Assault on Precinct 38

The charedim go to war against Israel - supported by the government.

After suffering attacks from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, Israel is now in the midst of a war on an eighth front. But you won’t read about it in newsgroups such as “Israel Live News.”

The crisis of the manpower shortage in the IDF, with the crushing burden on reservists that it has caused, has occurred at the same time as the expiry of the charedi exemption from army service. Last August, the charedim declared that they considered even a minimal enforcement of army enlistment to be an act of war. In a bizarrely hypocritical move, they warned that if the state tried to commit the terrible sin of taking charedi young men out of the Beis HaMidrash to fight, rather than letting them secure safety and success by learning Torah, they would respond by leaving the Beis HaMidrash to fight rather than securing their safety and success by learning Torah.

Yet the Attorney-General has started this minimal enforcement, by cutting off certain special financial privileges that charedi draft-dodgers formerly received. And the police have been making some arrests of draft-dodgers. Accordingly, yesterday and today, the charedim have gone out to war.

Huge numbers of charedim, apparently largely from the more extremist factions, are rioting. They are blocking roads and train lines across the country, without caring for the consequences that this causes for others. They are trying to turn police cars over. They tried to break into the offices of the police and other national authorities. A religous soldier with a big knitted kippa was mobbed; a religious female soldier in long sleeves and a long skirt had to be escorted to safety while people screamed shikseh at her.

My home town of Beit Shemesh has been one of the focal points. Route 38, the highway leading to Beit Shemesh from the main Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, is home to a police station that services the area. Last night, a charedi draft-dodger was arrested and brought to the station. Following this, a gang of rioting charedim set fire to the forest around the police station, hurled debris at it, and broke into it.

One of the fires set outside the police station

And where is the Minister of Internal Security amist all this anarchy, the man in charge of police, the strongman who was elected on the platform of asserting sovereignty and showing who’s boss? He’s decided to take the side of the traffic-blocking, fire-starting, police-fighting rioters, with a post declaring that the real problem is with the “anarchy” of the “criminal” Attorney-General, whose crackdown on charedi draft-dodging threatens the survival of the coalition.