The Eighth War

It's become formalized.

For much of the last two years, Israel has been fighting against seven entitities that declared war upon it: Gaza, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Iraq militias, and various Palestinian forces in the West Bank. Now, there’s an eighth war: the charedim. This was officially declared last week in a huge banner headline on the front page of Yated Ne’eman:

Of course, they claim that it is the State of Israel that has declared war on them. They declare that it is a war “against God and against His anointed ones.” This, they say, happened when the state arrested two yeshiva students “for the crime of learning Torah” as part of a “war on Torah.”

However, this is just as much a perversion of reality as those who claim that the Gaza war was started by Israel on October 8th. The State of Israel was simply very minimally enforcing its universal draft law in light of the huge manpower crisis. And nobody was arrested “for the crime of learning Torah”; that is simply appalling motzi shem ra (slander).

What does this war involve on the charedi side? Well, aside from the weakening of the economy by some thirty billion dollars annually that the charedi community was already doing, they plan further steps. The following acts are reported as being under consideration:

• Mass protests shutting down roads, with all the harm to people’s jobs and lives thereby caused;

• Protests outside Israeli embassies in the US and other places, to create international pressure;

• Arranging mass boycotts to collapse major companies;

• Arranging mass withdrawals of bank accounts to crash the banks.

And all this is because the man chairing the relevant Knesset Committee on behalf of the most charedi-kowtowing government in history, which was ready to grant exemptions to tens of thousands of charedim learning in yeshivah, along with billions of dollars, wanted at least some significant enlistment of charedim not learning in yeshivah, as used to be normative for charedim until the 1980s, to help with a national crisis causing immense suffering and great danger.

The truth is that this hateful declaration of a state of war is simply a further manifestation of the charedi secession from the rest of the Jewish People, which actualized after October 7th. Israel has been at war, millions of people are part of a nation whose men and women are leaving their learning and jobs and families for endless months at tremendous cost and suffering. But, as a matter of policy with rare exceptions, the charedi community refused to be involved, even though this caused everyone else to have a massively increased burden of service. They refused to even help those who are involved. And they feel no sense of guilt and don’t even show any signs that they actually care.

When you don’t help Israel when it’s at war, and you don’t care about the massively increased suffering that this causes, and you don’t care that you are causing ever-increasing economic harm to Israel, and you constantly slander and delegitimize Israel, you might as well officially admit that you’re at war with it.

The question is, how should the rest of us respond? I have been giving that a lot of thought, and I will share my proposal in a future post.