Exile in a Sovereign State

At the heart of much Haredi resistance to the draft lies an anti-zionist doctrine

On Sunday afternoon, in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak, two young female soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces were forced to run for their safety with police protection through streets vibrating with fury. Behind them surged hundreds of ultra-Orthodox men like a shouting human wall of indignation gathering force with every step. The video footage is painful to watch, not because it is chaotic, though it is that, but because it is lucid. It shows something unmistakable.

The uniforms of the two young women should in theory represent nothing more radical than citizenship in arms. Israel has been at war for two years. Yet in this street they are seen differently. They are interpreted as both a provocation and as evidence of a historical deviation.

The immediate temptation is to file the episode under politics. Another clash over conscription. Another skirmish in the long bargaining process between Haredi parties and the state. Another dispute about quotas and exemptions. But this interpretation, though comfortable, is shallow. What revealed itself in that street was not merely a disagreement over policy. It was a clash of worldviews.

At the heart of much Haredi resistance to the draft lies an anti-zionist doctrine. In this worldview, Jewish political power before the messianic age is not merely premature but transgressive. Some have even described it as “heresy” and a “rebellion against God.” The modern state is tolerated by Haredim as a practical necessity, certainly exploited as a source of communal benefit, but it is not embraced as a legitimate expression of Jewish destiny.

The debate over draft exemptions is therefore often misframed. The language of fairness, while valid, is insufficient. Yes, there is a profound injustice in asking some sectors to risk their lives in war while others are categorically shielded. Yes, the demographic trends make the status quo untenable. But the deeper fracture is metaphysical.

Zionism was not merely a political movement. It was a revolution in Jewish consciousness. It declared that waiting passively for redemption had become a luxury history would no longer afford. It insisted that exile was not a virtue, and that vulnerability was not piety. It reclaimed agency as a civilizational necessity.

Haredi antizionist ideology resists this revolution. It clings to a pre-sovereign imagination in which Torah study replaces political responsibility and divine providence substitutes for national defense. In this paradigm, participation in state institutions is spiritually compromising. The Knesset is suspect. The Supreme Court is suspect. The army, above all, is suspect.

And so when young women in uniform become objects of fury rather than symbols of collective defense, we should not be surprised. The hostility is not accidental. It flows from a worldview that sees the uniform not as service but as evidence of a theological deviation.

One must be careful and precise. Not every Haredi shares this militancy. Some work, pay taxes, and navigate Israeli modernity with quiet pragmatism, although most do not. Some serve in specialized Haredi frameworks within the IDF. But the dominant rabbinic discourse in significant sectors continues to treat the state as an alien imposition rather than a shared achievement. This produces a structural asymmetry. The Haredi community draws upon the security, infrastructure, and economic stability that sovereignty provides, while maintaining “distance” from the very institutions that sustain those goods.

No polity can indefinitely survive such an arrangement, especially not one surrounded by enemies and reeling from trauma.

The Haredi world faces a choice, whether they like it or not. It can continue to inhabit an ideology shaped in exile, one that treats power as impurity and sovereignty as sin. Or it can undertake the far more demanding task of reinterpreting its exilic tradition in light of Jewish history’s return to agency.

The image of those two soldiers forces a question that cannot be deferred: can a Jewish state endure when a significant and growing portion of its population remains ideologically and therefore institutionally estranged from the very idea of the state? Until that question is addressed honestly, every political compromise will fail.

The crisis cannot be resolved by tinkering with quotas or recalibrating stipends. It is doctrinal. And doctrines, unlike budgets, do not expire at the end of a fiscal year. They do not yield to compromise formulas. They define loyalties, obligations and horizons of legitimacy. They shape the moral imagination of a community and in the long run, they shape the destiny of nations.

The Haredi leadership understands this perfectly well. Their resistance is not improvised. They are not arguing about numbers. They are defending a worldview. Which is why the confrontation cannot remain at the level of administrative adjustment. If the dispute is ideological in origin, it must be answered at the level of ideas. Only there, in that argument about doctrine, can the matter truly be addressed.