Ultra-Orthodox block main road for hours in draft protest; 32 arrested

Ultra-Orthodox protesters blocked a main traffic junction for several hours on Thursday at a demonstration against proposals to draft them into the military. The demonstrators scuffled with police, who arrested at least 32 participants.

Police said some protesters blocking Route 4 at the Coca-Cola Junction in Bnei Brak called them “Nazis” and lay under police vehicles to block them.

Police were seen using mounted officers in attempts to clear the road during rush hour. After some three hours police announced that the road was finally open.

Some protesters called for violence, while others vowed to go to jail or die instead of enlisting.

Demonstrators carried signs reading: “All Haredi Jews are forbidden from enlisting, even those who are not yeshiva students.”

The sign was referring to a talking point often made in public discourse that many of the ultra-Orthodox men who receive exemptions on account of their status as yeshiva students do not actually study at yeshivas.

כביש 4, דרך גהה, נחסם על ידי חרדים מהפלג הירושלמי במחאה נגד גיוס תלמידי ישיבות@YoavBorowitz @AnnaPines_ pic.twitter.com/8xe1VfpD9b

— כאן חדשות (@kann_news) June 27, 2024

The demonstrators belonged to the extremist Jerusalem Faction, which numbers some 60,000 members and regularly demonstrates against the enlistment of yeshiva students.

Many ultra-Orthodox Jews believe that military service is incompatible with their way of life and fear that those who do enlist will be secularized.

The protest was a response to the High Court of Justice’s landmark ruling on Tuesday that ordered the Israel Defense Forces to begin conscripting ultra-Orthodox men and halt funding to yeshivas that do not comply.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men block a highway during a protest against army recruitment in Bnei Brak, Thursday, June 27, 2024. (AP/Oded Balilty)

The court ruled that a government decision from June 2023 instructing the army not to begin drafting eligible Haredi men — issued after the law allowing for blanket military service exemptions expired — was illegal, and that the government must therefore actively work to conscript ultra-Orthodox recruits to the Israel Defense Forces.

The court ruling also permanently barred the state from funding ultra-Orthodox yeshivas for students who are studying in them in lieu of military service, asserting that those funds were bound up in the terms of the IDF service exemptions which now no longer exist.

The High Court’s decision means that after decades of political and societal controversy and strife over the issue, there is now a legal obligation for young Haredi men to join their Jewish Israeli comrades and serve in the military.

Israeli mounted police disperse ultra-Orthodox Jewish men during a protest against a ruling by a top Israeli court that they must be drafted into military service, in the center of the Israeli city of Bnei Brak on June 27, 2024. (Jack Guez/AFP)

This new reality has come about largely due to the confluence of two major events — the expiration of the original law allowing for blanket service exemptions, and the cataclysmic October 7 Hamas attack and its aftermath, which threw into sharp relief the IDF’s need for more manpower.

Although the government could in theory re-legislate the blanket exemptions, doing so would be politically difficult since several Likud MKs have already said they will not vote for them and since the country is engaged in active fighting on numerous fronts.