Large Group in Israel Want the Killing to Stop But Not The Religious Ultra Conservative They want more Blood
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| An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man being carried by Israeli security forces during a protest against conscription last week in Kfar Yona.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
The journalists reported from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Bat Yam, Israel.
New York Times
I have always love and respected Israel until they invaded Gaza and started killing indiscriminately men, kids, babies, Women and babies. Too much for my eyes to stomach. I am not alone on this and many of the supporters of Israel asked themselves the correct question: Why do I support Israel? Well, Its a democracy, rule of law, have had Germany tried to erased them from the face of the earth. Never could I imagine in my wildest nightmare that Israel would do that, which is what the German government with the German people did to Israel.You will figured it they had the experience that such things should not happen. Instead they used as an excused a Hamas attack that killed about 1200 civilians, kids, women with their babies born or to be born Fetuses. But Israel did the same at people that had nothing to do with what happened. Even if they had helped and there s no evidence of that. Many of them flew in motorized parachutes straight to the fun-park. But why would Israel take revenge in 60,000 of Gaza's people many being ambulance drivers and doctors.
I see now for the first time a group of Israelis and there are enough of them to be noticed out of that land.
I have been waiting so long for something to happen just like I wait here for people to stand against Trump and MAGA. To my disappointment it's not happening here but I remain hopeful for the midterms.
The so called Religious in the USA gave the election to Trump and so is in Israel. Even today the Rabbies are against in stopping the killing. The group in their Knesset of ultra conservatives wants the killing to go on. They are propping up Netanyahu.
The worse killer of Humanity is Religion. All of them. If you go back in history you will see Im not speaking from pure air. When you see thousands of people kill, at the center is someone who is doing it for their god. True or Not? Im an exsemianry student and I gave up religion because I did not want the blood of innocents on my hands. You don't have to be like me but take responsibility suability for what's going on.
But in Israel these group are vocal and they mean business. I hope they make a change in their own government. Once you put Netanyahu in jail, things will improve. I most tell you that even if Netanyahu government fell tomorrow, the death of over 60 thousand human being for no good reason will never be for gotten and and the rest of the World will never see Israel with the same light. Including myself. We no longer want to hear about 6 million jews killed but about 60K people being killed for no reason but their raze. Looking for Hamas and killing women and kids is no excuse to be hiding behind those babies. Shame! For their sake I hope that group of which I posted below succeeds.
Elisabeth BumillerNatan Odenheimer and Johnatan Reiss
The journalists reported from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Bat Yam, Israel.
New York Times
Adamfoxie Blog Int.
It was 11 p.m. in Jerusalem, and one of the city’s most insular ultra-Orthodox communities was in a furor.
Hundreds of men in black suits and black hats of the Edah Haredit sect grew agitated as a top rabbi, shouting in Yiddish from a balcony, denounced the Israeli government for drafting the ultra-Orthodox. They had been exempt from military service to focus on religious study since the founding of Israel, but now they were needed for the war in Gaza.
A large fire blazed in the street, set by ultra-Orthodox protesters who had ignited a dumpster. Police officers on horseback tried to keep order as water cannons on trucks sprayed “skunk water,” a vile-smelling liquid, to disperse the crowd.
Outside the nearby Mir Yeshiva, one of the largest and most prestigious religious schools in the country, Haim Bamberger, 23, said he was studying the Torah, as, he said, God wanted. It was Mr. Bamberger’s way of defending Israel, rather than through military service. “When we do what he wants, he protects us,” he said.
The Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed nearly 1,200 people and led to the taking of roughly 250 hostages, Mr. Bamberger said, “was partly because many people in this country are not doing what God wants.”
Mr. Bamberger said he had been drafted but was ignoring his notice and risking jail. He grew more animated as he spoke. “In this country I’m considered a criminal,” he said, “because I want to study Torah.”
Days later, the Israeli military police began arresting ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers. Only a few have been detained so far, according to multiple Israeli news reports, but on Aug. 14, hundreds of ultra-Orthodox protested and clashed with the police outside a prison where the Ynet Hebrew news site reported that seven were held.
For now, at a time of rage among the ultra-Orthodox and building tension between the military and the government over Gaza, the military is holding off on mass arrests.
