Perhaps now is the moment to extend the draft to the ultra-Orthodox, because a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

This is a segment from The “Yesterday’s Politics, Today!” Edition.

Transcript:

And now it is time for our second discussion.

So Linda, draft Haridim now?

That’s a good question.

The Defense Ministry publicized for public comment two memoranda of proposed changes in the law governing Army service that would make compulsory service longer for soldiers now and for the foreseeable future, and the other that would make reserve duty much longer as well.

According to the new proposals, compulsory service would be extended by four months from two years and eight months to three years.

The maximum number of days that reservists serve each year would more than double in most cases.

Grunt reservists would go from being called up a maximum of 54 days every three years, or an average of 18 days a year, to 42 days a year.

Non-commissioned officers would go from being called up 70 days every three years, an average of 23 and a third days a year, to being called up 48 days a year.

Officers would go from 84 days over three years, or 28 days a year, to 55 days a year.

What’s more, the age of retirement from the reserves would increase for grunt soldiers from 40 to 45, and for officers from 45 to 50.

Under today’s rules, a plain old soldier finishing the Army at 21 would do 342 days of reserve duty in his lifetime, almost a year.

Under the newly proposed rules, a plain old soldier finishing the Army at 21 would do 1,008 days of reserves, or more than 2 and 3/4 years.

Ouch.

The proposed changes are painful and irksome, and lots of people worry about the effect they will have on individuals, their ability to thrive at their jobs and maintain intimacy in their families, and on the society as a whole, especially the economy.

But the biggest gripe by far about the proposed changes to Army service is that they are mum about the ultra-Orthodox.

The rationale for the draconian new demands on the time and safety of most Israelis is that the Army needs the people to do its job.

But if this is true, why not make use of the 13.3% of the population that is Haredi?

In recent years, those who support, or at least accept, the ultra-Orthodox demand to be exempt from conscription have argued mostly that the IDF simply doesn’t need Haredim and indeed does not really want them.

Those who argue that the ultra-Orthodox should be conscripted mostly said that even if they are not needed, fairness demands they serve.

But if they are actually needed, what justification could there possibly be for not recruiting them to compulsory service?

It was in this spirit that Benny Gantz’s National Unity Party responded to the new memoranda with this.

“In general, we are more convinced than ever that there is a deep need to promote an Israeli service law that will encourage all communities to share the burden, including Arab and ultra-Orthodox citizens.”

Gili Troper, a leader of the National Union Party known for his refusal to vilify the ultra-Orthodox, posted on Facebook that, quote, “The idea that young men will extend their service to three years while their cohorts do not serve a single day in military or civil frameworks is intolerable.

The idea that mothers and fathers will have to leave their children losing a year of studies with their jobs compromised for dozens of days a year while others do not serve at all is unacceptable.”

Finance Minister Bitzalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionism Party tweeted that Haredim must, quote, “take on a more significant part in defense and security missions.”

Even Minister of Welfare and Social Affairs from the Mizrahi Ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, Yaakov Margi, said that there are many in the ultra-Orthodox community who can and should be drafted into the IDF.

Shas Interior Minister Moshe Arbel lately said that the task ahead is to make more ultra-Orthodox men into combat soldiers.

Still, after many, many years of fighting over whether and how ultra-Orthodox boys might be drafted in the army and the coalition, there is little stomach for trying to establish an ultra-Orthodox draft now in the middle of the war.

But maybe this is the only time when such a draft can be set up.

The Stanford economist Paul Romer once famously said, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

Allison, is now the time to debate the conscription of ultra-Orthodox boys into the IDF?

No, it’s not.

But we don’t really have a choice, right, if they’re going to introduce legislation that extends the need for non-ultra-Orthodox to serve.

And we have also in the works and part of our coalition agreement, ultra-Orthodox parties wanting to equate yeshiva study with service in the IDF.

Remember that?

So I just think that political circumstances mean that we have to debate it.

I’m not necessarily that this is the time.

But I agree with the crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

I mean, it’s kind of like agreeing on the Palestinian state that everyone knows what the solution is going to look like when it looks like, when it comes.

We know kind of what the borders would be or what the arrangements would be.

But just nobody can really agree on it and sit down and agree on it.

Everybody knows that there is never going to be a possibility of having these mass numbers of Haredi boys, men, whatever, become regular soldiers, become combat soldiers, to be able to change Haredi society enough that it will embrace it.

