A New Law Would Make It Easier for Young Haredi Men to Join the Israeli Workforce—and to Avoid Military Service

The majority of Israeli Ḥaredim do not perform mandatory military service, taking advantage of a special law dating back to the country’s founding that exempts yeshiva students from the draft. As a result, those ḥaredi men who would prefer not to pursue a life of religious study and teaching—the norm in their community—are discouraged from seeking jobs, since leaving yeshiva would make them eligible for conscription until they turn twenty-six. Israel’s religious parties have proposed a law that would lower that age by three to five years. While such a measure would ameliorate the problem of low workforce participating by ḥaredi men, and would be unlikely to reduce the number of Ḥaredim serving in the IDF, it is nonetheless unpopular because it further undergirds what many non-Ḥaredim see as a fundamentally unfair system making conscription mandatory for one part of the population and optional for another.