Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 21: Why won’t Haredim serve in the IDF? A deep dive with Shmuel Rosner

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

Haredi Israelis make up some 13% of the population but have extremely low rates of workforce participation and military service. The growing welfare subsidies that sustain their communities have increasingly become a source of tensions and frustration for other Israelis, and the multi-front war that began on October 7 has now made their exemptions from military service a major political issue. Israel needs more workers, less welfare spending and many more soldiers to thrive in the future. Can the Haredi community change? What happens if it doesn't?We spoke with Shmuel Rosner, senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and veteran journalist and analyst. Rosner has studied the Haredi community and the policy debates on these questions. He's the editor and publisher of the political website The Madad, themadad.com, which we recommend for, among other things, its aggregation of polling and political writing from across the spectrum of Israeli media.This episode was sponsored by Julie and Frank Cohen because they believe this podcast is a way to teach our story, and because understanding our past and present is key to building a better future.Julie and Frank have asked to dedicate this episode to someone we lost on October 7.Today we remember Yochai Azulay, 28, from Holon, was murdered while trying to flee the Hamas attack on the Supernova music festival on October 7. Born in Tel Aviv, Yohai grew up in a traditionally religious family and spent much of his time devoted to exploring his roots and his connection to Judaism. He served in the Kfir Brigade during his mandatory military service, and after his release, he toured around South America. After his return, Yohai soon met his girlfriend, Noa, and the pair were planning a future together.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail].

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Ask Kaviv Anything. We're going to do one of those episodes where we take a deep dive into an issue that is front and center in the Jewish world, certainly front and center on Israeli's minds. And that is the Qaradi community, sometimes called ultra-Orthodox. I know quite a few Khadim that object to the idea of ultra-Orthodox, as though there's a spectrum of orthodox and then ultra-Orthodox. They're just what they are. They're not a comparison to some.

someone else, but extremely so. And this Chahehiahe community is extraordinarily diverse. It doesn't always look it on TV, but it in fact is the Lithuanian communities, the Hasidic communities. There's a huge gap there in how they learn and how they live in their mystical theologies and all of that. It's a different place. They vote differently.

They think differently. But nevertheless, as a community, in many, many ways, they act as one. And certainly they think of themselves. a coherent Haredi identity. The Israelis have been at a war now in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, the Seven Front War, for well over 600 days. And over the course of that war, we have discovered that we don't have enough fighting men. And that has created huge new pressure, a huge new demand on the Qaeda community to stop doing something that it has been doing roughly since the 60s, 70s, which is explicitly and purposefully choose not to serve in the Israeli military.

This is very frustrating if you are, like my brother-in-law, a soldier in the paratroopers in the reserves, who left your job in high-tech in Tel Aviv, and was in Gaza when your first child was born, and was in Lebanon when your first child celebrated her first birthday. And in fact, in order to push back Israel's enemies, had to give 300 days over the course of the last 600, and there are people in this country who sat around for those 600 days,

went to work, raised a family, they're not literally sitting in the streets, but they're not sacrificing. Their businesses are not collapsing, as are the businesses of so many reservists. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have sacrificed tremendously at a moment of great danger for the country. And the ultra-Orthodox community, as many call them in English, the Kharidim, have not.

And the question has arisen, therefore, a new way. It's not just about fairness. The small campaigns among secular Israelis to have universal draft also apply to the Khadim is no longer just about literally, you know, the principle of the thing. We actually need the manpower. And so the whole big question of the enormous gap in participation in the workforce, the gap in payments into the welfare system, because they don't participate in the workforce, the gap in education, the gap in military service, the gap in participation. The fact that to so many Israelis, it feels as though they carry this community on their shoulders, and the community stands around telling them that it is holy, and they are

the mules whose task it is to carry them. That is some of the political language used by some Haredi leaders that creates a lot of this anger and tension. We're going to dive into this anger and this tension with someone I respect very deeply and learn from. Part of the purpose of this podcast is not to tell you the clever things I have discovered or know, but it's to tell you where I get them. And Schmul Rosner is one of those places. Shmul Rosner is a senior fellow at JPPI, the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. He is also, and this is a top secret of Israeli journalists, please don't tell anybody, so we look cooler and more clever. He's the editor, publisher, pollster, grand puba of a website called the Madad, T-H-E-M-A-D-D-D-com, or The Measure.

