No Prison For Charedim

It's not the right solution

An announcement was recently made that the Military Police was stepping up arrests of people who evade conscription. This was met with howls of rage from the charedi parties, who threatened to bring down the government (because this issue is infinitely more important to them than any national security issue).

In fact, the arrests were not targeting charedim specifically, but rather people from every sector. Though of course there are many, many more draft-dodgers in the charedi community than in other communities, as this chart shows:

As you can see above, every other sector of the population pulls beyond their weight in military service, the dati community especially so, and that’s all to make up for the fact that the charedi community does only a tiny fraction of the contribution that they should be making.

But is arresting draft-dodgers really the solution to the IDF manpower shortage? To be sure, you can’t have one rule for charedim and a different rule for everyone else. But in light of the enormous, systemic and ideological problem with the charedi community - 80,000 men who are opposed to serving - prison is probably not going to help solve the problem. You can’t put 80,000 people in prison, and even if you did, that wouldn’t solve the manpower deficit.

However, there is another much simpler solution, that has never been tried. We don’t need to punish charedim at all for evading sharing the responsibility of national defense. All we need to do is stop paying and incentivizing them to do it.

The Likud might claim to be a right-wing capitalist party, but it’s operating a bizarre socialist welfare state to benefit a community that is ideologically and wilfully undereducated and underemployed. The charedi lifestyle is massively subsidized by the rest of the country. Here’s a chart that displays this very clearly, from a crucial article by the Kohelet Forum about the charedi financial drain of the economy. It divides the population into three sectors - charedim, Arabs, and everyone else - and shows how much the average family in each sector contributes to national resources or takes out of them after the taxes and benefits have been calculated:

Non-charedi families put in an average net of over 6000 shekels every month; charedi families take out 4000. This is via all kinds of government grants and subsidies and tax breaks. Even their healthcare is massively subsidized.

And all we need to do is stop giving them all these free financial benefits to draft evaders. No stipends for yeshivos. No subsidized daycare. No discounts on national and municipal taxes. No subsidized public transport. No welfare benefits. No subsidized healthcare. No lottery for subsidized housing. Cancelling their drivers’ licenses would also be a good idea, and one that even charedi roshei yeshiva might support.

Some charedim will be able to take the financial hit. But many others, out of sheer necessity, will change their lifestyle, and their culture will change to make army service acceptable. Redirect even some of the billions of shekels given to charedim into raising the salary of soldiers, with an additional raise for those in combat, and we’ll see lots and lots of people enlist. וְהַכֶּסֶף יַעֲנֶה אֶת הַכֹּל

And what about those who prefer abject poverty? Well, if they are that determined to live by their unethical principles, let them do so and suffer the consequences. They can (mistakenly) view themselves as being the sort of honorary Levites that Rambam describes, but then they must also adhere to Rambam’s description of such people as casting off worldly concerns and receiving their sustenance from God.

No matter what you think about the effectiveness of such strategies, there is absolutely no reason why those who serve the country and make sacrifices to help everyone should subsidize those who refuse to do so. If you want to devote yourself to Torah and force everyone else to leave their studies and jobs and families and risk their lives and health for endless bouts of reserve duty, then go ahead, but don’t expect us to pay for your lifestyle!

(Note that all this is even along the lines of the position of the Netziv of Volozhin. He was of the view that under certain circumstances, Torah scholars should indeed be exempt from combat - but he says that they still should accompany soldiers to the front line, be available for other forms of national service, and pay higher monetary taxes to support the military!)

Of course, the only way this will happen is with enormous campaigning to make charedi financial support politically toxic. Hence this blog. Please spread the message!