A Political Crisis
Military service is compulsory for most Jewish Israelis, both men and women. The exemption for the ultra-Orthodox, known in Hebrew as Haredim, has long been resented by the rest of the Jewish population. But the nearly two-year war in Gaza has turned an irritant into a political crisis that is deepening divisions in Israeli society and imperiling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fragile coalition.
Last month, two ultra-Orthodox parties crucial to Mr. Netanyahu’s majority in Parliament withdrew from the government after it did not pass legislation exempting the ultra-Orthodox from the draft. Their move could lead to the collapse of the prime minister’s coalition and early elections, although Mr. Netanyahu has survived far worse political threats.
“The war has pushed everything to an extreme,” said Nechumi Yaffe, a professor of public policy at Tel Aviv University who is ultra-Orthodox. Secular Israelis are asking, she said, “Why should our children die and your children are just sitting drinking coffee and learning?”
Professor Yaffe said she had polling that showed 25 percent of Haredi men would enlist if they were not ostracized by their communities for doing so, as many are, and another 25 percent would enlist with some encouragement. She said attitudes were softening within less extreme ultra-Orthodox sects, although many rabbis are resisting change.
“The rabbis are feeling like they’re losing control,” she said.
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| A protest in Jerusalem in 2024 after the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that he military can begin drafting ultra-Orthodox men.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times A dense crowed of men wearing dark clothes and hats while standing outdoors near concrete buildings and all looking in one direction. |
The policy dates to Israel’s beginnings in 1948, when David Ben-Gurion, the nation’s founding prime minister, granted the exemption to the 400 yeshiva students in the country at the time. Ben-Gurion envisioned their Torah study — which they believed would safeguard Israel from its enemies — as part of a revitalization of Jewish religious scholarship lost in the Holocaust.
But as the ultra-Orthodox population grew, the policy was extended, sparking backlash and legal challenges over many years. It did not help that the most extreme ultra-Orthodox sects were anti-Zionists who do not recognize the state of Israel because, they say, it was founded by secular Jews and not for a divine purpose.
In June 2024, the Israeli Supreme Court finally ruled in a landmark decision that without a formal law there was no legal basis for the exemption, and ordered the military to begin drafting ultra-Orthodox men.
The military says it urgently needs 12,000 new recruits for a force exhausted by Gaza. More than 450 Israeli soldiers have died in the enclave, suicides are on the rise and fewer Israeli reservists, the bulk of the fighters, are reporting for duty. Many have spent more than 400 days in service since the war began.
Others are questioning the government’s goals in a campaign that has killed more than 60,000 people in Gaza, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. A group of experts who monitor food security declared on Friday that Gaza City and the surrounding territory are suffering from famine, a situation that has drawn global condemnation. The Israeli security agency that oversees aid deliveries in the enclave rejected the finding.
Mr. Netanyahu, at odds with top generals, is now moving forward with plans to take over Gaza City.
The Israeli military announced Aug. 20 that 60,000 new reservists would be called to duty and that 20,000 would have their orders extended, bringing the total number of reservists to serve across all fronts in Israel to roughly 120,000, according to a senior military official who requested anonymity under military ground rules.
Feel like dancing? Lets dance
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| Smiling ultra-Orthodox Jewish men hold hands in a circle. In the rear, people stand around a high table with bottles on it. |
A wedding in Beit Shemesh, Israel, last year. The number of ultra-Orthodox in Israel has grown to about one million today — roughly 13 percent of the population. Any exemption for the group from serving in the military is seen as unsustainable. Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
The Israeli military says that 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men between the ages of 18 and 24 are eligible for service and that almost all were sent draft notices in the past year. So far, only 2,940 have enlisted, although there is time for others to sign up before a series of deadlines. Most of the 2,940 will not be ready to go to war now, but will be able to do so after the Israeli military’s six months of training.
Their number is still far off the military’s target of 4,800 ultra-Orthodox enlistees for the year, “and even further from the army’s needs,” Brig. Gen. Shay Tayeb, who is in charge of military personnel, told a committee in Parliament on Aug. 12. ....[The Ultra's did not want to fight let others kill for me]
The future promises more strains. The number of ultra-Orthodox in Israel has exploded to about one million today — roughly 13 percent of the population — from 40,000 in 1948. Some 22 percent of 6-year-olds were Haredi in 2024. By 2035, their numbers are projected to reach 30 percent.
Any exemption for them is seen as unsustainable. “This is the math talking,” said Inbar Harush Gity, the Defense Ministry’s former head of recruitment of the ultra-Orthodox into the Israeli military.
