The Draft Dodgers Nobody Talks About

Israel is at war on multiple fronts. Soldiers are dying. Reservists are on their fourth and fifth call-ups, their marriages fraying, their businesses collapsing, their children growing up without them. And yet the entire weight of this country's moral outrage has been aimed, laser-focused, at one community: the Haredim.

Let's talk about everyone else.

According to Israel's state comptroller, from all potential recruits in 2021, 31.4% avoided enlisting. Of those, only 17.6% listed Torah study as their reason for not joining. Read that again. Nearly a third of eligible Israelis didn't serve, and the majority of them weren't Haredi. They were secular. They were your neighbors in Tel Aviv. They were the people marching every Saturday night waving flags and demanding that Haredim go to the army.

Inside the IDF, officers quietly complain about "a whole civilian industry of lawyers and psychiatrists" helping draft dodgers, both religious and secular, obtain fraudulent exemptions on mental health grounds. These aren't yeshiva boys. These are young men from Ra'anana and Herzliya and north Tel Aviv who discovered that if you know the right doctor and say the right things, you never have to put on a uniform.

Former IDF Personnel Directorate chief Major-General Eliezer Stern put it bluntly: "They pretend to be psychos in order to get an exemption because it is convenient for them. Psychological problems are not an exact science, and those who really want out can play the role and would not be caught."

Where is the protest movement about this? Where are the op-eds? Where is the Knesset committee hauling secular draft dodgers before cameras to explain themselves? There are none. Because the secular draft dodger is politically invisible. He is an inconvenient fact that disrupts a very clean and satisfying narrative.

A recent Israel Democracy Institute poll found that 98.5% of secular Israelis support sanctioning Haredim who fail to enlist. 98.5%. A figure so uniform it would make a Soviet pollster blush. The same secular public that produces thousands of young men who quietly slip through exemption loopholes every year wants to strip Haredim of their driver's licenses, their voting rights, their ability to travel abroad.

The hypocrisy would be breathtaking if it weren't so predictable.

Reservists complain bitterly that they are put into an endless loop of reserve duty while others sit out the war entirely. That anger is legitimate and real. But it is being deliberately channeled in one direction only, toward the Haredi community, because that is politically useful. It fuels election campaigns. It fills protest squares. It gives the secular left a villain that everyone can agree on.

Meanwhile the young man in a Tel Aviv apartment who paid a psychiatrist to sign a piece of paper so he could avoid serving is never mentioned. He votes correctly. He posts the right things. He is one of us.

Around 80,000 Haredi men of military age are currently not serving. That is a real problem that deserves a real solution. But tens of thousands of secular and traditional Israelis are also not serving, and that number is never placed on the same table, never subjected to the same fury, never treated as the same moral emergency.

A country that selectively enforces its burdens is not enforcing shared sacrifice. It is enforcing a political preference. And a protest movement that demands equality while looking away from draft evasion in its own ranks is not a movement for fairness. It is a movement for targeting.

Israel deserves an honest conversation about who serves and who doesn't. All of them. Not just the ones who are easy to target.