The Haredi draft crisis is no longer a sectoral dispute. It is not merely about manpower, coalition bargaining, or the familiar slogan of sharing the burden. It is a test of whether the State of Israel still possesses a common threshold of obligation.

A state does not become real simply because it protects. Protection can be provided by patrons, clans, donors, militias, parties, and foreign allies. A state becomes real when it can summon — and when that summons applies not identically, but commonly.

This is the point at which the Haredi question becomes unavoidable. Israel is not being asked whether it can tolerate difference. It must tolerate difference. A Jewish state that cannot make room for radically different forms of Jewish life would already have failed its own name. The question is sharper: can difference be allowed to become immunity from the state’s right to summon?

For years, the language surrounding Haredi exemption has been softened by appeals to tradition, Torah study, communal autonomy, rabbinic authority, historical trauma, and coalition arithmetic. None of these is irrelevant. But none of them cancels the central fact. If the state is real enough to fund institutions, protect neighborhoods, maintain roads, provide benefits, and defend borders, then it is also real enough to demand obligation.

One cannot live permanently under the protection of sovereignty while denying that same sovereignty the right to call.

The recent ultra-Orthodox protests and convoys toward military prison are therefore more than another episode of Israeli street politics. They are a political diagram. One part of society mobilizes in order not to be mobilized. Another part serves, returns to reserve duty, buries its dead, loses months of work, studies, health, and family life, and is then asked to understand why exemption must remain negotiable.

At a certain point, such an arrangement stops being pluralism. It becomes asymmetric citizenship.

But the deeper danger is not only that exemption is unfair. Unfairness can be endured for a time. Societies endure many unfair things before they break. The deeper danger is that exemption begins to absorb the free capacity of the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)