with their Arab cousins is compelling, especially if Israeli Arabs take on national service. By contrast, the claim that Haredi draft dodging defends Israel by maintaining the Lord’s good graces through Torah study is an absurd fig leaf – despite my veneration for the Torah and traditional Judaism.
In Israel today, 114,000 students learn in government-funded Torah institutions. Even if all 54,000 full-time yeshiva students exempted from military service under the Tal Law enlisted immediately, approximately 60,000 full-time, government-subsidized Torah scholars could still provide the divine protection they believe their studies deliver. These scholarly masses are joined by tens of thousands of others, in Jerusalem and elsewhere, who are shaping the extraordinary Torah study renaissance occurring today throughout Israel.
Modern Israel 2012, particularly Jerusalem, has a scale and intensity of learning that rivals the historic Babylonian Talmudic academies of Sura and Pumbedita, Maimonides’ Egypt, the Baal Shem Tov’s Poland, or the Gaon’s Vilna. I am not daring to suggest that we have greats to equal those gedolim, those giants – I cannot judge. But I acknowledge the great work so many serious Jews and the Israeli government have done to revive Jewish learning on a mass scale after the Holocaust. And I resent the implication that this vast, impressive Torah study effort is so fragile it will collapse or fail to achieve its holy mission, if Haredi 18-year-olds do not serve in the army as other Israeli youngsters do.
David Olesker
/ July 11, 2012Gil, I’m afraid that your loving nature betrays you on this one. You look at Haredim and (rightly) see them as your Jewish brothers and sisters. But in doing so you make the leap to thinking that, because you share many of their assumptions they are required to share most of yours.
The Haredi opposition to the draft is simply not open to arguments based on liberal democratic arguments relating to the social contract. There’s a large minority of Haredim who would respond that they were here first, never asked for the Zionist state and therefore cannot be expected to submit to its social contract.
Even the more moderate majority of Israeli Haredim see their educational system as a supreme value that trumps the social contract in the same way as Jehovah’s Witnesses see pacifism as a supreme matter of conscience that preempts any claim society may have on them. Most moderate Haredim would (reluctantly) go to prison rather than submit to coercion on this matter.
Given that you are not going to convince the Haredi community that you are right and they are wrong, all you are left with to ensure compliance is coercion.How much force is a liberal democratic state justified in using against them? Fines? What if they won’t (or can’t) pay? Imprisonment? How many, for how long and how many times? Withdrawal of the franchise for those who refuse to serve? (Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein was based on that idea.)
How far are you willing to go in the name of the social contract? Are you willing to give the answer of that other famous Canadian liberal, Pierre Trudeau, “Just watch me!”?
The answers to the above questions will depend, partially, to your answers to two other ones; Is this a point of principle (i.e. equal rights and equal duties), or a matter of necessity (i.e. the army needs more people)? If it’s the former then, as a liberal democrat, you have a clash of principles between the social contract and freedom of conscience. How do you reconcile them?
If it’s the latter, then we should all loose the Sturm und Drang and focus on some undramatic, practical steps that would allow for increased, voluntary Haredi participation in the draft as outlined by your fellow Jerusalem Post columnist, Jonathan Rosenblum. (http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=274716).