How Israel Became The Enemy of The Haredim

Israelis are shocked–shocked I tell you–to discover their Haredi neighbors consider them enemies.

Israelis are shocked–shocked I tell you–to discover their Haredi neighbors consider them enemies.

Haredim have declared “war” against the State of Israel for enlisting Haredi youths into the army. Israelis have previously assumed the use of this term “war” to be a metaphor or exaggeration despite all evidence to the contrary.

For example, here is a video of Rabbi Shalom Ber Sorotzkin (the head of the Ateres Shlomo) discussing their plans to paralyze the State of Israel via attacks on Ben Gurion Airport, trains, and civilian vehicles.

https://x.com/yoeli_brim/status/1983239801814790329

The reason for denying that Haredim are engaging in increasingly violent resistance against mainstream Israelis is two-fold: an Israeli belief that all Jews are mutually responsible for one another (כל ישראל ערבים זה לזה), which extends towards a culture of brotherhood among Israelis. This is compounded by wishful optimism that the army’s manpower shortage is soluble via Haredi recruits.

Familiarity with political theory will quickly disabuse us of these errors.

In The Concept of The Political, notorious Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt posited a concept called the friend-enemy distinction. The friend-enemy distinction is the observation that polite politics is predicated on the groups involved not feeling existentially threatened by the others. When a group feels existentially threatened, they divide society into “friends” (political allies) and “enemies” (threats).

An existential threat, that is, a threat to one’s existence, can take several forms. While the most obvious existential threat is a threat to one’s life, people feel just as existentially threatened by threats to our traditional lifestyles and communities.

This is where the liberal cultural worldview of Israelis creates a blindspot in understanding how Haredi communities operate (and fail).

To exist within the modern world, Haredi communities employ a carrot-and-stick model to retain allegiances of community members. While the stick is more familiar to the public (social ostracization, economic dependence), the carrot is not well understood.

The Haredi world is built on a very tenuous and fragile social compact. Formally, the Haredi world and lifestyle revolves around the yeshiva. In the yeshiva that the cultural tastes and ideological mores of boys and young men are shaped.

The question: why do young men at the prime of their lives agree to forgo the opportunity to hang out around women and deprive themselves of vocational training? The stick matters, but teenage boys are not known to be motivated by punishments.

The Haredi social compact is this: give us the best years of your life, follow our rules and cultural expectations, and you will be rewarded with a virginal eidel maidel. In other words, rather than the shidduch system serving the yeshiva system, the yeshiva system serves the shidduch system! That is, of course, a crass thing to articulate aloud, so it is referred to in euphemisms.

This arrangement is remarkably fragile.

The army threatens the Haredi community for very different reasons than their rhetoric would seem to indicate. Haredim claim that the army cannot accommodate the Haredi lifestyle, which is true in a sense. The government responds by making “accommodations”, through institutions such as the Hashmonaim Brigade, but such “accommodations” misunderstand what about the army is so incompatible with the Haredi lifestyle.

By joining the army, young men are given vocational training which allows them to be self-supporting in and out of the army, basic training which makes them physically attractive, and proximity to young women. “Join the army, and you too can become competent, attractive, and hitched!” The army thus shatters the Haredi social compact by drawing young men out of yeshivas and into an alternative arrangement for success.

It is hard to believe the Haredi community can survive a new arrangement of that sort. Only the least desirable young men would choose to remain in the yeshiva over the army if the army were a socially-viable alternative. The Haredi community has no choice but to resist army recruitment by any means necessary.

The Haredi lifestyle is not threatened by Palestinian terrorism or invading armies, because the Israeli army solves that problem for them. No: their lifestyle is threatened by the army’s need for tens of thousands of recruits.

The prospect of mass-recruitment into the army thus poses an existential threat to the Haredi way of life. In so doing, Haredim have reshaped their relationship to Israelis as one of enemies.

This creates the great irony that Haredim are willing to leave yeshiva to engage in violent actions against the state, but not on behalf of the state. Lacking any other way out, Haredim will engage in mass protests which will do nothing. Then, they will begin holding true to their threats.

My prediction (always a fraught exercise!) is that the Haredim continue to escalate against the state over the coming months. The attitude of the Israeli public shifts from minor annoyance to hatred. Then, something will go wrong. Perhaps an accident, perhaps a teenager does something out of line. Rioters torch a car with a baby inside, or assault an American diplomat.

An incident severe enough to garner public outrage that catalyzes a conceptual shift among the Israeli public from annoyance at Haredi draft-dodgers to enmity. That moment will be exceptionally dangerous. Haredim are under the delusion that international pressure will protect them from Israeli retaliation, but human rights in practice only applies to secular liberals and uncivilized barbarians.

The Israeli army is composed of tens of thousands of battle-hardened soldiers, including thousands of Druze with no moral qualms about massacring Haredi rioters.

The Haredim may have “declared war”, but such a violent conflict will be more akin to the Heroro Wars than whatever historically illiterate example they’re going with this month. A word of wisdom: if you’re a Herero, you don’t want to start a war.

The best resolution to this brewing conflict, the one in which everyone wins, is for Haredim to lose. Let’s pray they do so quickly and peacefully.

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An organization called Lev Lachayal is doing a small part to assist lone soldiers recruiting into the IDF, and getting support in the forms of housing, psychological counseling, and Torah learning while there. I’m sure they would appreciate your financial support.