The Haredi Chain Reaction — How an Agent Model Can Break Israel |
Israel is fighting enemies on multiple fronts. But the most dangerous battlefield may be internal: a self-reinforcing social model that grows rapidly, draws heavily on shared resources, refuses reciprocal obligations, and steadily corrodes the trust a small country needs to survive.
I’m going to describe that model using a modern vocabulary that’s suddenly familiar: AI agents.
Not chatbots. Not “programs.” Agents.
A program follows instructions. When it misbehaves, you fix the code.
An agent is different. It acts semi-autonomously in a changing environment. It has an objective (what it optimizes for), constraints (what it refuses to do), a training set (what it learns from), and an interface with its surroundings (how it secures resources and avoids threats). When an agent’s objective function is misaligned with the system it lives inside, it doesn’t merely “fail.” It can optimize the wrong thing—efficiently, persistently, and at scale.
This lens helps explain a particular phenomenon inside Israel: the political-social Haredi model that prioritizes non-participation in general civic life—especially military service—while remaining materially dependent on the state and society it seeks to remain insulated from.
This is not a claim about every Haredi individual. There are many Haredim who work, contribute, and seek workable compromises. But the dominant political posture around sweeping exemptions and weak enforcement is real—and in wartime it is now a national stress test. The Supreme Court’s June 25, 2024 ruling made that explicit: in the absence of a legal framework for blanket exemptions, the state must draft........