Legal expert Shlomit Ravitsky Tur-Paz warns that Israel’s draft bill for the Haredi community may entrench societal divisions and worsen long-term challenges for the economy and military.

Regardless of what happens with the current draft bill to regulate conscription for the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community, a situation in which an entire population group, which is projected to grow, remains apart and does not contribute enough to society and the economy, is unsustainable, attorney Shlomit Ravitsky Tur-Paz said.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post on Thursday, Ravitsky Tur-Paz, an expert at the Israel Democracy Institute, laid out the fault line in the so-called “incentives” in the draft bill being pushed by the coalition.

These incentives can be easily manipulated, she said. More importantly, they would have the opposite effect, entrenching haredi society even deeper in its insulation.

“Our grievances are with the state. It is the body that created a situation where the haredi community exists in its own autonomous bubble, where it receives full rights but does not perform full duties, and is disconnected.”

“The state has to come back to this issue; it is its responsibility” to be the regulating authority, Ravitsky Tur-Paz said.

The issue, she continued, is not of religiosity – it is of national collectivism. Until haredi society accepts that “the way that Israel is right now is unsustainable,” until the government utilizes its own power for this cause, reality will not change, she warned.

For decades, existing frameworks allowed broad draft deferments for haredi yeshiva students, but they were repeatedly found to violate principles of equality.

A landmark 2017 High Court of Justice ruling struck down the existing arrangement as unconstitutional and instructed the Knesset to legislate a new model within a year – an instruction that went unfulfilled.

No legal basis for exempting yeshiva students

When the status quo finally expired on June 30, 2023, Israel was left without any binding legal basis for exempting yeshiva students, and the court repeatedly pressed the government to explain why it was not issuing draft notices or enforcing conscription equally.

The government, facing intense pressure from its haredi coalition partners, attempted to buy time with temporary measures, promising future legislation.

One year later, in June 2024 – after October 7 and the Israel-Hamas War had begun – a nine-justice panel of the High

Court ruled unequivocally that no lawful exemption framework existed, ordering the state to draft haredim under standard conscription law and cut funding that effectively subsidized evasion.

The ruling came just as the government was circulating early drafts of new legislation built around sharply reduced enlistment targets and weak enforcement mechanisms.

But these proposals, critics argued, were all tailored to coalition needs rather than military realities. Enforcement remained limited, enlistment rates stayed low, and negotiations over a durable draft law dragged into this year, with multiple versions collapsing under political pressure.

In November, another version of the draft bill was introduced by Likud MK and Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Boaz Bismuth. Like its predecessors, it is built around modest recruitment targets, a renewed exemption structure, and a layered system of personal and institutional sanctions.

According to its explanatory notes, the bill seeks to both increase haredi participation in national service and preserve exemptions for full-time yeshiva students – two goals that cannot be fully reconciled.

The omission of biometric verification tools, present in earlier proposals, further limits the state’s ability to determine who is actually studying full-time, suggesting the law is designed primarily to recruit those outside the core yeshiva system.

The bill grants a broad “clean slate” upon enactment, lifting existing sanctions and enforcement orders related to draft evasion. Ravitsky Tur-Paz noted that this alone indicates that the institutions will be granted some breathing room without needing to reform any of the core issues.

“In what other area does this happen that first you get the money, and then you show that you did what you were supposed to do for it?” she asked, saying that should an institution fail to meet enlistment quotas and be denied government funding, it has other options, like recruiting from abroad.

Institutional sanctions will not always be felt directly by the individual student and will remain in effect only until the student reaches the age of 26.

Sanctions on an individual are set to include travel bans, driver’s license restrictions, loss of civil-service hiring preference, and the revocation of certain tax benefits. While not convenient or comfortable, what these sanctions do is keep a student between the critical ages of 18 to 26 even more under the yeshiva framework – and out of the military or job market.

In fact, Ravitsky Tur-Paz said, if these sanctions are applied, “they will be what any yeshiva head dreams of.”

After one year of under-enlistment, additional penalties will take effect, including a loss of eligibility for subsidized housing, daycare discounts, National Insurance Institute benefits, and public transportation privileges.

In the event of multiple years of missed military enlistment quotas, additional financial penalties and review mechanisms will also come into play.

Under the proposal, the state would set annual enlistment targets beginning at 4,800 recruits, which would gradually rise.

Coalition officials have presented the framework as one that, on paper, could bring roughly half of each haredi age cohort into some form of “recognized service framework” within five years. Yet these frameworks include non-military alternatives – civil security roles and exemption tracks – meaning the proposal does not approach anything resembling 50% haredi enlistment in the IDF.

The quotas themselves are far below the sector’s potential: When the exemption clause expired in 2023, roughly 100,000 haredi men were draft-eligible. The first-year target, therefore, covers only about 5% of this pool, compared with an enlistment rate of approximately 88% among other Jewish men in Israel.

The IDF has warned that its needs far exceed what the bill provides. While the 4,800 target was initially based on the army’s 2024 absorption capacity, the military has since told the court that no such limitation will exist after mid-2026.

Nevertheless, the bill maintains its low quotas. A built-in “safety net” further lowers the operative targets by allowing a 25% shortfall in the first year before sanctions apply, effectively reducing the requirement to around 3,600 recruits, and even fewer after deducting civil-security participants.

The proposal also authorizes an advisory committee to further reduce the number of turnouts, giving the political echelon broad discretion to weaken the bill’s agenda.

At the same time, the criteria for who counts as “haredi” are expansive. Anyone who attended a haredi high school for two years may be included in the target calculations, even if they no longer identify as haredi.

The recruits themselves need not be young or combat-eligible. The outline allows enlistment up to age 26, meaning many recruits will be older, married, and placed in non-combat roles closer to home. This stands in sharp contrast to the IDF’s immediate needs.

Another noteworthy point is that the 26-year-old exemption will allow yeshiva students to defer service until they become automatically exempt. Economists have warned that this traps young men in years of non-employment, leaving them poorly positioned to join the workforce.

The bill also prohibits vocational training during the deferment period, further limiting long-term earning potential.
Without significant changes to haredi society, which is growing exponentially, Israel will not be able to maintain its status as a first-world country with an accompanying economy and military, Ravitsky Tur-Paz cautioned.

“Israel has no choice. It has to make hard decisions.”