Who Is Being Unfairly Treated?

Lakewood strikes back

It appears that I struck a nerve. Yesterday I criticized CBN News from Lakewood for spreading fake news. They had claimed that there is an assault on charedi Jews which unfairly targets them for envading enlistment when at least as many secular Israelis also evade enlistment. Amongst other problems with their claim, I pointed out that among non-charedim, enlistment rates are at least 85%, while among charedim, it’s only 15% (even with a liberal definition of charedi). CBN News was not happy with me:

So I’m a “washed-up iconoclast”! Goodness. They explain as follows:

We never said the rate or percentage of non-enlistment is equal between Charedim and the secular/traditional population. Of course the rate is higher for Charedim - they’re roughly 13-14% of the population producing close to half the exempted pool, while secular and traditional Israelis make up roughly half the population. Nobody disputes that math, and anyone claiming we said otherwise is either misreading the post or deliberately distorting it to score points against Torah Jews.

What we said - and what remains true - is that the raw number of people avoiding service is on par between the two groups: 46.6% secular versus 44.7% Charedi out of the total exemption pool. That’s the government’s own figure, not “fake math.” The number is what determines how many people are missing from the army and how many people the establishment ought to be holding accountable if fairness were actually the goal, instead of making Charedim the scapegoat.

Alas, CBN still doesn’t get what “fairness” means, so in true yeshivish manner, let me give a parable. (And in passing, let me note that CBN’s designation of charedim as “Torah Jews” is offensive and inaccurate. Jews who fulfill the Torah learn in yeshiva and serve in the IDF - and there are nearly a hundred such yeshivot, including a very small number of charedi ones.)

The parable is as follows: There’s a certain amount of tax evasion in every population. It’s not the easiest thing to track; there are some people paying low taxes for legitimate reasons, and others who are hiding income. The Tax Authority uses a combination of algorithms and random audits to investigate such things.

But suppose there was one sector of a million people which openly declared that, as a community, they refuse to pay any taxes at all. Would anyone claim that the Tax Authority is being “unfair” by focusing on that sector, simply because the rest of the population is larger?! For multiple reasons, it would make sense to focus on that group.

That’s one response to CBN. But in any case, the claim that the authorities are disproportionately focusing on charedim is not even remotely true!

Let’s take a look at how CBN claims the situation to be:

…There is an entire industry of Israeli attorneys who specialize in getting secular clients out of service - not through documented severe illness, but through vague “social” or “moral” objection, and through medical and mental-health claims that, by every honest account, are far easier for a non-frum applicant to get approved than for anyone else. It has reportedly become harder in recent years for religious applicants to get waved through on mental-health grounds, while for secular applicants it remains, by all accounts, still easy. That’s roughly 15% of the exempted secular population walking away from service for reasons that have nothing to do with being sick, and everything to do with not wanting to go.

There are several different types of non-charedi people that CBN is lumping together. Let’s discuss each in turn:

1. People who genuinely need to be exempt for medical reasons. This is, obviously, a real thing. And it’s not a tiny number of people. For example, one of my neighbors has one son who is in the IDF, but another who was exempt due to a stomach condition that the army just didn’t want the responsibility of dealing with. Obviously, genuine psychological conditions are another legitimate reason for the IDF not to want to draft someone, and for whatever reason, psychological conditions are extremely widespread in today’s world.

2. People who seek exemption as conscientious objectors. This is strictly evaluated by the military’s Conscience Committee. To qualify, you must be a total pacifist—opposing all military action universally (needless to say, there are no charedi pacifists). CBN later claims that this includes those who object to Israeli policy in the post ‘67 territories, but in fact such “selective objectors” are overwhelmingly denied an exemption, and if they refuse to enlist are imprisoned. Applicants participate in interviews to prove their anti-militaristic, pacifist ideology. This process is rigorous and only a small number of applicants successfully receive this exemption. Those who do not receive the exemption and still refuse to enlist are sent to prison.

