Religious influencers voted for endless reserve duty

For three years, and especially since the war began, you could not scroll through Israeli social media without running into them. Religious-Zionist influencers turned their feeds into a bleeding diary of struggle.

We heard them venting, watched them crying on camera, read heartbreaking posts about husbands closing in on 500 reserve days, about homes falling apart, about children growing up without a father and about the justified feeling that they are simply suffocating under the burden. We listened, we identified, and we even got angry alongside them.

And then, finally, the moment of truth arrived. The ballot boxes opened. After three unbearable years, each and every one of us was given the chance to make an impact, to recalculate the route and to demand real change in the state's priorities. But the moment the Instagram screen was replaced by the voting booth curtain, reality disappeared, and in its place came the old fears.

Instead of translating the real distress at home into civic action, we discovered that those same influencers prefer to stay in exactly the same place. When we looked at the party platforms, the picture was clear: there are parties that made equal burden-sharing, drafting chareidim and ending the exemption a core issue. But for them, to vote for parties like Bennett's or Eisenkot's? Heaven forbid. That is too "left-wing". Never mind that within those lists are clear right-wingers, security hawks and settlement figures. The narrow political analysis defeated the day-to-day reality.

Missing the husband on reserve duty? Apparently not enough to vote differently. (IDF Spokesperson)

This divide moved between two disconnected choices: one, a direct vote for the coalition parties. That same coalition that everyone knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that under Likud leadership will continue to walk hand in hand with the chareidi parties, perpetuate the exemption and allow most of the chareidi sector to continue evading service while their husbands are called up for a fourth and fifth reserve tour.

And the second, an escape into hopeless political adventures, like voting for parties such as Winter's. An attempt to feel "both/and", both deep right-wing and also pro-reservists, while completely ignoring all the polls that made clear this party simply will not pass the electoral threshold (and again, we are forced to wait for the soldiers' votes just to find out if those votes were thrown in the bin).

It turns out that for three years, those same influencers may have lived in Israel, but did not really want to see it. The outcry about the burden was authentic, but when the ability to change it was given, they preferred to keep the "base" and vote for exactly the same government. For the same forces that continue to preserve the existing arrangement in which a few serve and sacrifice, and the rest are exempt.

So here is the truth, in the most open way: I am no longer buying these complaints. Someone who is really suffering, who really feels she is breaking under the burden, who really understands that the current situation is unsustainable makes a change. Yes, even if it means leaving the political comfort zone, and even if it means voting, Heaven forbid, for a party that is not an inseparable part of the automatic right-wing bloc.

If you chose to leave the situation as it is at the moment of truth, do not open the camera tomorrow morning to complain about the next reserve-duty order. Your voice in the ballot box said it all: you chose this situation with your own hands.