And everybody knows that the rest of society will never accept a situation in which they are formally excused from the service.

Everybody knows that we’re going to end up with some sort of a compromise that involves national service contributing to the state, whether it’s volunteer, whether it’s hospitals or working in their society, that’s going to be possible for Arab citizens of Israel to do, that for ultra-Orthodox citizens of Israel to do, that will address the need for some sort of equality and equity and yet not try to move the needle too much in ultra-Orthodox society to try to make mass numbers of soldiers.

That’s the solution.

And it’s just like some sort of a political pressure poker game has to be played in which we act like, yeah, we really do want to force all of these Haredim to go to the army and put them under enough pressures that they compromise.

They say, yeah, OK, so we will do the national service instead.

And so maybe this is a situation in which we can do it because of the war, because it’s clear that the country has so many needs and not only the military need to fight it.

And there’s plenty of time and place for citizens who want to do national service who don’t necessarily want that to do military service to do something meaningful.

So yeah, so maybe it is a moment where we can actually address this problem.

I don’t think we’re going to address it with the solution of getting ultra-Orthodox en masse into the army, especially as combat soldiers.

I think that we could not address it now.

This bill, something like this bill, is going to pass.

And I bet that it probably won’t end up mentioning anything about the ultra-Orthodox.

But we shouldn’t do it.

This seems to me to be a real opportunity.

I, for years, have felt like we make too much of this issue of ultra-Orthodox conscription and that it’s fine for the ultra-Orthodox not to be conscripted.

But I don’t exactly feel that way now.

This new law asks for too much of other people’s time.

Though I have to admit that reading it, I was like, oh my god, I can’t believe how little people have to do the reserves.

When I was doing the reserves, I had to do 40 days a year every year.

Back in the day.

Back in the day, yeah, exactly.

I was having those kind of feelings.

When I was in the army.

But this increasing it back to the levels that it was when it was too high and even beyond is impossible.

And adding five years of service to everyone, it’s just too much without– and to increase the gap between those who serve and those who don’t serve in such a dramatic way at this moment, after so many people have given so much time and also risked their lives, it just seems impossible.

And the happy thing about this is that this is the first moment where a lot of voices within the ultra-Orthodox community seem to recognize that this is true.

Certainly in Shas, you have Margi and Aryeh Deryi himself, the head of Shas, ministers and the head of the party saying that something has to be done and that more ultra-Orthodox people need to serve more fully than ever in the past.

And that’s amazing.

And then among the Ashkenazim as well, you also for the first time hear people say we recognize that this is unacceptable.

And not only that, you have rank and file ultra-Orthodox people saying we feel part of this war.

We feel as though we want to contribute.

And so you had that really basically symbolic number of, I don’t know, some dozens of people– Very symbolic. –going and volunteering.

But even still, it was amazing in a society that in the past, volunteering for the army was deeply looked down upon.

These were people who in their own communities were viewed as doing something heroic.

There had never been anything like that.

Right.

I also think that there are changes going on in ultra-Orthodox society where they want to be more part of the modern world.

There are schools that are now offering– there are yeshivot that are offering the bagrut.

And maybe this is an opportunity.

And that having even a small number of ultra-Orthodox soldiers I think is important.

They’re drafting people early from the mechinot, the pre-army programs.

I have several friends whose kids are not being able to finish their mechina, and they’re being called up.

My friends are very distraught.

They feel it’s really not fair.

The Reform Movement is part of a coalition of groups that yesterday, I believe, or the day before, went to the Supreme Court and filed a petition against that for the discrimination of pulling them out of their pre-army programs.

And something that we haven’t mentioned– I’m sorry, Linda, to interrupt you.

But also there’s the issue of the yeshiva arrangements, which is national religious people, not har ad-dim, able to do a very, very abbreviated combat, usually army service, and combine that with yeshiva studies.

And also that’s unfair, the fact that they’re not pulling them out of the yeshivas, only these pre-army mechinot.

Sorry, Linda, continue.

No, that’s OK.

I was just going to say my good friend, Jonathan Livni, said, we have an agreement.

He’s sort of avowedly secular.

Sorry, we have an agreement with the har ad-dim.

They pray for us, and we die for them.

And maybe it’s a chance to– even if the numbers aren’t huge, at some point, there will be a tipping point.

