Analysis: Secularists face uphill struggle to make the ultra-orthodox serve

By BEN LYNFIELD
Published on Thursday 23 February 2012 01:58

Amid the continued stand-offs with Iran and the Palestinians, Israel’s other struggle – that between secular and religious Jews – is heating up as secularists and their backers take a more muscular approach to defining the character of Israeli society.

On Tuesday, responding to petitions by secularists angry at government-sponsored mass draft-dodging by the ultra-orthodox, Israel’s Supreme Court annulled a law that allowed men to engage in religious studies instead of performing mandatory military service. A day earlier, Tel Aviv city council approved an unprecedented resolution calling for the launching of public transport on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath.

Both moves can be seen as indications that members of the country’s secular majority are becoming less willing to tolerate having their lifestyles determined by the ultra-orthodox minority, most of whose members are not part of the labour force and do not perform the three years’ military service required of other Israelis.

But religious parties are a main prop to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, and every government in recent Israeli history has been wary of alienating them.

Draft waivers for the ultra-orthodox go back nearly to the founding of Israel, when rabbis asked prime minister David Ben-Gurion to exempt religious seminary students from the army so that they could devote themselves to study of sacred texts and become successors to the European luminaries of Jewish learning who were killed during the Nazi Holocaust. He agreed to 400 exemptions.

But in 1977, then prime minister Menachem Begin of the Likud party, under pressure from religious coalition partners, agreed that anyone who studies in a seminary can be exempt. Today the number of ultra-orthodox exempt from service is about 62,000.

The supreme court ruling on Tuesday said that under the now annulled Tal Law, which had been in force for ten years, the government failed to enforce requirements for exemptions, so that the number of ultra-orthodox who did not serve actually increased.

Stoking the secularist sentiment, defence minister Ehud Barak is now proposing that, under new legislation to be drafted to replace the Tal Law, the number of exemptions should be brought down to 2,000. But that result is seen as highly unlikely because of the opposition of Shas, a hardline religious party that gives the government vital support.

The ultra-orthodox have largely shunned the army because they view it as incompatible with maintaining a lifestyle in accordance with strict Jewish law and they fear it would lead their youth to abandon their community.

Analysts say that while the number of ultra-orthodox drafted or performing national service can now be expected to rise, it is questionable whether Mr Netanyahu will be willing to abandon Likud’s long-standing alliance with ultra-orthodox parties, a step required to definitively end the exemptions.

Yossi Verter, a columnist for Haaretz daily, said: “Will the new bills bring tens of thousands of ultra-orthodox to the army induction centres beginning in August? It is highly doubtful.”