When the Uniform Comes Off, Power Remains

Three young women showed up for their final discharge day from the IDF in civilian clothes: a tank top, a short skirt, a crop top. Moments earlier, they had cut their military ID cards, standing on the threshold between service and civilian freedom. A few minutes later, they were court-martialed and roughly a third of their final pay was docked for “inappropriate dress.” Their mothers called it repulsive and humiliating. The IDF described the case as a “deviation from orders.”

Even if it was a deviation, it was not without meaning.

The real scandal is not the clothes. It is the jurisdiction. These women had completed their mandatory service, risking their bodies for the Jewish state. And yet the institution still assumed it had the right to police their bodies one final time. The uniform came off, but the control did not.

That single moment exposes a deeper rot: a state that demands women’s sacrifice, bodily risk, and full legitimacy in combat roles, while still hesitating to grant them full autonomy the moment they return to civilian life.

Just days earlier, Israel’s High Court had ordered the IDF to begin a pilot program opening tank crews to women by November 2026, affirming the legal obligation to provide equal opportunities in combat roles “to the extent possible.” Women are now expected to bear the full burden of military citizenship, including its most demanding and dangerous forms. But when they appear in civilian clothes with bare shoulders or legs, some commanders still reach for military punishment. The message is unmistakable: your body belongs to the collective, especially if you are a woman, even after your duty has been fulfilled.

This is not mere prudishness. It is the soft, insidious face of religious coercion operating inside a democratic army. There are no morality police beating women in the streets. Instead, there is a quiet, almost automatic decision that a female soldier’s civilian appearance remains subject to a moral code increasingly shaped by an Orthodox logic of modesty. The categories of “immodest,” “inappropriate,” and “disrespectful” have become so deeply embedded in parts of Israeli institutional life that punishment begins to feel natural. No central order is required. The climate does the work.

And this is where the hypocrisy becomes unbearable. While these young women, and thousands like them, serve, fight, and bleed in the IDF, large sectors of the Haredi community continue to refuse military service altogether. Their rabbis and politicians threaten national rupture whenever exemptions are seriously challenged. They demand, and receive, massive public funding for yeshivas, political leverage in coalition governments, and growing influence over marriage, divorce, public religious space, and the symbolic boundaries of Jewish life. They reject the basic social contract of the Jewish state, according to which citizens share the burden of its defense, while insisting on shaping the norms by which those who actually serve are judged.

This is the grotesque asymmetry at the heart of Israeli public life today. Women are told: serve in tanks, serve on the front lines, serve with “dignity,” and go on serving even when the uniform is already off. Haredi men are told, in practice, that refusal can still buy influence, subsidies, and the right to police everyone else’s modesty.

The problem does not end there. In Tel Aviv, ahead of Memorial Day, hundreds of people, including families of victims and hostages, demanded a state commission of inquiry into October 7. Among the most powerful voices once again were women: as daughters, sisters, mothers, bearers of memory, anger, and public accusation against a state that failed them. The protesters said they would not allow the authorities to bury the catastrophe and force forgetting.

And here the contrast becomes brutally clear. In one place, women stand at the center of national mourning, public accusation, and the demand for accountability. They become the voice of memory, loss, and moral pressure. In another, young women completing military service are still treated as bodies requiring correction at the threshold of civilian life. The asymmetry says everything. The state readily receives women as mourners, witnesses, soldiers, and symbols of collective sacrifice. It is far less willing to recognize them as fully autonomous subjects of their own public visibility.

This is not a side issue. It is a constitutional crisis in miniature. Because Israel’s institutional structure grants Orthodox rabbinic authority real jurisdiction over core spheres of personal status, Orthodoxy does not merely influence the state. It partly inhabits it. One specific interpretation of Jewish life is no longer content merely to govern its own adherents. Increasingly, it seeks to set the thresholds of legitimacy, visibility, and ordinary conduct for all Israelis. In that sense, Orthodoxy functions, at least in part, as a patrix for the anti-feminist matrices of the Jewish state.

The same pattern can be seen at the Western Wall, where proposals continue to surface that would place the entire site under exclusive Orthodox control and criminalize non-Orthodox or mixed prayer as “desecration.” One interpretation of Judaism does not simply want to live by its own rules. It demands jurisdiction over the public expression of Jewish identity itself.

Defenders of the status quo will say that this was merely a local error or an unfortunate excess. Perhaps. But that does not save them. The truly important question is not whether the incident was centrally planned. The question is why it was so easily possible. Why did it seem entirely intelligible to someone in authority that young women completing their service could still be punished militarily for civilian appearance? Why was such a decision institutionally legible at all?

At that point, the story stops being about a tank top or a skirt. It becomes a story about a Jewish state that wants, and increasingly needs, women’s full participation, their sacrifice, their memory, their witness, and their legitimacy, while still hesitating before their autonomy whenever it appears outside the approved script.

A Jewish state that demands equal sacrifice from its daughters while granting them unequal autonomy, all while shielding sons who refuse any equivalent sacrifice, betrays the very idea of a modern, viable Jewish democracy.

The tank-top affair is small. Its implications are not. When the uniform comes off, control should come off too. Anything less is not tradition.

It is hypocrisy with teeth.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)