What the Haredim owe Israel

Israel’s Haredi community has many good qualities—make that excellent qualities. In one important sense, they are the moral core of the country. Thanks to their studies, the Torah is not a dead letter; it is a living, breathing document. Others have let that tradition lapse; the Haredim did not. Israelis and all Jewish people are richer for it.

But we come here not to praise the Haredim but to criticize them.

The occasion is a law. In July 2026, the Knesset voted 58-54 to bar the arrest and prosecution of Haredi men who evade military service, granting tens of thousands of them immunity through the end of November.

Our issue concerns the military, and here we must be careful, because the easy version of this argument is the wrong one.

Some Haredim have enlisted and serve with distinction in the defense of their country. They deserve thanks and congratulations, and get too little of both from their own community.

The overwhelming majority of the Haredim, however, refuse to enlist. When a handful of young men are jailed for that refusal, the response is to bring the country to a virtual standstill through mass protests and blocked highways. A national emergency is manufactured over the conscription of a few dozen students. July’s law was the fruit of those protests.

This behavior benefits Israel’s enemies.

In an ideal world, the draft would itself be a rights violation. Conscription is forced labor at gunpoint, and from the radical libertarian premises we ourselves hold, a man who refuses it has done nothing wrong. We do not retract that. A yeshivah student who says, “I will not be dragooned” stands on defensible ground, as does a secular student in Tel Aviv.

But that is not what is being demanded. What is being demanded is an exemption for one community—ratified by law while the coercion continues at full force for everyone else—financed by taxes that fall on the very families whose sons and daughters join the Israel Defense Forces.

Refusing coercive service may be defensible. Insisting that others be coerced in your place, and that they pay for your exemption, is not. It is not principled objection to conscription. It is a claim to a privileged position, and no libertarian premise supports such privilege. We know of no religious premise that does so either.

Nor should the case for service be waved off as mere statism. Ludwig von Mises, an exemplar of support for a free society if ever there was one, wrote of nations in extreme danger: “He who in our age opposes armaments and conscription is, perhaps unbeknown to himself, an abettor of those aiming at the enslavement of all.”

Whatever one thinks of Israel’s wars—and reasonable people think very different things about them—the country faces genuine threats to its existence. Mises did not take the state’s side in this case casually. He took it because he understood what the absence of an army means when your neighbors have both armies and evil intentions.

There is another way to raise a military: pay volunteers enough to fill the ranks. We vastly prefer this voluntary military system. But that means substantially higher taxes, and taxes are involuntary too. The choice is not between coercion and liberty but between forms of coercion, one of which leaves a country standing while the other does not.

In any case, conscription is what Israel’s parliamentary democracy has adopted, and it is the reality the Haredim confront whether they like it or not. Moreover, their options are not confined to full enlistment or open defiance. Shortened tracks, Haredi units, civilian national service in hospitals and ambulance corps have all been proposed; several exist; and each would let a man discharge an obligation to his neighbors without setting foot in a mixed barracks. Yet the Haredi leadership has resisted these options as well. That is what makes the objection look less like conscience and more like exemption.

Haredi leaders’ reply is that by studying Torah they already defend the country. Thus, their yeshivas are a shield no less real than the Iron Dome or the IDF. This would not survive five minutes in any court that weighed evidence rather than theology. Moreover, it invites an obvious question: If Torah study protects the Jewish people, where was that protection before 1948? The study houses of Vilna and Lublin were full. It did not save them. Something was missing, and an army is what provides it.

Third, the public purse subsidizes all of this. If that is not a shonda (“disgrace”), then there is no such thing as one.

The Israeli budget contains no line labeled “Torah study,” so the figures must be assembled, and we would rather understate than overreach. By a modest reckoning, state support for Torah institutions ran to roughly NIS 1.7 billion in 2023 and a comparable sum in 2024, alongside stipends for the roughly 169,000 adult yeshiva and kollel students the Israel Democracy Institute counted that year. These are stipends negotiated in Knesset coalition agreements. Governments have repeatedly shifted money out of other ministries to keep the payments flowing.

Argue about the total if you like. The structure is what matters, and it is not in dispute: Public money, most of it raised from households that send their children to the army, flows to men who will not serve in support of an exemption that non-Haredi households do not enjoy.

Every shekel is a shekel not spent on regiments, munitions, aircraft or interceptors. The community that insists that Torah study defends the nation is paid by that nation out of funds subtracted from its actual defense.

We do not write any of this out of contempt. We began by calling this community the moral core of Israel, and we meant it.

That is precisely the problem. A community that understands moral obligation this deeply should not need to be told that the men guarding the gates are owed something, or that money taken from a soldier’s family to fund an exemption from soldiering is not sacred money. The Haredim kept the Torah alive for 2,000 years without a state. They should ask themselves how much longer they expect to manage to do so without one.