Lies, Lakewood Lies, and Statistics

Do secular Israelis evade IDF service just as much as charedim?

The yeshivish community in the US have several WhatsApp newsgroups. One of them, based out of Lakewood, is called CBN. It is currently claiming that there is a hate campaign unfairly targeting charedim for evading enlistment, while “secular Israelis skip service in numbers equal to or greater than Charedim.” CBN claims that the real data “exposes the anti-Charedim as exploiting the pain of lost soldiers to tell plain lies in their assault on Torah Jews.”

CBN cites a figure that 46.6% of people who get exemptions are secular Israelis, virtually identical to the 44.7% who are Charedi, while religious Zionists account for another 8.7%. CBN demands that “If fairness and equal application of the law are truly the goal, the data demands the same scrutiny be applied across the board, not a campaign that targets one community while giving the rest of society a pass.”

But it’s actually CBN that is failing to give the same scrutiny across the board, and thus telling lies, in three ways:

1. It Confuses Individual Unfitness with Blanket Community Policy

The most significant distortion is the nature of the criteria required to achieve the exemption:

Secular Exemptions (46.6%): These are evaluated entirely on an individual, case-by-case basis. To receive an exemption, a secular Israeli must prove a severe, documented medical condition, a profound psychological disability, or a criminal record. They cannot opt out simply because they do not feel like serving. If they do, they are arrested, and there are no mass protests.

Charedi Exemptions (44.7%): Historically, these were granted as a blanket, community-wide policy based strictly on religious identity and full-time Torah study (Torato Umanuto). A completely healthy, able-bodied Charedi youth could receive an exemption simply by filling out paperwork confirming his religious lifestyle, regardless of physical or mental fitness. And even now with the expiration of these exemptions, there is virtually no enforcement, even for charedim who are not learning.

2. It Ignores Demographic Proportions

The statistic looks only at the pool of people who were exempted, rather than the proportion of each community that actually serves.

The Secular Community: The vast majority of eligible secular Israelis enlist. The 46.6% slice of the “exempt pool” represents a tiny minority of the overall secular youth population—specifically, only those suffering from severe health or personal crises.

The Charedi Community: The 44.7% slice of the “exempt pool” that is charedi (and which has actually grown since the reported study was done) represents nearly the entire Charedi youth population. When a community of military age has an enlistment rate close to zero, it distorts the “exempt pool” data, masking the fact that non-enlistment is the standard rule for one group and a rare exception for the other.

3. It Conflates Men and Women

In Israel, military service is mandatory for both genders, but the rules governing exemptions are completely different for men and women. Many religious Zionist women and some traditional/secular women legally opt out of military service to perform Sherut Leumi (National service). By mixing male and female data together, the statistic inflates the number of “secular and religious exemptions,” obscuring the specific crisis surrounding male combat-ready enlistment numbers, which is the primary driver of Israel’s national defense and economic debates.

Summary:

Comparing the two numbers is a false equivalence. It equates a small proportion of secular Israeli youth who cannot serve due to a severe medical or mental health crisis with virtually the entirety of Charedi youth who do not serve due to a community policy. The actual relevant numbers are as follows:

State Secular Schools (Mamlachti): Enlistment sits at 88.4% for men and 88.5% for women.

State Religious / Religious Zionist Schools (Mamlachti-Dati): Enlistment sits at 85.1% for men (with 58.2% of women opting for National Service).

Ultra-Orthodox Schools (Charedi): Enlistment drops drastically to just 14.9% for men (which is mostly people who can only be considered charedi with a very flexible definition) and a negligible 0.6% for women.

If you know people who read CBN News, please share this with them. Ironically, CBN is actually less extreme than the other yeshivish news groups vis-a-vis Israel issues.