IDF draft equality is minimum condition to restore Israeli solidarity - editorial

For more than a year of war, reserve soldiers and their families have carried a burden that is physical, financial, and spiritual. They have lived on packed duffel bags and half-sleep, on WhatsApp messages that start with “They called us again,” and on the quiet dread of another knock at the door.

They have done so not because it is easy, and not because anyone has explained a coherent national destination – but because this is what a society does when it still believes it is one society.

For decades, many Israelis – including voters on the national-religious Right – were willing to swallow a reality in which one public carried a larger share of service, while another public condemned the state’s secular civic character and still demanded the state’s full protections and budgets.

The price of that arrangement has always been social resentment. Since the October 7 massacre, that resentment has turned into something more dangerous: a fracture in the idea of mutual obligation.

Even within the religious-Zionist sector, which supplies a disproportionate share of combat soldiers and those who have fallen, the patience has snapped.

Smotrich has accepted the position of his party’s rabbis that improving the draft bill cannot come “at the expense of breaking up the government,” KAN News reported this week. That means: Don’t oppose the law if it risks collapsing the coalition – before elections. That is the whole story of this political era in one sentence, and it is exactly what voters are increasingly unwilling to fund with their bodies.

The broader public mood reflects that skepticism. The Jewish People Policy Institute think tank’s December 2025 index found that a majority of the respondents oppose the current proposal backed by Likud MK Boaz Bismuth, largely because they believe it will not lead to meaningful haredi enlistment.

The Institute for National Security Studies think tank’s polling has likewise shown overwhelming demand for change to the current arrangement and deep concern that broad exemption harms motivation for combat service.

That is what makes this election different. The question is not whether politicians will sit with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The question is whether any coalition can credibly claim to govern “for the people” while locking in a system where one entire population group is structurally protected from the most basic obligation of citizenship.

A government that continues to do this is not merely unfair; it is strategically reckless. It tells the public that sacrifice is for suckers, that “together” is a slogan for funerals, and that the state will always find a way to make the same families carry the same load.

So, here is the call, ahead of elections, to voters and leaders alike: Do not lose the ball. Draft equality is not a punishment or revenge. It is the minimum condition for restoring Israeli solidarity after a war that has shredded nerves and households. The war did not only take bodies; it took spirit. It took marriages, jobs, sleep, and the sense that someone competent is steering.

If the political class insists on treating conscription as a coalition-management exercise – if it continues to promise “we won’t support a bad bill” and then quietly accepts the same bad bill in the name of stability – then voters, including religious-Zionist voters, are signaling they will treat that as a breach of trust.

And if leaders still want a country that shows up when called, they should start by showing up to the one test that now defines whether we are still one society: a fair share of service, a fair share of risk, and a state that stops confusing political survival with national survival.