Israel’s political crisis is sustained by groups and institutions that claim to carry the country on behalf of everyone else. The problem begins when service becomes sovereignty, representation becomes ownership, and every indispensable contribution demands immunity from the judgment of those expected to live with its consequences.

An Israeli reservist returns home after another prolonged period of military service and asks why men of his age remain in yeshivot financed by the same state that repeatedly removes him from his work and family. A Haredi politician replies that Torah study protects the Jewish people no less decisively than tanks or infantry. A settler insists that his family inhabits dangerous ground so that hesitant Israelis in Tel Aviv will not surrender the country by exhaustion, while a judge is described by liberal demonstrators as one of the last adults still capable of protecting democracy from its elected government.

Each of these claims contains something recognizable. That is precisely what makes the resulting structure so difficult to confront. None of these figures merely performs a particular function within Israel; each is gradually invited to appear as a substitute for the nation itself.

Every complex society depends on representation. Soldiers defend people who are not soldiers, judges interpret laws for citizens who will never read a judicial opinion, scholars preserve traditions for those unable to devote their lives to study, and elected representatives make decisions for millions who possess neither the time nor the appetite to attend every parliamentary committee.

Representation remains politically tolerable only while a limited function recognizes its limits. A soldier may serve the public without exhausting the meaning of citizenship, a scholar may preserve a tradition without becoming the exclusive guardian of collective existence, and a court may restrain power without claiming to embody democracy in its entirety.

Israel has been crossing from representation into substitution. Institutions and communities increasingly describe their particular activity as something performed in place of the whole, often on behalf of citizens presented as unwilling, unqualified or insufficiently Jewish to perform the task themselves. A contribution is thereby transformed into a jurisdiction, and the person who carries a burden acquires the authority to determine what burdens count.

The dispute over Haredi military exemptions offers the clearest example. Haredi leaders do not defend Torah study only as a religious vocation deserving protection in a Jewish state; they present it as a national service performed for every Jew, including those who reject the premise. The yeshiva student studies for the metaphysical survival of the people, and his exemption is redescribed not as withdrawal from a shared obligation but as a superior contribution invisible to secular accounting.

The reservist occupies the apparently opposite position, yet the political structure is remarkably similar. He no longer appears merely as a citizen performing an onerous duty but as the fullest form of the citizen, whose exposure to injury and death grants a seriousness unavailable to people who remained at home. Military service........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)