Written by Israel’s government is collapsing over conscription. The right answer isn’t to draft everyone. It’s to honor the refusal.
Published on efiretemple.com • May 2026
Israel’s ruling coalition has called for an early election. The cause is not the war in Gaza, not the strikes on Beirut, not the famine in the territories. It is the question of whether ultra-Orthodox men have to serve in the army. The vote to dissolve the Knesset is expected to pass next week. Israelis will likely go to the polls in late August.
Eighty-five percent of Israelis tell pollsters they support drafting the Haredi. The framing across most coverage is the same: religious privilege must end, the burden must be shared, the wars cannot be sustained without these soldiers. The army chief of staff himself told the Knesset that Haredi recruitment is an “existential need” for the IDF.
There is another way to read the same facts.
If 24,000 draft notices produce 1,200 recruits, the answer is not to force the other 22,800. The answer is to ask why people are refusing, and to consider that some of them are right.
Refusal in Israel is older than the current war. It runs from the high school seniors who wrote to Golda Meir in 1970 protesting the West Bank occupation, through the Yom Kippur War objectors, through the Lebanon refusers of 1982, through Yesh Gvul during the First Intifada, through Courage to Refuse during the Second, through the thousand combat pilots who refused over the judicial reforms in 2023. Refusal is a tradition. It has its own organizations, its own legal infrastructure, its own quiet network of support across generations.
Since October 2023 that tradition has expanded in every direction.
There are the teenage objectors. Tal Mitnick, imprisoned for 185 days. Itamar Greenberg, held for nearly 200 — the longest sentence for a conscientious objector in over a decade. Ayana Gerstmann and Yuval Peleg, both 18, jailed in July 2025. Sofia Orr, who declared at fifteen that enlisting would mean “taking part in and normalizing a decades-long cycle of violence,” and followed through. In August 2025 the group expanded to seven young refusers — the largest cohort the conscientious-objector network Mesarvot had seen in years. The Israeli military, which had previously released refusers after 120 days, appears to have abandoned that policy. The new sentences are longer. The pressure is harder. They keep coming anyway.
There are the reservists. Quietly, without manifestos, Israeli reserve duty response rates have dropped between 30 and 50 percent depending on whose numbers you use. Most of them are not ideological. They are exhausted, disillusioned, tired of a war that has not freed the hostages and has not ended. Their refusal is not signed and published. It is simply the empty bunk at the base.
There are the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have always been formally exempt from conscription but who navigate a system that pressures, recruits, and at times prosecutes them for the wrong choices. Their refusal is structural — built into a state that did not ask them and would not trust them with weapons in any case.
And there are the Haredi. Their reasons are different. Their politics are different. Their refusal is grounded not in opposition to the occupation but in a religious worldview that places Torah study above state service. Most secular Israelis find that worldview infuriating. But the right of conscience does not belong only to people whose conscience you share.
The principle that matters is the one the Israeli state has spent decades trying to limit: that a human being’s first allegiance is not to the army. It is to whatever they hold sacred — the dignity of other human beings, the study of scripture, the refusal to kill, the refusal to occupy. Whichever it is, the state does not own it.
This is not a popular position in Israel right now. The Israeli High Court ruled in 2002 that pacifism could ground exemption but “selective refusal” could not — meaning a soldier could refuse all military service but not refuse the specific orders they considered immoral. The reasoning was that selective refusal would “weaken the ties that bind us as a nation.” Refuseniks are routinely called traitors. They receive death threats. They speak in whispers.
The 1998 ruling that the Haredi exemption was illegal, the 2024 ruling ordering active conscription, the current crisis over enforcement — all of it rests on the same premise: that the state’s claim on the body of its citizens is total, and that any exception is an injustice to those who serve. Read carefully, this is an argument for forcing everyone to participate equally in a war the International Court of Justice has ruled plausibly violates the Genocide Convention.
There is a different argument available. It is that the right of refusal is itself the principle, and that the state’s job is not to eliminate exemptions but to honor them — for the Haredi yeshiva student, for the eighteen-year-old who has read enough of what is happening in Gaza to know they cannot be part of it, for the reservist who has come back from one tour and will not go on another, for the Palestinian-Israeli whose family lives on both sides of the wall.
Western coverage tends to focus on the politics. Will Netanyahu fall in August. Will Bennett and Lapid form a government. Will the Haredi exemption survive. These are real questions. But underneath them is a deeper one that the coverage does not ask: what does a state owe to the people inside it who will not pick up the gun?
It owes them, at minimum, the right to refuse. Not selectively, not on terms approved by a military court, but genuinely. It owes them the right to say no to a war and not lose 200 days of their life for saying it. It owes the Haredi the same exemption it owes the secular pacifist and the religious Christian and the Bahá’í. It owes the reservist the right to come home and stay home. It owes the Palestinian citizen a status that does not depend on whether they are useful to the military.
None of this is on any Israeli ballot in August. The election is being fought over how to expand the war machine more equitably, not over whether it should be fought at all. That is the failure underneath the failure — the conversation Israeli democracy has refused to have, even as a small and growing number of its own citizens are spending months in prison to force it.
If you are looking for moral clarity in this story, look at them. Not at the politicians who will replace Netanyahu, but at the eighteen-year-olds in the Tel Hashomer prison. At the reservists who have stopped reporting. At the yeshiva students who refuse to go. They are not all motivated by the same thing. They do not have the same politics. They do not even like each other. But they share the one act the state most needs them not to share: they have said no.
The defense of refusal is not a defense of any particular refuser. It is a defense of the line between a person and the state that claims them. That line is worth defending wherever it is drawn — by faith, by conscience, by exhaustion, by despair. The whole world is watching to see what Israel does with the people who will not fight its wars.
The right answer is to let them go.