'Someone Is Going to Get Killed': The Haredi Draft Crisis Is One Night Away From Catastrophe

The escalation between Jerusalem Faction protesters and Israeli police has reached a breaking point. The question is no longer whether someone gets seriously hurt --- it is when.

I am writing this with shaking hands.

Not from fear of the government, though that fear is justified. Not from fear of the secular press, which has already decided what this story is and who the villains are. I am shaking because I have watched what is happening in the streets of Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, and Beit Shemesh over the past several weeks, and I know — the way you know something in your bones before your mind catches up, that we are one bad night away from a tragedy that will scar this nation for a generation.

Someone is going to get killed. And when that happens, everyone who could have stopped this and chose politics instead will have to answer for it.

What Is Actually Happening Out There

Let us be honest about the full picture, because our community deserves honesty more than it deserves comfortable narratives.

This very morning, June 17, a senior Jerusalem Faction official told Walla: "We will not remain silent over the violence we absorbed this morning. This will have severe consequences. We will shut down the country, and anyone who thinks they have seen it all is in for surprises. The struggle is only at its beginning, and our next steps will be far more significant."

Far more significant. Let that sentence sit with you.

Those words came after police dispersed Haredi protesters blocking Highway 4 near Bnei Brak today, with five arrests and confrontations that Shas Chairman Arye Deri publicly condemned, calling on National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir to "wake up."

Ben Gvir himself, the same minister who has enthusiastically endorsed aggressive police tactics against anti-government protesters, is now calling for an urgent meeting to ensure stun grenades are used only in "exceptional cases," after police deployed them against Haredi demonstrators.

The hypocrisy would be almost funny if the stakes were not so deadly serious.

A Chronicle of Escalation

This did not begin today. It has been building for months, each incident more alarming than the last.

In April, protesters belonging to the extremist Jerusalem Faction breached the home of Military Police commander Brig. Gen. Yuval Yamin in Ashkelon while his family was inside. He himself was not home. His wife and children were.

The following day, hundreds of demonstrators flooded the entrance to Jerusalem, blocking cars and chanting "We will die and not enlist." Police ultimately dispersed the crowd using water cannons and stun grenades.

In early June, hundreds of ultra-Orthodox men rioted in Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh, repeatedly attempting to storm a police station. This came days after a violent attack on the home of High Court Deputy President Noam Sohlberg.

In Beit Shemesh, rioters broke into a police station. Police dispersed them using batons and stun grenades. Nearby vegetation was set on fire, endangering local residents.

On June 1, a 25-year-old was struck and seriously injured by a motorcycle during protests on Highway 4. Three police officers were injured. Protesters smashed windows at the Har Hotzvim police station.

Train service across central Israel was suspended entirely after demonstrators entered railway tracks at the Ganot interchange.

At one point, police threw dozens of stun grenades at a crowd that included infants in strollers. The Jerusalem District Commander immediately ordered the officers involved removed from the scene for questioning.

Stun grenades. Near babies in strollers. In Jerusalem. In 2026.

The Ben Gvir Problem

Here is what makes this situation uniquely, almost cosmically dangerous: the man responsible for overseeing the Israel Police is Itamar Ben Gvir.

This is a minister who has spent his political career inflaming tensions, not managing them. A minister whose instincts run toward confrontation, not de-escalation. A minister who enthusiastically supported aggressive police tactics when the crowds in the streets were anti-Netanyahu protesters, and who is now expressing sudden concern about excessive force now that the crowds are Haredi.

The communities most affected by this escalation cannot trust that Ben Gvir's "urgent meeting" about stun grenade protocols will produce anything other than a press release. His credibility on the question of measured police force is, to put it gently, nonexistent.

And yet he is the one holding the lever.

The Jerusalem Faction's Responsibility

I will not pretend that this op-ed is a defense of everything that has happened on our side of these confrontations. It is not.

Breaking into the home of a military officer while his family slept inside is not a protest. It is a terror tactic. Attacking a Haredi soldier at his home in Beit Shemesh and threatening to burn his house down with his children inside — as happened in April — is a chilul Hashem of the highest order, and those responsible should be prosecuted and condemned by every Haredi leader in this country, without equivocation.

A Breslov Hasidic attacker yelling "We'll burn down your house with the kids inside" at a fellow Jew who serves in the IDF has not sanctified the Name of Heaven. He has desecrated it.

The Jerusalem Faction's escalating rhetoric - "anyone who thinks they have seen it all is in for surprises" - is not the language of Torah. It is the language of a movement that has lost the thread between principled resistance and reckless provocation.

But the State Bears Responsibility Too

None of that changes what the State of Israel is doing, and none of it changes where this is heading.

Young men are being arrested for the crime of learning Torah. Families are being terrorized by military police raids. The Supreme Court — whose legitimacy within the Haredi world is, for historical and philosophical reasons that deserve serious engagement rather than dismissal, deeply contested — is issuing orders that would force Jews who believe with every fiber of their being that their place is in the beis medrash, not the battlefield, into uniform at gunpoint.

The coercive apparatus of the state is being turned on a community that is not a security threat. These are not terrorists. These are yeshiva boys and their fathers and brothers, whose only weapon is their bodies in the road and their voices in the street.

When you deploy stun grenades and water cannons and mounted police against that population, month after month, with no political resolution in sight, you are not enforcing the law. You are building a pressure cooker.

What One Bad Night Looks Like

I want you to picture it, because I think about it constantly.

A protest at night. The Jerusalem Faction mobilizes thousands, as it has before. Police arrive in force. Tensions are already high from the morning's events. A stun grenade lands too close. Someone panics. A crowd surges. A mounted officer's horse rears. Someone falls. Someone gets trampled. Or a stun grenade causes cardiac arrest in a middle-aged man with a heart condition standing at the edge of a crowd. Or a protester throws a stone that catches an officer in the temple.

Any of these scenarios. Any night. Any protest.

And then what? Then we have a martyr or a fallen officer, and the restraint that has barely held until now evaporates entirely. Then the Jerusalem Faction's promise of "far more significant" steps becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. Then Ben Gvir either clamps down with force that triggers more violence, or loses control of a police force that is already exhausted and enraged.

Then blood.

What Must Happen Now

There is only one way out of this, and everyone in a position of power knows it and is choosing coalition arithmetic over human lives.

The Knesset must pass a framework that resolves the draft question with some combination of expanded exemptions, voluntary service tracks, and genuine accommodation of the reality that mass conscription of the Haredi world, even if legally mandated, is not going to happen peacefully. The Supreme Court can issue orders. The army can make arrests. But you cannot imprison an entire community.

The Jerusalem Faction leadership must take its own rhetoric seriously enough to understand that "we will die rather than enlist" cannot become a self-fulfilling prophecy carried out in someone else's death.

And the government, this government, with Ben Gvir holding the police portfolio and Smotrich holding the money, must make a decision about whether it intends to govern a country or tear it apart.

The Haredi community did not start this confrontation. We did not ask for a Supreme Court that issues conscription orders. We did not ask for military police raids on yeshiva dormitories. We did not ask to be the wedge issue in a coalition that uses our sons as political ammunition.

But we are here. And the streets are getting more dangerous by the week. And the Jerusalem Faction's leadership is making promises about what comes next that should terrify everyone who loves this country and this community.

One bad night.

That is all it will take.

May Hashem protect us from the leaders on all sides who seem incapable of understanding what they are playing with.

The author writes on Haredi community affairs. The views expressed are the author's own.