the index is the translation and it contains an aggregation of polls it contains opinion pieces thought pieces it's small journalists read it and then say clever things about what Israelis think now you know now you don't have to guess and and also Shmoil has done a lot of work on the Kharedi community

including putting out a video series online in Hebrew and I respect him tremendously he's been a very very He's a veteran journalist and a very experienced one. He was the Haaret's reporter in the United States, and the only Israeli reporter in the United States I ever knew or read, who taught me about American jury. And among Hebrew-speaking Israelis, I consider myself quite an expert on American jury

in the sense that Israelis don't really take an interest. And Shmuel did. So he's a Hebrew-speaking Israeli with serious interest and credentials and provides us all with tremendous amounts of knowledge. We're going to dive in on this really foundational, really painful question for Israeli society. Before we get to that, two minutes of sponsorship, this episode is sponsored by Frank and Julie Cohen, and thank you so much for that. Frank and Julie believe that this podcast is a way to teach our story, because understanding our past

and present is key to building a better future. And as with many, many of our sponsors, they have dedicated this episode to someone who fell on October 7. Today we remember Yochai Azulai, 28, from Cholon. He was murdered while trying to flee the Hamas attack on the Supernova Music Festival on October 7. Yochai grew up in a traditionally religious family. He spent much of his time exploring his roots and his connection to Judaism. He served in the Kphil Infantry Brigade during his mandatory military service. After his release, he toured around South America. My wife did that. It is the law. You're not allowed to stay in the country after getting out of the army, you're required to go backpacking somewhere around the world.

And after his return, he met his girlfriend, Noah, and they were planning their future together when he was murdered by the Hamas terrorist. He was buried in Cholon on October 15. He is survived by his parents, Ziva and Itsik, and his older sister, Daniela Kelen. Thank you to Frank and Julie. Shmuel, how are you? I'm okay, everything is great, but there's a war going on. So I cannot just say it as if nothing is out there.

I'm okay and I'm sorry about it. Yeah, exactly. Let's dive right in. I gave a little bit of an introduction on the Qaeda community. I want to just say one thing to start. And I know I've been talking now for, I don't know, eight minutes. But I really want this to be the beginning. I deeply respect the Qaredi community.

And I don't mean that to be politically correct. then I don't mean that to set them up for a fall. What I mean is something very specific. When I am driving down the Ayalone Highway in Tel Aviv and I see a huge billboard with a supermodel in underwear, I'm frustrated. I'm frustrated for my daughter. I don't want to start covering up billboards,

and I believe in free speech. I'm one of those wackos who think you should have too much free speech rather than too little. But I also don't want my daughter growing up in a world surrounded by those images. is. In one of the videos you produced, Moshe Rubeel, a chasse minister in government, and an extraordinary and competent and serious and thoughtful man who will speak to all Israelis and speak honestly and thoughtfully, when confronted by these economic questions that we're

going to talk about today, said, look, humans are not, I'm paraphrasing, humans were not created to increase the GDP, right? There is a deep meaning to life, and if all we see are these numbers, we're not going to be happy. And here's the thing. There is something broken in the West, and I am a big, big fan of capitalism in the sense that every other system is worse. And I'm a big fan of democracy in the sense that every other system is worse. But that does not mean that there isn't something broken. People are sadder, more angry, more anxious, polarizing, radicalizing, and we have measures of these. Every single health authority in every single democratic country is measuring how societies are falling apart.

They're fraying and the algorithms and the attention economy of modern life. And then I go to visit my friends in the Haredi community. And it's a world with a tremendous amount of psychological quiet, right? There's one sacred source. It's a community that is measurably among the happiest people in the world because it has this one thing that matters. And it isn't quite ideology. It isn't quite religion. I mean, they, of course, will say it's God, it's religion, it's Torah.

But it's also the deep bonds of loyalty and connection. It's infinite social capital. They're strange dress. I'll finish with this. I apologize. You will hear Shmuel Rosner's wisdom here. The strange dress is part of it. They're not stupid.

They know what they look like. That's on purpose. I once asked a Hasidic rabbi. You think he considers himself from the bub of sect. You know, why does he dress funny? And he says, I can't stand in a line to a movie and get angry. I can't stand in a line to an inappropriate movie.

Because I have that, it protects me. And it protects other. from me and it makes me purer in my soul, it's easier for my soul to be stronger. And the other piece to it is it's hard to step out, right? It's a signal to the in-group that you belong to, that you're willing

to pay the social costs of looking weird and therefore distancing yourself in the out-group. It's a signal of the strength and importance to you of belonging. And so I think they have some significant wisdom that is part

of the healing of the world from all the horrors and awfulness of this moment, all the fraying of our societies and democracies all over the Western world. I want to start with that. I don't think it's a small thing that is beautiful there. I think it's an enormous thing. Now let's get into all the problems and failings of this community. With that in mind, we'll start with the military. I'm just, I'm coming to you up front. My family, my wife has another brother who has a similar story in the armored corps. My family is given a lot to this war, and they haven't. And that pisses me off. First of all, what's the data? Do they serve? Are there any that serve? How much do they serve? And why don't they serve?

Well, the answer to the question, do they serve is an easy one. They don't. Maybe 8% of them do. Very few of them on the margins, on the Haredi society, serve in the IDF. Most of them don't. and you know we are all familiar with stories such as the one you mentioned. My son is now doing his reserve time in the military. He was called for three months. So he's spending April, May and June in uniform. Before that he spent, I think, all November and December of 24 in uniform. So in one year in which he needs to do internship.

as a graduate of law school. So it's a year of internship, of which at least five months he's going to spend in uniform, which means that an internship of a year is really an internship of half a year. And you know, there are people who do even more reserve time than him. So to see ultra-Orthodox youngsters his age, 24, 25, not having to wear uniform, that's something that is quite frustrating for many of us. You ask why aren't they, why don't they serve in the military? That's a long story.

It begins with David Ben-Gurion in 1948 at the War of Independence. Right after the Holocaust, when the world, when the Yeshiva world, the Haray, the Ashiva world, was almost eliminated at the He said. Holocaust and Ben-Gurion was asked to release to release 400 students from military duty in order for them to keep learning at their yeshivas and he thought he was doing you know he thought the Haredi community was a museum it was it was basically gone so he let them he let them off the hook and let them keep keep studying rather than serving.

We should say that many other Haradis did serve in the War of Independence. And afterwards, in the 50s, the 60s, up until the mid-70s, more than 60%, close to 70% of all Haradis did serve in the military like everybody else. This is an important point. Right now, secular Israelis have a service rate somewhere in the 80s. And so they were very, they were almost at the level of secular Israelis. And something changed in the 70s. Now, the framework Ben-Gurian used is called Torato or Manuto, right?

Where great artists, great athletes are allowed to step out of the army, not if you're an Olympic level swimmer and you go to the military for three years, you will not be able to compete in the Olympics. You'll lose those three years. So you are exempt from military service. but in arts, in sports, these are a tiny group, you know, a couple hundred, a few tiny number of hundreds every single cohort, every single year. And the Haredim started as that, right? It was their Torah is their art, right? What happened in the 70s and what's the scale of the problem now? Well, in the late 70s, the change was a political change.

Menachem Begin became prime minister in, you know, you want the... election, became Prime Minister in the late 70s. He formed the coalition for which he needed the ultra-Orthodox parties as part of the coalition, and they had the ability to make requests, to change things for themselves. And two very significant rabbis at the time, Ravshach and the Rabbi of Gour, they basically told him, we want all young ultra-Orthodox. men to stay in their yeshivas. And he and them, they formed something that became quite unique.

They basically forced all youngsters to stay within the yeshivas by having the threat of military service hanging over their heads. Basically, Israel became the enforcer of yeshiva studies. Explain that. I'm a young a Haredi young man. I reach age 17. Like all 17 year olds,

I go to the draft office and because I'm in a Haredi yeshiva, they give me an exemption. You're faced with the community have leverage over me. Yeah, you are faced with the following choice. Either you go and serve like everybody else,

which takes away three years of your life. and takes you out of the community. In the community, in the Haredi community, it became something of an anathema to even think about serving. If you serve, you will not get a probershidah, you will not be respected by your community. It could hurt your family.

Maybe you have younger siblings. They will be thrown out of their younger, Yeshivas or Kolels or Talmud Torah or whatever, they will have difficulty finding a spouse. So the whole community geared up towards this situation or towards this mentality in which people who serve are second or third rank, Haredes. They no longer consider to be Haredes. So you're young and this is the choice you face. Either you tell the military I'm going to study, which lets you, gets you off the hook of military service,

but then you have to stay in the yeshiva. You stay within the confines of the Haredi community. You are basically under the control of the Haredi, you know, handlers of the situation. They find you the yeshiva. They give you a stipend in order for you to be able to. to learn. So you're dependent on them both culturally and economically speaking and you have to

keep yourself within the community for a number of years, until age 26 at least, where you work for the ishevas? These handlers work for the yeshivas? Who do they work for? The handlers are the politicians of the community and the rabbis and all the machers that take care of the community. It's a structure of many people which aims to keep the community intact

and basically force all youngsters to remain within the community. You pay a very high price if you decide to go and serve. It basically throws you out of the community, which is something that for young people is not something that they, they will tend to do. So this gives the Haredi community, Haredi handlers

enormous power over their youngsters. And it basically keeps them all out of service because when they stay in, they get married at a fairly young age. They have children.

By the time they get off Yeshiva, they decide to move on to something else. if they ever do, they are no longer useful for the IDF. If you're 26 or 27, you have four kids, you are married, you have no profession, you have no, there's no point in drafting you at this point. So basically, this new arrangement turned the whole community into, well, not draft Dodgers, it's all legal. It's all legal or used to be legal up until two years ago when the Supreme Court ultimately decided that this arrangement is not legal.

