The Structural Barrier to Equal Burden-Sharing in Israel |
If Israel is serious about both integrating the Haredi population and expanding the IDF’s manpower, the problem cannot be reduced to enlistment policy alone. It is fundamentally political.
As long as sectoral parties maintain a near-monopoly over their voters, the elites who lead them have strong incentives to preserve dependence, resist integration, and block reforms that would dilute their control. This is not unique to the Haredim, but part of a broader pattern in which identity-based parties (religious, ethnic, or cultural) prioritize the survival of their leadership structures over long-term societal integration, which would dilute their power. Breaking that monopoly and creating a political system in which Haredi voters are meaningfully courted by cross-sectoral parties competing on economic and national policy is therefore a prerequisite for any real change: both in sharing the burden of service and in integrating Haredim into Israeli society. And in order to achieve that we need to drop the requirement for Haredim to enlist at all.
Throughout history, elites have held power through their access and control of the levers of influence. From there they have used that power in order to legitimize their position. Sometimes they are fractured, sometimes cohesive. Sometimes they are elected, sometimes inherited. But they always, inevitably, work to maintain their power. Not because they are evil but because they are human.
Every argument, narrative, excuse, or speech needs to be read through that lens.
When that legitimizing discourse is successful, we believe that those elites best represent our interests. In democracies, we imagine that elites rise through merit. Which is what is often called the myth of meritocracy. In democracies we also believe that competing elites check each other in a healthy balance while representing different voices and interest groups. In non-democracies, elites often justify their rule through tradition, ideology, or divine right. But across systems, one fact holds true: elites in the long term do not have the same interests as the people on which they........