There is a moment, now familiar in certain Haredi communities, when a rumor escalates into an emergency. A military-police vehicle has been spotted. A yeshiva student, identified as a military draft evader, may be arrested. A hotline message is sent out across the community: “The kidnappers have arrived.” Within minutes, young men are in the street, roads are blocked, officers are surrounded, and what began as one arrest becomes a test of whether the law can be enforced at all.
This is where the Haredi conscription crisis now stands: no longer only in Knesset committees, coalition negotiations, or Supreme Court rulings, but on the pavement, between black coats and blue uniforms. Israel spent decades managing the contradiction between compulsory service and sweeping yeshiva exemptions through delay, ambiguity, and political compromise. October 7 made that ambiguity much harder to sustain. The army needs soldiers, the courts have demanded consequences, and the government has failed to produce a stable law. Into that vacuum stepped the police.
That is the heart of the problem. The police cannot solve the draft crisis, but they have become the institution through which the crisis is experienced. For the Haredi young man, the state now materializes for him in the form of an officer who may hand him over to the military police. For the non-Haredi Israeli, the state appears to hesitate at the entrance to Haredi neighborhoods, enforcing the law only where enforcement is easy. In both views, police conduct becomes the measure of state authority.
At first, the mainstream Haredi leadership tried to keep the flames contained. In January 2026, after a wave of protests led by the Jerusalem Faction (a hardline Haredi political organization opposed to any compromise on the draft), Rabbi Dov Lando, one of the senior leaders of Lithuanian Haredi society, urged young men not to participate in these demonstrations. He called the protests harmful and told Haredi educators to calm students and keep them learning. The message was clear: oppose the draft, but do not let the street take over.
By May and June, that line had begun to blur. MK Moshe Gafni called on Degel HaTorah party representatives in local authorities to stop cooperating with the police because of its involvement in arrests of yeshiva students. Meir Rubinstein, mayor of Beitar Illit and chair of the Haredi Local Authorities Forum, warned the police commissioner that the police had become “an enemy of the Haredi sector” and raised the possibility of freezing cooperation, including community policing. Yated Ne’eman, Degel HaTorah’s newspaper, placed the confrontation under a front-page headline: “War!”
This shift matters because it comes not from the anti-state fringes alone, but from the political and municipal leadership of the Haredi mainstream; from people who sit inside the Israeli system, run cities, negotiate budgets, and depend on police cooperation in daily life. Their anger over draft enforcement is real. But once cooperation with the police becomes a bargaining chip, the price is paid by ordinary Haredim who rely on police services: think, a woman or child facing domestic violence or a family threatened by extortion, who could be deeply impacted by the distrust created between the police and their community.
The danger is sharpened by what has happened on the street. In December, a confrontation on Jerusalem’s Bar-Ilan Street escalated after fears spread that Haredi draft evaders would be handed over to the military police; officers were injured and police vehicles damaged. In January, during another anti-draft demonstration on the same street, police reportedly were ordered to stay out of the protest area; an attacked bus driver began driving away, and a 14-year-old boy who had climbed onto the back of the bus was killed. In April, extremists broke into the yard of Brig. Gen. Yuval Yamin, the chief military police officer. In June, extremists vandalized the home and car of Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg.
These incidents are not identical, and they should not be treated as if they are. A chaotic protest, a call to suspend municipal cooperation, and an attack on a judge’s home are different acts with different meanings. Indeed, the attack on Sohlberg’s home crossed a line even inside Haredi society; it was attributed to zealot circles, and even figures associated with the Jerusalem Faction distanced themselves from it. But together, the incidents mark a dangerous progression: from resisting enlistment, to resisting enforcement, to targeting the people and institutions identified with enforcement.
That movement has a paradoxical trap in policing. The divide is not simply between Haredim who complain of over-policing and non-Haredi Israelis who complain of under-policing in Haredi communities. In Haredi society itself, both claims are present, and both describe a broken relationship with the police. Over-policing can mean harsh dispersals, humiliation, profiling, and force that confirm the fear that the police arrive not as protectors but as an enemy. Under-policing means something different but no less damaging: absence, hesitation, selective enforcement, reliance on communal intermediaries, and the quiet abandonment of vulnerable Haredi citizens when they need protection most.
Non-Haredi Israelis may look at blocked arrests or police hesitation in Haredi neighborhoods and see state weakness. Many Haredim see another form of discrimination: a police force that enters forcefully when the state wants compliance, but is too often absent when a woman faces domestic violence, a child is abused, a family is threatened, or local strongmen impose their own order. The terrible possibility is that both diagnoses are right. A police force can be too forceful in one alley and too absent in the next. It can alienate through aggression and invite disorder through hesitation.
Research by the Israel Democracy Institute shows that distrust of police is deep-seated. Even before the war, seventy-four percent of Haredi Jews believed the police over-police the Haredi community, compared with 26% of non-Haredi Jews. Eighty-three percent said police treatment of Haredim is worse than its treatment of other citizens. But distrust does not mean that Haredim want less law enforcement. Often, it means they want a different kind of law: less humiliation when the state enforces, and more protection when the community’s own mechanisms fail.
This is why under-policing is not a favor to Haredi autonomy. It is also a form of neglect. The same community that distrusts the police also needs it. Most Haredim do not want the police to disappear from their neighborhoods. As mentioned, they need protection from crime just like anyone else. This is the tension Haredi leadership must confront honestly: turning the police into the enemy may rally a fearful public against the draft, but it weakens the very institution that protects vulnerable Haredi citizens when communal mechanisms fail them.
The state must confront its own illusion as well. For years, it has often dealt with Haredi society through intermediaries like rabbis, politicians, and community leaders. This model lowered friction and helped preserve the Haredi autonomy that successive governments found convenient. But it also meant that individual Haredi citizens seldom experience direct contact with the state. In policing, that model is no longer enough.
Israel needs a nuanced doctrine for Haredi policing: consistent enforcement against violence, obstruction, and attacks on officials; disciplined restraint in the use of force; sharp distinctions between extremist groups and the broader Haredi public; and direct police service to Haredi citizens who need help, whether or not communal leaders approve.
The question at hand has become much bigger than just how many Haredim can serve in the IDF. The question is whether Israeli law can enter a Haredi neighborhood without arriving as an enemy, and whether Haredi opposition to the draft can remain within the boundaries of democratic disagreement. If the answer to these questions is no, the draft crisis risks becoming something larger and more dangerous: a crisis of authority, trust, and law itself.
