The scenes of IDF service members taking over Haredi communities had a deeper meaning for both sides, as the Haredim were largely exempt from Israel’s compulsory military service – just one of the many ways they stay out of the mainstream of Israeli society. Indeed, nearly half of Haredi men prefer not to work at all and rely on government funding and philanthropic assistance to feed them and their families. About 42 percent of Haredim live below the poverty line, nearly four times as many as other Israelites.
The relationship between the Haredim and the secular Israelites has been a confrontation from the beginning of the land. Zionism, which advocated the construction of a Jewish national home in the Land of Israel, has its origins in secular Jews, mainly from Eastern Europe. The Haredim, on the other hand, believed that only the Messiah could establish a Jewish state, that God would decide only when the Jews had to return to their homeland. People who try to speed up the process commit serious sin.
The Haredim worked hard, inside and outside Palestine, to stimulate the political efforts of the Zionists. The Zionists in Palestine responded with violence. In 1924, an assassin takes the life of Jacob de Haan, a Dutch-Jewish writer and activist who became a Haredi as an adult, a day before he was to travel to London in hopes of persuading the British government to to reconsider promise ‘Establishing a Jewish state in Palestine’ considered favorably ‘. After the Holocaust, it was the Zionist movement that became the leading Jewish political force; the anti-Zionist movements were largely destroyed, apart from the Haredim, whose community survived, despite the large numbers killed by the Nazis. Many of the survivors migrated to the United States; most others moved to Israel.
David Ben-Gurion, the driving force behind the creation of a Jewish state, in the hope of proposing a united front to the United Nations committee investigating the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine, made a series of aggressive promises to ultra-Orthodox leaders. In the new state, he said, Saturdays will be made an official day of rest, kosher food will be served in all state kitchens and there will be no civil marriages. As far as education is concerned, each of the three Jewish communities – secular, modern Orthodox and Haredim – would have autonomy, as long as core subjects such as mathematics, foreign languages and history were taught.
But even these concessions were insufficient to bring the Haredim into the national scene. On October 20, 1952, the prime minister visited a small apartment not far from the site of the present town hall Bnei Brak. He went to see the leading Haredi leader of the time, Abraham Abraham Yeshayahu Karelitz, known as the Hazon Ish, the same figure that Kanievsky quoted to assure his followers that Saddam Hussein’s missiles would not touch them. Ben-Gurion needed the Haredi parties to form a coalition, and they took their orders from the Hazon Ish.
As Yitzhak Navon, then political secretary of Ben-Gurion and later the fifth president of Israel, told me in a 1990 interview, Rabbi Ben-Gurion graciously welcomed. The two men talked about Spinoza and other philosophical topics, and then Ben-Gurion finally asked the question, “How can religious Jews and non-religious Jews live together in this country without exploding from within?” The Hazon Ish responded with an allegory of the Talmud. “If two camels meet on a narrow path, and one camel carries and the other does not, then the camel must give way without burden,” he said. And it was the religious Jews who carried by far the greatest burden. “We bear the yoke of many commandments,” he continued, with the clear implication that secular Jews bore no yoke and that they had no value.