The ultra-Orthodox are unmoved.
“It may be that the circumstances have changed and the times have changed,” Motti Babchik, the powerful political adviser to one of the ultra-Orthodox parties that left the government, said in an interview. “But the basic agreement between the Haredis and the state of Israel remains the same.”
‘Is Their Blood More Red?’
Rabbi Tamir Granot’s son Capt. Amitai Granot, 24, was killed by a Hezbollah missile on the border with Lebanon in October 2023, eight days after the Hamas-led attack on Israel. The following March, Rabbi Granot delivered an impassioned speech, widely shared on YouTube, calling on the ultra-Orthodox to serve and share in the pain.
“Was Amitai wrong?” his father asked. “Is it for naught that he now lies under clumps of earth beneath Mount Herzl, he and all his comrades who lie there with him, and other cemeteries around Israel? Should they have stayed in yeshiva and left the army and self-sacrifice to secularists only?”
Rabbi Granot is part of a different stream of Orthodox Judaism, religious Zionism, which is an integral part of Israeli society and sends large numbers of its yeshiva students to the military. In an interview at his Tel Aviv yeshiva, Rabbi Granot recounted how he went to the homes of ultra-Orthodox religious leaders after his son’s death and tried to reason with them. He told them, he said, that he had students in his yeshiva — he called them his children — and, like his son, they knew they had to serve.
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| A man with a gray beard sits on a brown sofa in front of a shelf with books, looking out a window. |
Rabbi Tamir Granot, whose 24-year-old son was killed by a Hezbollah missile on the border with Lebanon in 2023, at his home in Tel Aviv this month.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
He posed a question to the Haredi leaders: “So why are your children better than them? Is their blood more red than our blood?”
Some leaders agreed that the ultra-Orthodox should serve, he said, but none would say so publicly. “One of the biggest told me, ‘I can’t do it.’ I asked him why. He told me, ‘If I will do it, I will not exist.’”
In other words, Rabbi Granot said, “he will lose his status in society and everyone else from the leadership would say he’s not a rabbi.”
The issue has only intensified since then. Last month, in a video made public of an emergency meeting about the Haredi draft, Hillel Hirsch, a leading ultra-Orthodox rabbi, unequivocally told a small group of colleagues that most Haredi yeshiva students do not want to serve. “They never dreamed of it; they don’t dream of it now,” he said.
Another rabbi, Yoel Shapira, spoke up and offered a reality check. “But this is becoming a conversation everywhere,” he said. “In all the yeshivas it’s becoming a topic.” In one of the most important yeshivas, he said, referring to a military intelligence corps, “boys are saying that so-and-so has a brother in Unit 8200 and he doesn’t feel uncomfortable that he has such a brother.”
Many young Haredim use “kosher phones” similar to the old flip-tops, but some also secretly keep smartphones, which have given them access to the outside world and, particularly, to secular Israel, where service in the Israeli military is seen as an entry into adulthood and the collective defense of the nation.
“Living in Israel, not being in the army, it’s a situation that you’re always going to be apologizing for,” said Nechemia Steinberger, a Haredi lecturer and rabbi in Jerusalem who enlisted in the military in 2021 at 37. “I felt, even though it’s a later stage in life, ‘I’ve got to do it.’”
‘Brother, We’re the Same People’
Rabbi Arie Amit, a member of the Chabad Lubavitch sect, which is more inclined than other ultra-Orthodox groups to engage with the outside world, was among the first Haredim in Israel to enlist. It was 2001, he was soon to be 18, and the second intifada, a mass uprising of Palestinians against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, had started the year before.
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| A man stands with one arm on a metal railing of a promenade. Blue-green water and small waves are in the rear. |
Rabbi Arie Amit, a member of the Chabad Lubavitch sect in Bat Yam, Israel, last month. He was among the first Haredim in Israel to enlist in the military.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
“I saw in the newspapers that people were blowing up in the streets, and I didn’t see myself studying Torah all day,” he said in an interview in a cafe in the city of Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv. “So I thought I could contribute to my people much better in the military.”
He now handles logistics at a temporary base just inside the Gaza border, and said he understood why so many Israelis were upset with the ultra-Orthodox.
“People are being killed, or people are serving many, many months,” he said. “It’s like: Brother, we’re the same people. Why aren’t you contributing to the burden that we’re carrying?”
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