But for a couple of decades, that was the legal arrangement. And the Haredi community, I said, up until the mid-70s, more than 60% of young Haredes served in the military. This went down pretty quickly to less than 10%. So we ended up with a community that is no longer serving. Now, this could have been, you know, an anecdote had Haradis remained 2% or 3% of the population. The share of the population they were back in 1948. However, in parallel to everything we talk about, and this is something, you know, the Haredi challenge, I don't call it a problem. I call it a challenge. It's a challenge to Israel. The Haredi

challenge is a multi-layer challenge and it would not have been in challenge had the community not dramatically grown. So they are now about 13% of the population. And by, you know, if you look at projections for the future, this community is projected to become 15% and 20% and 25%. And within 30 years, it will become about a third of the country. Now, they're already 25% of the kindergartners. Exactly. So if they are a community with a very high rate of retention, people aren't living the community. Most Haradis stay within the confines of the Haradi community.

The community is growing and suddenly you find yourself with, you know, it's not 2% of the people not serving. It's 13% of the people not serving. And suddenly people such as your brother-in-law or such as my son, they look around and they see a community of 80,000. That's the number we have now. 80,000 people who are within this age range where they essentially have to serve and they do not serve. So you call in whatever, 300,000, 400,000 people to serve and you, you know, many of them are civilians. They are taken out of their, you know, year of internship, legal internship. or from their offices in the high-tech sector or small business owners, restaurant owners, whatever they do, they're called in to serve for three months, for four months, for five months, for eight months.

They have to serve. And these other people, 80,000 in number, do not serve. Now, what could we achieve had they served? You know, the math is easy. If you call them in, you could release, you could reduce the number of reserve days for other civilians, cut them by half or by two thirds or even by 75%. Because one Haredi brigade can release 13 or 12 brigades who know, now have to, you know, you have to guard an area.

Okay, if you have one brigade of people who serve for three years, think for three years, so you have 36. 36 months. Exactly. Exactly. Right. So for 2,000 reservists, they would have 36 months per person taken off of their time. So I take away from that two fascinating problems.

And I think we're also going to see it on the economic. side, which I want to get to in a moment. Israel created the problem. In other words, Israel asked this community how the rest of the country can carry them on its shoulders. It was part of getting their votes in the Knesset to build coalitions. And

that's one. And two, just from the way you described how there is a mechanism of control, in other words, if a young person doesn't want this deep ostracization from the community that military service entails, certainly deep within the Hasidic community, certainly deep within, you know, the Yeshiva community. In other words, if you really,

Haredim is a diverse group, right? Some of them do work. Half of Haredi men are absolutely in the workforce. They earn less because their education system doesn't include a lot of math in English, but nevertheless, they do work all their lives. But if you don't want that deep ostracization, then you're stuck. And that means that if you're the Haredi elites managing this system, and you want to keep the young people in because that guarantees the future of the community. You want the service threat to remain. In other words, the country says, you know what, fine.

You're not serving. Goodbye, good luck. Do whatever you want. Anything you want to do at 18 is yours. You are completely exempt. Well, does it then lose this massive mechanism and this massive leverage, this mechanism of control over the young people?

Do you think they would still stay in the community? No, I think this could help. And some people suggested such remedy to the challenge that we have. They say, well, rather than trying to chase them and force them into the military, let's just say, you know, you're all exempt. No money for yeshivas, no stipends for yeshiva students. You're 18. Do whatever you want. Yeah.

This could have been a solution. some kind of solution. It doesn't solve the problem of the IDF. The manpower problem of the IDF is now becoming an essential part of the issue because of the war. Before the war an idea such

as, you know, release them all, tell them to go find their way. That could have been something that ignites a process of integration into the workforce, into, they'd have to go and learn something because otherwise they can't work in anything.

So maybe this could have, could ignite such process. Right now, we have a real problem in the military. You know, we cannot go on forever with the number of reserve days that people have to serve. It's becoming an issue for Israelis. So just telling other people you can go and do whatever you want while our sons and daughters are going to serve, that's, you know, that's an issue that is not just an issue of how it looks, it also an issue for for society to deal with in the sense that some reservists could say, well, you know, you're going to let them off the hook. I'm not coming either. You know. How did they justify it?

You have, first of all, you talk to them. I hate to say them. I'm a Jerusalemite born and bred. They're all over. We talk to each other. I had Haredi and ex-Hareidi students sitting next to me in my classroom at Hebrew University. It's very accessible.

They're very loud. We, I don't know what, secular, traditional, religious Israelis. We all belong to different. We're very loud. We're constantly talking, chatting, sometimes yelling. So they is very close and very constantly sort of interacting with each other. How do they justify it? They know there's a war.

There's 450 dead soldiers from the war, something like that. That's without October 7. That's just literally in the fighting. There's, you know, many tens of thousands whose businesses have closed. How do they justify sitting this out? And we know also from polls that they're very right wing in their views, and they certainly want Hamas to be defeated and Hezbollah to be defeated. but they're sitting it out.