And A, it’s just not fair.

Noah, your children and my children have been serving in reserve duty and have had to put their lives on hold for quite a while, have come back from the States.

My son left a business, and his business certainly suffered while he was here for almost four months.

It’s just not fair.

And maybe this really is an opportunity.

And if not the army, then national service.

But it’s just not fair.

That’s it.

I’m sorry.

I agree with you.

But it feels, for the first time to me, anyway, as though things are lining up in a positive way.

This seemed like an issue that was just so deeply divided and divisive that all my life, for years, I’ve felt like it can lead to nothing good.

And this is the very, very first moment where I feel like there are changes going on among the ultra-Orthodox in the way that they view their responsibility to society and the way they understand the army.

And there are changes in politics where there is a big middle now, represented mostly by Benny Gantz’s party, that seeks a solution that doesn’t use words like leeches and parasites to describe the ultra-Orthodox and seeks a solution.

And then there is this war that all of us feel part of.

And so I think that there really are opportunities that there never have been in the past.

The problem is it’s just such a hard time to take advantage of those opportunities.

Just before this war, there was an offer on the table that involved national service instead of the military service, a perfect compromise.

And it was turned down by the coalition parties in this government.

You think that some sort of magic wand has been waved over the ultra-Orthodox and over their position that because of the war, now if you put that same compromise on the table in front of them, they would go, oh, yeah, we’re ready to do it?

Yeah, not at all a magic wand.

I think that this has been for everyone in the country, this experience has been one of massive change and reevaluation and probably as much or more for the ultra-Orthodox than anywhere else where I think I gather just from reading the ultra-Orthodox newspapers that they have been shocked to find the degree to which they, which is mostly to say not necessarily the political leaders in the Knesset, but the people on the ground, feel this deep, deep identification with what the rest of the country is going through in a way that they haven’t before.

And so I sense it just by reading Yathed Ne’eman that this is the, I have never experienced a time where the newspaper sounds so unalienated from the rest of society.

It’s shocking. – Well, I hope, I bow to your greater knowledge and readership of Yathed Ne’eman.

I hope it’s reflecting the sentiments of the power brokers there, because again, here’s your optimism knocking up against my cynicism.

You know, this isn’t, Haaretz society is not a democracy.

It’s a very small number of people at the top who are making the decisions about these kinds of things.

So the changes can’t just be in the rank and file.

It has to be in the leadership. – Yes, but it’s very dialectical.

It’s not, we have this image as though, and I often hear people say, “Oh, just one rabbi decides “and everyone votes exactly the way he says.”

But that’s not actually true either.

It’s much more dialectical than that.

The people who are leaders, especially the political leaders, are highly influenced by other people as well. – But if there are X number of hours in yeshiva in an educational environment, the person who’s messaging that education of whether you do the army, you don’t do the army, you consider national service, you don’t consider national service, that’s gonna be decided by those educators and teachers who are funded by the money that comes from, you know, the people at the top.

So that’s why I just don’t see any kind of mass change happening without them buying in. – Right, I just think that their positions are not utterly deaf to the feelings of the people with whom they live and who send them their students.

And so I think there’s something more dialectical that in this relationship.

And in fact, I just think you see change.

The Haredi press is somewhere in between these.

It’s highly influenced by the leaders and now it sounds very, very different than it ever has in the past 30 years that I’ve been reading it.

It just sounds very different than it did in the past.

And where is that voice coming from?

It’s coming from this meeting between those elites, the people who have power and everyone else and attitudes all around seem to be shifting in some degree.

You’re right, it’s not as though, we hear the leaders of the ultra-Orthodox parties, the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox parties in the Knesset sound very much the way that they’ve always sounded.

But I don’t think that, I think there’s good reason to think that that might be changing. – Once again, I hope that I’m wrong and you’re right.

I just wanna add one more quick thing, which is I think that the Haredi leaders were afraid that the army meant people leaving the fold and joining modern society.

And I think at least in Shas, they realize that it’s happening anyway and that they can’t stop it.

And that there was a Facebook right at the beginning of the war of a ultra-Orthodox, someone who came home in his uniform.

People used to get stoned for walking through Haredi neighborhoods with uniforms on.

And he was showered with candies by all these little kids throwing candies at him.

And again, that’s one example.

But I kind of agree with Noah that I think maybe something is changing and that there is an opportunity.