Haredim: The biggest threat facing Israel

Israel’s new leadership calls itself the “Change Government” because the long-serving Benjamin Netanyahu has been finally displaced. But its ideological disparities risk blocking the real changes that are needed, including on the primary threat the country as currently constituted faces.

It’s not from the Palestinians, nor from the wider Arab world or even Iran. The greatest danger is from within: the rapidly expanding haredi.

The haredim cling to a rigid interpretation of Judaism which tolerates little deviation from ancient traditions. They can be found in the United States, Belgium, Britain and elsewhere, always forming tight-knit communities, but only in Israel is there a toxic firewall between them and fellow citizens.

This can be traced to the decision some 70 years ago by David Ben-Gurion to grant draft exemptions to students at yeshivot. Back then this applied to several hundred genuine scholars.

This arrangement turned Torah study into an arguably unprecedented obsession in which all haredi men are pushed to lifelong seminary duty, first to avoid the draft and then essentially as a source of welfare.

Whereas other university students pay tuition, haredim receive stipends for as long as they study, if possible for life. Over 150,000 men now in these schools are indoctrinated in the faith that stricture and rabbis supersede the laws and officials of the state.

To maintain the insularity, most haredi high schoolers are sent to the community’s schools that teach little or no math, science and English; in recent days Israel’s chief rabbi, who is haredi, called such studies of secular subjects “nonsense.” Israel funds these schools even though their unfortunate graduates are essentially unemployable in a modern economy.

As a consequence less than half of haredi men are part of the workforce, the lowest participation level of any identifiable group in Israel – and, tellingly, far less than haredim in other countries. The minority who do work tend to populate a vast religious bureaucracy that includes supervisors of the mikvaot ritual baths, kashrut food certifications, and other apparatchiks.

Women in the community are banished from haredi parties’ candidates lists and encouraged to procreate with such vigor that they on average produce 7.1 children – far more than in any identifiable group in Israel.

They live in a poverty rendered minimally tolerable by state subsidies for each child at the expense of working Israelis. Thus the community doubles itself every 16 years, four times the rate of the rest of Israel.

The haredim have grown to about 12% of the 9.5 million people – almost 20% of the country’s Jews. Unless something changes – and the attrition rate is estimated at less than 5% – they will constitute a majority of Israel’s Jews in a few decades.