Elliott Abrams
It will not remain true for another year, however. The latest date for the next election is October 2026—and it could come much sooner. The electoral timetable and the possibility of an end to the Gaza war mean the political stasis of the Jewish year 5785 (October 2024 to October 2025) will end. And that in turn will likely mean the return of the older battles that the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war pushed aside. “judicial reform,” meaning the role and power of the Israeli Supreme Court, and the struggle over drafting ultra-Orthodox Jews into the military. To these will be added the “blame game” over which leaders are to be held responsible for the security failures of October 7, 2023.
The Haredi Community and the Draft
The war has deepened divisions over that latter issue, and it will be central to the next election. Israel’s ultra-Orthodox groups have long been exempt from conscription under a deal made at Israel’s founding by the first prime minister, David Ben Gurion. At the time, the number of young men exempted, ostensibly so that they could continue to study Torah full-time, was derisory and militarily irrelevant: 400 students in 1948. Today, due to the enormous demographic growth of the ultra-Orthodox—known as the Haredi community—sixty-three thousand young men are exempted.
The strain of the Gaza war on Israel’s mostly reserve army has proved the need for a larger force, so the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) needs those recruits—or some of them. For most Israelis, who have watched their family members called into reserve duty again and again, those exemptions are unfair and should come to an end. Some studies suggest that about a quarter of the Haredi youth are, in fact, surreptitiously employed, not studying.
The resentment at their failure to serve has exploded in the last two years, and the Supreme Court has struck down several legislative compromises that maintained most of those exemptions. Meanwhile, divisions are developing in the Haredi camp, with growing support for some form of service. This is all part of the broader issue of the Haredi role in Israeli life as that community grows—now about 14 percent of the population and likely to hit 20 percent by 2065.
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