‘They won’t die for something they’re not part of’: why Israel’s ultra-Orthodox won’t join the army

Have the ultra-Orthodox gotten too much of a pass on military service? I would think they would be more in favor of it. Should they be required to serve:

 

The ultra orthodox are in a peculiar place in Israeli society.
Ultra orthodox tend to be more conservative and more "Right wing" - with the view that Israel has the right to take the "promised land" - but at the same time many ultra orthodox are also against serving in the military, something that has been accepted since the original founding of Israel.

This sounds like a total paradox, of course, but it is less of a paradox than it might seem. Because the ultra orthodox can be sorted out into different groups: there are both pacifists and very militant orthodox.
But there is still a portion of them that both want Israel to take back the "promised" territory, yet at the same time believe it is against their religion to serve in the military forces.

There is no way Netanyahu can require conscription of ultra orthodox without that eroding his political base. Natanyahu's party has to see that as totally obvious. Conscripting ultra orthodox would be seen as an attack on conservative Judaism, which Natanyahu's party supposedly stands for.

Of course this is not without a degree of irony.

 

Don't you know that the religious class is a protected class in every society and throughout history?

 

Hmmm...

A fanatical religious minority wants to control the lives of the majority, a majority that they don't want to be a part of.

Now where else are we seeing that now? It seems so familiar ...

The Haredi are even worse than our fundies. The kids all get trained to be ... a Talmudic scholar. Few of them will work at an actual job, they just collect government subsidies, and the rest of Israel is getting really ticked off about that.

 

Plus they are rather fecund.

 

They really don't need to be in the military. Muslims are like the Native Americans here and will leave alone people they think are touched in the head. They have evil spirts in them and will go into the person that harms them.

 

Some are waiting for the Messiah to return: