As Israel approaches another election cycle, the national debate over military service is once again becoming a central political issue. For years, however, the conversation has been framed almost entirely around one subject: Haredi exemptions. Yet the data shows this narrative is incomplete.

Israel is not facing a single-sector draft crisis. The enlistment challenge now cuts across multiple parts of society, including growing numbers of secular Israelis who do not enlist, rising psychiatric exemptions, high dropout rates, and longstanding non-participation among large parts of the Arab population.

The question voters should now ask is not simply which politicians promise to “solve” the Haredi issue, but whether any party is willing to address the deeper structural challenges affecting military and national service across Israeli society as a whole.

It is important to recognize that the IDF’s enlistment challenges have been evident for some time. By 2020, the scale of non-service among Israelis, secular and religious, had already reached striking levels. Around 32.9% of men did not enlist in the IDF, while 44.3% of women also did not enlist. An additional 15% of men who did enlist failed to complete their service. Nearly half of Israeli men were therefore not completing full mandatory military service. That is not a fringe phenomenon. That is a national issue.

Even more striking is the composition of exemptions themselves. Among those receiving exemptions, 46.6% were secular Israelis, compared with 44.7% who were Haredi. In other words, secular Israelis represented a slightly larger share of exemption recipients than the ultra-Orthodox in this dataset. That fact alone fundamentally complicates the way the issue........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)