Thousands of ultra-orthodox Jews clashed with Israeli police in Jerusalem in violent protests over a Supreme Court ruling to begin enlisting the community for military service.
Protesters targeted an Israeli minister’s car during the demonstration on Sunday night, which turned angrier over the course of the evening with five people arrested for attacking police and throwing stones as officers responded with water cannon and mounted police to disperse the crowd.
“Stones, objects, planks of wood and all types of things were thrown at police and security forces in the area,” a local police commander said, adding that people tried to harm police and government officials and that such people had cast “a great stain on the entire ultra-orthodox public with their violent and dangerous behaviour”.
The mass protest came after the court ruled last week that ultra-orthodox men of age must be drafted into the Israeli army, and that the religious seminaries who do not comply will have their government funding frozen. The sect, known as Haredis or God-fearing Jews, have previously avoided conscription because of a decades-old law that allowed them to pursue full-time religious studies.
Yitzhak Goldknopf, the Haredi housing minister and construction minister who was attacked on Sunday, has previously spoken out against the high court ruling, but letters calling seminary students to the draft have already begun to be sent out. The community is now seeking to put pressure on ultra-orthodox members of parliament, who make up 18 seats of the ruling government coalition, to act.
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“Rather die than enlist” and “We will not join the enemy’s army,” read some of the signs at the protest, in which a wide swathe of different Haredi sects rallied together against the draft.
One head of a prominent Jewish seminar in Jerusalem, Rabbi Moshe Tzadaka, told the crowd that they should “not make compromises”.
• Netzah Yehuda, the ultra-Orthodox battalion dividing US and Israel
In last Tuesday’s high court ruling a panel of judges ruled unanimously for conscripting seminary or yeshiva students, citing the nearly nine months of war in Gaza, the northern front with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, and the army’s need for more soldiers.
“In the midst of a gruelling war, the burden of inequality is harsher than ever and demands a solution,” the ruling read. There are some 60,000 eligible Haredi citizens, but the court order did not suggest who to recruit or how to go about it.
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The ruling is the latest in a series of ruptures in Binyamin Netanyahu’s government which threaten to tear it apart completely, but the prime minister is still searching for a solution to placate his religious cabinet members while drafting a minimum number of ultra-orthodox men.
Hundreds of thousands of reservists have been called up over the past nine months to fight in the Gaza Strip and along the border with Lebanon, leading to upped accusations of inequality in sharing the national burden of protecting the state. Haredis believe they are protecting Israel through their study of Torah and any interference would corrupt their youth and destroy their well-preserved and protected way of life.