How do they talk to themselves about that? Well, they have several reasons or excuses that they mention when you talk to them about the situation. The first of which is, well, you don't really need us. You can do without us. The military is large enough as it is. You know, find all the people who aren't doing anything who aren't studying Torah and, you know, get them in and you'll have enough people. you managed with us thus far, why suddenly the urgent need? It's not a real problem.

That's one excuse I hear a lot. The second one is studying Torah is as important if not more important than military service. This is what really guard us from our enemies. If you have such deep belief in the power of Torah, to guard the people of Israel, the Jews, from their enemies, then you can say, well, you know, you do your job by holding a rifle. We do our job, our parallel job, by holding the Talmud, the Gemara, and studying all day.

And this is our part. We do, you know, this is our part of the deal. Each of us has... Do they believe it? That, by the way, brings Israeli counters. that, you know, from secular Israelis, great. So put all your yeshivas on the border because that's where we really need the protection, right? Do they, not do they believe that in some deep mystical, spiritual sense, Taurus, that he protects the Jewish people over time and through history? They do absolutely believe that, and I think I believe that.

But do they literally believe that there is literally a kind of dome force field over the country protecting it from its literal, immediate physical, enemies from the Iranian missile fleet because they are studying Torah? How much is that from your understanding? Well, you know, I assume that some of them believe it in the literal way that you just described, and some of them believe it in a more, you know, in a vaguer kind of way. You know, it's important that in parallel to having a military, we keep doing this thing because in the long term, if we all stop doing this, even for a short period of time, this will harm the Jewish people in ways that we cannot currently imagine.

A third reason that we keep hearing from them is that the IDF is not well prepared to absorb young Haredes and let them live their lives in a way that will, you know, you get in Haredi, you get out Haredi. That's the slogan that they tend to use. You know, the military must develop venues through which they can serve in a way that does not harm their or erode their ability to retain their way of life and their culture. there is some truth to to disclaim.

Then again, if the IDF were to be told that, you know, they need to set up the bases and the places in which Haradis can serve as Haradis, and if the IDF does us, it will get 10,000 new, you know, battle-ready Haredes, the IDF will be able to handle such task. We have this natural.

Because, because, you know, just preparing everything to get disappointed when these people just switch to a different excuse, that's something that is not, it's not a high priority for the IDF. The IDF will be able

to deal with such task if it is convinced that this is really what is standing between young Haradis and military service. We should say we have this natural experiment that's been done. 25 years ago, when I was a young soldier, I started out in one unit in an infantry brigade, one of the regular infantry brigades, and after the medics course, I was brought in, you have to volunteer, I was asked, and I agreed, to go to a special unit. the Haredi Nakhl, it was called at the time,

that was set up to be a unit that could absorb young Haredi men. And actually the first cohorts were kids who had dropped out of Yeshiva, sometimes really suffered after dropping out of Yeshiva, really disconnected from their community, went through that ostracization without having anything to do with the military, and to try and rebuild their lives. I mean, we're just living detached and alone and dependent. depressed and with a lot of social problems, there is this phenomenon in the Chariqadhi community,

as in any community of young men wandering a little bit lost. And they joined the army as a way to rebuild a new life. And they wanted that to be something that was a path back also in some ways to their community. There was a group of rabbis who set up a nonprofit that came to the army and worked with the army to build this. First, it was a company, then a battalion, then a brigade, to be Chahreidi. And there was a mandatory rabbi's class every day. Mondays and Thursdays and on Shabbat, you read the Torah. So the Torah went with us into the field when we were doing training in the field, an actual Torah scroll for the reading. And the level of kosher food was a higher standard of kashr. And the whole thing overseen very

carefully by a group of Qaridi rabbis who kept visiting constantly to make sure. And the army went with this project, and the project still exists. It's now a whole brigade. And and Kharedim didn't come. In other words, the first couple of very early cohorts were groups of 20, 30, 40, Qaradi young men, but the hundreds that filled out the ranks were just religious Zionists who said, oh, wait a second. They were going to serve anyway in the paratroopers,

but they just said, oh, wait a second, there's an infantry brigade with a rabbi's class every day. Well, that's fun. That's my kind of place. And that's what it actually became. So we actually, the army has already gone through this experiment. It has seen what happens. And the project has utterly failed.

They're not going to join, even if the conditions are met, which means that the conditions of the army wasn't the fundamental question. I asked them, you know, the biggest medical charities in Israel that aren't billion-dollar hospitals, the biggest medical charities in Israel are Qaeda. They have this extraordinary network of charities and NGOs that help people in a thousand ways. They have their own rescue services that rescue everyone and everyone. But the Haridim built it, and the Haridim are most of the staff. Why can't they replace under a National Service civilian rubric

overseen by rabbis in their civilian clothes, a third of the medical core of the IDF? Why can't we find, in other words, there's so much creativity there. There's so much serious problem-solving for their community that is constantly happening. There's a very clever community that knows how to build real communal strength. Why aren't they doing that in order to serve? In other words, they're not looking for ways to make it work.