3. People who fake having a serious psychological condition. This also occurs, but is not as simple as it sounds. You can’t just wear your underpants on your head and stick two pencils up your nose. It requires evaluations from licensed professionals and an evaluation with a military mental health officer. And there is no reason to believe that it’s easier for non-charedim to slip by than charedim. (Still, let us note that a non-charedi who slips by is at least still contributing to the economy rather than living on welfare.)

Data is lacking as to how many people fall into each of the aforementioned categories. But clearly there are many, many people who have legitimate reasons not to be drafted. Thus, while the overall number of exemptions may be equal in the large secular community and the small charedi community, the fact is that many more of the exemptions in the secular community are for legitimate reasons, aside from the proportionality being very different.

Meanwhile, secular Israelis who provide no reason not to enlist get arrested and sent to prison. CBN’s claim that non-charedi draft-dodgers don’t get arrested is simply not true. This year alone, of the 165 non-charedi draft dodgers that were arrested in proactive military police operations, only 16 were charedi - that’s less than 10%, even though they are half of the total number of draft-dodgers! CBN says that secular draft-dodgers don’t get headlines or mobs outside their homes, but that’s because their society doesn’t protest and riot when the police arrest draft-dodgers!

Now let’s turn to charedim, who CBN claims are not viewed correctly:

Critics love to say the decades-long blanket Charedi exemption was a rubber stamp, but this is not true. When the Torah Study exemption was actually in force, a bachur or yungerman had to prove full-time enrollment, and the rules were unforgiving: leave the country past a certain number of days, work part-time, or take time away from the beis medrash, and you were out of compliance. That’s precisely why so many bnei Torah - including men learning in the US with family ties back home - ended up needing entirely different exemption categories, not the yeshiva exemption at all. The narrative that every exempted Charedi just filled out a form and walked away is a lie the establishment tells because the truth is inconvenient: the yeshiva exemption was rigorous, while the secular alternatives were not.

Pardon my English, but what a load of fetid dingo’s kidneys. “Proving enrollment” meant getting a letter from a Rosh Yeshivah, who is usually happy to provide a fake letter since his yeshiva gets government funding for each student who was officially enrolled. In fact the story recently broke about a yeshiva in Ashdod which only had less than a tenth than the number of officially enrolled students, and this story was considered to be only the tip of the iceberg. It is estimated that fully a third to a half of the 80,000 “yeshiva students” who received an exemption were not actually learning in any serious fashion, or even at all.

As for the “unforgiving rules,” gimme a break. Yes, when charedim wanted to leave the country, it required IDF authorization. But that was also required when non-charedim wanted to leave the country - and they usually wouldn’t get it, because they were in the army! My charedi neighbors had a much easier time traveling abroad than my son in hesder. And charedim learning in yeshivah get far more official annual vacation than soldiers!

And how many charedim are even being arrested now?! It’s only been 16 this year, out of eighty thousand draft-dodgers, many of whom are extremely easy to find - you can just walk into a yeshiva! And no arrests were done in yeshiva - those arrested were those who were otherwise occupied. One celebrated charedi “martyr” was subsequently discovered to be enjoying himself in Pattaya, Thailand’s seediest district.

In summary, all the claims about “unfair” focusing upon charedim and “unfair” treatment of them is actually about applying standards that are completely normative for the rest of society - and still only applying them far more leniently!

You wanna talk about “unfair”?! “Unfair” is that millions of non-charedim have been part of a society in which the husbands/sons/fathers have been called up to endless rounds of reserve duty, harming their Torah learning, their studies, their jobs, their family lives, their marriages, their mental and physical health, and sometimes their very lives, while for charedim the past three years have not involved any of that. For CBN to complain about “unfair treatment” is not just a ridiculous falsehood, it’s an unbelievable chutzpah.

Dear CBN editor reading this, I hope that you will retract and apologize. If you want to have a public discussion/ debate, I’m up for it. Sincerely, a “washed-up iconoclast.”