The law governing the exemption for seminary students expired last year, but the government continued to allow them not to serve. The Supreme Court ruled that in the absence of a new legal basis for the exemption, the state must draft them. The ruling also barred seminaries from receiving state subsidies if scholars avoid service without deferrals or exemptions.
The waivers also have wider economic impact. The ultra-Orthodox make up 13% of Israel's 10 million population, a figure expected to reach 19% by 2035 due to their high birth rates.
The conscription waiver keeps some of the community in seminaries and out of the workforce, hindering economic growth and placing a welfare burden on middle-class taxpayers.
Israel's 21% Arab minority are also mostly exempted from the draft.
These people are pretty fanatical about JUST studying the Tora... And they're going to give them guns and training... What could go wrong?
They demoed some military units made up of just these ultra-orthodox. The outcome was they did such blantant and heinous crimes in the West Bank that the US recognized their war crimes and blacklisted then from using any of their weapons.
Yes. You are referring to the “Netzach Yehuda” (Victory of Judea) battalion. It was sanctioned by the
government under the Leahy law.
surely you can't pull a trigger on the Sabbath
It's a subject of debate among normal Jewish people, but for most zionists it has been settled since the Maccabees. You can't 'start' a fight on or just before shabbat, you can 'finish' a fight that is ongoing, zionists just consider the war on Palestine and Arabs generally to be an ongoing defensive war so they can skip any holy days they need to