They're looking for ways to ensure it can never work. And that's the part that for me drives a real frustration. Why aren't they replacing half of the medical course? Chabad rabbi once said to me, it's not about where you are, it's about which way you're facing. Okay? So they're in one place. But they're not facing toward, well, how do we solve this?

They're facing away from how do we solve this? They don't think it needs to be resolved. They are happy with the way it is now. They think that they are fulfilling their role by sitting and studying. And again, if you want to be more cynical about it, I'd say that some of their leaders find it more comfortable for the community not to serve because this allows them to keep the community together and to avoid all the things that the,

Haredi community would like to avoid. Now, we need to remember what is being Haredi all about. It's about non-mixing with the rest of society. It's about keeping themselves separate. You mentioned their clothes and their food and their, you know, the cities in which they live. The Haredes do not want to mix in. If you serve in some way, and even if you're just being medical, core, even if you're keeping to yourself in separate units, you are, I cannot deny that there is

some risk. You know, in order to serve, they need to take some risk, not just risk to their lives, but also the risk of some level of higher integration into Israeli culture, Israeli society, Israeli ethos, if you have if you have Haradi men going into battle and God forbid getting killed

well suddenly Memorial Day is becoming something that you need to think about more seriously. Memorial Day is one of the most powerful cultural symbols of Israeli society and the Haradis right now

are not truly a part of it They don't take part because they have nothing to remember on Memorial Day. It's not their youngsters. It's not their families. It's not as if they're happy on Memorial Day. But they don't play a real role in creating this cultural symbol of Israelis. If they become part of the IDF, then this means a slightly higher level of integration. And they do not want this integration to take part.

Now, again, if they were 2% of the population or 3%, I'd say, okay, we can tolerate that. We are pluralistic people. We do appreciate all the values and all the great things that, you know, You mentioned that Haredi society has a lot of great things to offer to the world. And I agree. And this could have been great had they been 2% of the population. But when they become 13% of the population and then 15 or 20 or 25% of the population, it's no longer sustainable.

You cannot have a military. and call it the people's army when a quarter of the population is exempt from it. It's not something. It cannot hold. So either they join in or you need to change the whole structure of Israeli society in ways that can be very harmful to Israel's, not just culture, but also security. We need the military. October 7th was proof that we need a large, strong, and watchful military. And if we don't have it, we will be butchered by our enemies.

This is not some kind of, you know, a vague threat. This is very concrete. We need manpower on our borders to guard us from vicious enemies. And then we need to find a way to make these people, you know, participate in it. I want to suggest that it's already falling apart for them. And the example of Memorial Day is a good one. So for example, 15 years ago, Haredi ministers, who the Ashkenazi ones from United Tour Judaism from that party, wouldn't actually be ministers. They would only be deputy ministers until a few years ago

because they didn't want to swear allegiance to the state of Israel, which a full minister is required to do. And then there was some legal problem with being the deputy housing minister for many years and not actually being the housing minister, but there's some legal powers of the housing minister that the deputy housing minister was using. And there was some technical legal problem. And the courts were getting upset.

And because there was the technical legal problem, the head of the UTJ went to the Garibbe and said, can I? And the Garibbi said, what? Were we still doing that? Of course you can. Well, that's not a thing. This fundamental non-Zionism suddenly didn't matter when it actually mattered, right?

When it was about whether or not we can retain the massive budgets of the housing ministry. And it's a very pragmatic sense of an ability to suddenly. Well, the same thing happened for Memorial Day. The Hareda community does not mark Memorial Day. And when you ask them, they say, Jews commemorate dead Jews in 100 ways and in 100 different days. We have like, I don't know, five different fast days for various kinds of dead Jews. What we don't do is this kind of Roman Empire, you know, militarizing of marching and formations and standing at attention before stone monuments.

That's a goyish way to do commemorate. And it works for them, and it's beautiful and great. It's not Jewish. And then, sometime around 10 years ago, ministers of the Haredi parties, less than 10 years ago maybe, seven years ago, began actually representing the government in official Memorial Day commemorations, carrying wreaths, handing them to women soldiers wearing pants, in other words, not dressed as a Haredi woman needs to dress, and just being part of that representation. And how do Haredi communities change profoundly on things that seemed principled? And they do it with a very simple mechanism, which is how conservative societies change always, which is by pretending they didn't. This thing? It was never a real thing. It was never a bit.

Like they'd been fighting, screaming and fighting about this for years and years. And suddenly it didn't matter. Why? Because it didn't work anymore. It's already falling apart for them. And the other way we see it is in the last election, United Torah Judaism was an absolute apoplectic fit. They were shocked. They were horrified because huge numbers of their young people in their internal polling were going to go vote for the far right, not for United Tour Judaism.

