There are judges in Jerusalem. The government knew it.
The phrase, popularly associated with former prime minister Menachem Begin and the principle that governments must respect judicial rulings, is usually invoked as an expression of faith: However great the political pressure, the law will ultimately be upheld. In this case, however, it describes something considerably more cynical.
The coalition passed an amendment on July 14 after being warned, repeatedly and in the clearest possible terms, that it could not survive legal scrutiny. It then left the law effectively undefended in court. When nine justices unanimously struck it down, the politicians responsible attacked the court for producing the expected result.
The temporary amendment would have halted arrests, investigations, and other enforcement proceedings against qualifying ultra-Orthodox (haredi) yeshiva students who failed to report for military service. It did not exempt them from the draft; their legal obligation to serve remained, the state would simply have been prevented from enforcing it.
The law never took effect. Justice Ofer Grosskopf froze it the day after it passed, pending the petitions that produced Thursday’s judgment.
Grosskopf’s order was enacted against an already settled legal backdrop. After the statutory framework allowing yeshiva-student deferments expired in 2023, the High Court unanimously ruled in June 2024 that the government no longer had the authority to refrain from drafting eligible students. Subsequent rulings ordered the state to enforce that obligation meaningfully.
Its problems were not discovered after the vote by an overreaching court hunting for an excuse to intervene.
The Knesset’s own legal advisers warned lawmakers “once, twice, and three times,” as Deputy Supreme Court President Noam Sohlberg put it, that the legislation had departed entirely from the bill that passed its first reading.
That original bill was intended to increase haredi enlistment and national service, encourage employment, and reduce inequality. By the time the coalition had finished with it, it contained no enlistment targets, effective sanctions, or alternative enforcement system. Its principal achievement was to remove the consequences of refusing to report.
Knesset legal team warns High Court that legislative process fundamentally defective
The Knesset’s legal team eventually told the High Court that the legislative process was fundamentally defective. Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara opposed the law on both procedural and constitutional grounds. IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir warned that it would encourage noncompliance and was “clearly and unequivocally inconsistent” with the military’s needs.
The government was permitted to obtain separate legal representation – and it still offered no substantive legal defense. Instead, it submitted a short position saying the result of the case was “known in advance.”
That sentence should follow every attack now being directed at the court.
This was not a law that unexpectedly encountered a newly invented judicial obstacle; the coalition was told, at every stage, that it was crossing the basic procedural boundaries that turn a proposal into law. It crossed them anyway.
Nine justices, along with the petitioners and state and Knesset attorneys, were then required to spend their time litigating what lawmakers had already been told before the legislation passed.
Now, if the law somehow survived, the coalition would obtain temporary immunity from enforcement for haredi draft evaders. If it was struck down – as almost everyone involved understood it would be – haredi politicians would obtain something else: another judgment around which to rally their voters and another opportunity to portray the court as the enemy of Torah.
The law failed, and Shas immediately called the justices “the greatest generators of chaos in the country,” accused them of trampling democracy, and claimed that they were intervening in the election on behalf of the Left.
Pass an indefensible law, force the court to intervene, and then present that intervention as proof that the court is persecuting the community the law purported to protect.
The fear within haredi society is real. The messaging to families, explicit and implicit, is that military enlistment threatens their children’s religious identity and standing within their community, and that enforcement of an obligation imposed by Israeli law amounts to persecution of Torah students.
But that fear was not created by the High Court. It is the product of decades in which political and religious leaders, with the state’s cooperation and frequent capitulation, allowed a separate understanding of citizenship to take hold: that the laws governing military service were ultimately negotiable for one community, even when they remained compulsory for everyone else.
The state bears deep responsibility for that failure. It failed to ensure that every Israeli child receives an education in the rights and obligations of citizenship, and allowed temporary arrangements to become an assumed way of life and repeatedly postponed the moment at which it would have to tell haredi citizens the truth.
Haredi leadership must take responsibility
But haredi leadership bears responsibility as well.
Citizenship cannot mean access to representation, budgets, benefits, and political power, while its obligations are framed as oppression whenever they become inconvenient.
This is why Sohlberg’s despair, which carries through very clearly in the decision, is so poignant.
Sohlberg is not a judge hostile to Torah study looking at haredi society from the outside. He is an observant Jew, a graduate of a hesder yeshiva, and a jurist whose opinions are steeped in Jewish law and religious texts.
At the July hearing, an attorney representing a haredi organization claimed that the Torah prohibited enlistment under the current conditions. Justice David Mintz, also observant, responded: “I simply cannot believe what I am hearing.”
In Thursday’s judgment, Sohlberg answered the claim at greater length.
“With the signing of another chapter – as bleak as those before it – in the saga of haredi enlistment, and precisely ‘out of recognition of the value of Torah study’ and the Torah’s values, I cannot refrain from what has nearly become a fixed ritual,” he wrote.
He would try once again, he said, to make clear “to anyone willing to listen, that this is not the way of Torah. Far from it.”
He cited Moses’s question to the tribes that sought to remain outside the coming battle: “Shall your brothers go to war while you sit here?”
The court did not order the arrest of Torah students because they study Torah. As Sohlberg stressed, enforcement applies because they have not complied with a legal obligation to report for service.
Nor did the court create the haredi draft crisis; the Knesset preserved the duty to enlist and then attempted to switch off its enforcement for one group.
