Israelis protest military draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox

TEL AVIV — Among the thousands of Israelis who filled the streets of central Tel Aviv Saturday night to protest the exemption of their ultra-Orthodox countrymen from military service, Yaakov Ben Horim and his best friend were particularly angry.

The two men met 50 years ago, when they served together as combat soldiers during the state of Israel’s infancy.

“We barely knew what the state would look like then – it was, like us, still a child. But we knew that we must serve in the army, if we didn’t serve we wouldn’t have a State,” said Ben Horim. “The idea that a group of Israelis would be exempt – that they would fight to be exempt from serving – would never have occurred to us in those days. But that is because in those days we didn’t know the ultra-Orthodox.”

The issue is one of many, from separating the sexes on buses to tax exemptions for large families, on which secular and religious Israelis have clashed in recent years. At its core is a debate over the role of Judaism in the Jewish State.
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