And so their campaign became a campaign of, you listen to your rabbis, you follow your rabbis, your rabbis are who tells you what is good and just in this world. And they're losing the young people. And when the young people are Israelizing, you know, 40 years ago, Kharidim didn't curse like the rest of Israeli Jews. Today they curse exactly like the rest of Israeli Jews. Their accent has become standard Israeli Hebrew. They're integrating. It's happening. maybe we're just, you know, the next step is the shift of politics

toward the politics of the general majority. I'm suggesting, I don't know, because culturally, they're more Israeli than they were when I talked to them 25 years ago as a young soldier. It's true and not true. They are culturally more integrated into some of the cultural habits of Israelis, but on at least two very important fronts, we don't see any movement. And, you know, I could show you, because I did the research, that 25 and 30 years ago, people were giving me the same speeches.

They were saying, well, economic integration is on its way. It's a slow process. Just let it happen. It will gradually happen. They said the same thing about the draft. You know, we didn't go through the whole history of the draft law. But draft laws came and went and there was the Tal Committee and then the Tal Law. And people were betting on a slow process of integration without having to use any coercive means to integrate the Herades.

and by and large, 20 or 25 years later, we'll look at the numbers of the draft, of joining the IDF and economic numbers, nothing changed. And if things change, they changed for the worse. While the community was growing, their contribution to Israel's economy declined. declined. There's no other way of saying this. Now again, you can live with a two, three percent, maybe five percent community who say, well, we don't really, we don't really do the work thing. We prefer to study Torah and we get some stipends because we are very poor and we have large families and the country supports us, etc. At some point, when they become a 13 percent of the population, a suddenly we working Israelis finding ourselves supporting a lifestyle not because of necessity

these are not poor people because they're miserable and can't cope with studying anything this is a choice they choose a lifestyle that forces me and you to pay our taxes to

support them Now, again, there is a limit. There is a limit. You know, the Kohelit Institute did some calculation of how much money an average Haredi family is getting from the state versus how much money an average non-Haredi Jewish family gives to the state. And the gap is huge. It's dramatic.

The average Jewish Israeli pays the state seven thousand. shakles every day, every month, I'm sorry. The average, that's the net. Everybody gets benefits, everybody pays taxes. The non-Haredi Jewish household, on average, pays into the system, 7,000 more than they get out of the system. Exactly. And the Haredi, the average Haredi family gets, gets 5,000 shakles from the state more than it gives.

So you see a difference here. It's 12,000 shekel's difference. And you see it also municipally. In other words, an economist once explained to me the budget of the city of Jerusalem. The city of Jerusalem, which is 40% Palestinian. And among the Jews, half of that 60%, which is Jewish, is Haredi.

And it is one of the poorest cities in Israel. and a lot of it has to do with low levels of tax payments because of low educational levels and low levels of work participation. And so to sort of close the budget every year, Jerusalem has to receive a gift, a nice little package from the state, from the national government, of about a billion shackles. And what's interesting about that is who pays most of the taxes? The answer is the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, right? And so the city of Jerusalem...

The only reason that Jerusalem can function is that people in Rishon, and Herzlia and Netanya, in Tel Aviv and Rannana are paying their taxes to preserve the ability of Jerusalem to function because otherwise Jerusalem would stand still. Right. Tel Aviv just hands Jerusalem a billion shackles a year. And not by choice. And that's how the Harat – that is kind of a little sort of how the Hariri economy essentially functions.

So, solutions. Let me, not solutions. I take this from one of the interviews you had about the military question, but I'm going to take it to the economic side. It's unsustainable. Nobody knows how to change it. Netanyahu is a man who prides himself on his American-style understanding of the free market and his sort of conservative American economics and reforms.

And incidentally, back in 2002 when the country was in a deep recession, because of the Second Intifada, he passed reforms that cut subsidies to Haredim and drove something like a 10% rise in Haredi male participation in the workforce over the next two years. Netanyahu very much understands that people are susceptible to these incentives and believes in these incentives. And yet, to preserve his coalitions over the last 17 years or 15 years, whatever it is, he has massively expanded this Haredi welfare state that has become an enormous drain on the Israeli economy. because it is unproductive subsidies. And it subsidizes people not when others. They would not be able to not work if this wasn't paid for by somebody else. So there's no way out.

We're trapped in this. And we're going down this road until it crashes. Well, I thought it crashed on October 7th. October 7th did change the minds of many Israelis who tended to believe in the the process is coming myth. You know, the story that we've been told for the last 20 years, just wait patiently, just let them go through this process that they must go through in order

to Israelize themselves and they'll eventually come. When October 7th happened and Israel was in grave need for manpower and still nothing changed and the Haredi you know, the share of the share of Haradi men

going into the military didn't rise, not even one Eeyota, many Israelis realized that this is not going to happen by itself, that the country, the state needs to change

its habit in order for something to be altered. Now, you're right. The issue here is very simple. It's choosing the long term over the short term. Because right now what we have is a coalition that chooses the short term. They need the fingers of the votes of the Haradis to preserve the coalition.

So they do not make the necessary changes. We need for some time to have a coalition that does not depend on the Haradi vote and can just change the rules. You know, Haredes are human. If you use the usual, you know, stick and carrot methodology, they'll change their behavior. If you say, well, you can no longer get exempt from the IDF and go to yeshiva and get a stipend and participate in a, you know, get some help, some subsidies to buy your first apartment, et cetera. If the country says, well, if you didn't serve these X and Y and Z benefits are no longer available to you, then Haredes will have to find a way to participate in order to maintain their ability to economically survive. So you're optimistic just because the state of Israel built out this Haredi economy.

I'm not sure I'm optimistic. I'm just saying, you know, this is what needs to happen. Whether I'm optimistic, look, this becomes trickier again because of the overall process of the rapid growth of the Haredi community. So we are very near the time after which it will no longer be possible to even dream about the coalition that does not depend on Haredi community. ready vote. If they have the veto power, if they reach this level of growth where they have the veto power, I don't know what's going to happen. The result will be a rapid decline in Israel's ability to keep a first-rate economy. And for Israel to have a first-rate economy is not just about living well.

It's also about our ability to survive in this region. If we don't have first-rate economy, we don't have technological innovation, we don't have scientific edge, we don't have iron dome and lasers and powerful military. This is, this is, this is about our survival, not just about our ability to live comfortably and get nice food and great wine.

My last point, everything you've said to me, I am optimistic, and part of it is that I'm sometimes accused of being overly optimistic about everything, but we know and we have decades of data that they are responsive to the same incentives that all. of us are responsive to. And those incentives, look, we're going to run out of money for the Haredi welfare state, for that unique sort of bubble of a welfare state within the rest of Israel's welfare state. And we're going to, you know, actually start suffering military setbacks if the economy declines and the manpower isn't up to scratch. And that danger they're going to be responsive to. And the question, you know, I do think that they genuinely believe what they say.

and I think that they've built out a community that has these deep-seeded commitments. However, they're not stupid. They're deeply pragmatic. They know how this works. They don't learn enough math and English in their education system, but they're not illiterate in how economics works, and they have competent ministers and competent, you know, budgetary policies in cities controlled by Haredim that are all Haredi cities, et cetera.

And so we will reach a point where we have no choice and we will pivot. we will crash and then we will get back up and and pivot. Israel has its third currency right now. You know, we have this incredible, we're incredibly fiscally responsible. We have a debt-to-GDP ratio of something like 60%. America has more than double that. We're incredibly fiscally responsible, but we became fiscally responsible after crashing worse than Venezuela.

So I am optimistic in the sense that they are susceptible to incentives. Israel maintains this. whoever wanted to Haridim at their side did this to them. If you offer me money to sit at home, I might sit at home.

I might go out there and build beautiful things in the world, but having to, not having a choice, is a beautiful thing. So somebody needs to stop paying for it

and eventually it'll get too expensive. And you get the last word. The question is whether before we do it, we have to go through a catastrophe even worse

than the one we are having now, which, you know, yeah, I agree with you. If there is a catastrophe that truly threatens our ability to survive, we will probably come around to do what we need to do if we survive. So the question is, what type of catastrophe are we waiting for before we act? I was hoping that October 7th was a catastrophe dramatic, enough for us to understand that now is the time to act

but maybe not. Maybe we need to see more of it before we get back to our senses and do what needs to be done. And again, it's not just about military service. It's about the whole infrastructure that currently retains the the Haredi community.

We need to destroy the infrastructure and start afresh. This doesn't mean that Haredes will not be able to be Haredes. I respect their choices. I respect their culture. I respect their wish to do this and not that.

To wear these clothes and not other clothes. I have no beef with the Haredes as long as they do what other people, what other people do. Go to work. pay their taxes, do their duties. What Harareen in England and America do. These are very big, very complex issues.

We're not going to stop talking about them because Israelis aren't stopping to talk about them. And we will also talk to members of the Qaeda community and people from within the Hareda community and put all these questions very bluntly and very clearly to them. the conversations in Israel and Hebrew are blunt, are clear. And so it's good to get it out in English. Thank you so much, well, for joining me. People check out themadad.com, T-H-E-M-A-D-D. Just the aggregation of polls will let you know

what all the polls from all the different newspapers are all saying about, you know, B-B-standing and the opposition standing. And you'll be clever, you'll be smart, you'll talk to people about Israel and be able to say, well, Israelis think, and, you know, like us journalists who can very confidently say these things. That's one of our sources.

Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for the kind words.