Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon advised the government Thursday to show “zero tolerance” when dealing with violence against IDF soldiers from the hareidi community.
Hareidi-religious recruits are almost always immediately ostracized for enlisting in the IDF. They face rejection, vicious criticism and sometimes outright violence from their communities of origin when they pass on the street or share public transportation with other community members.
Speaking to reporters about the issue on Thursday, Ya’alon labeled the violence against hareidi soldiers “intolerable.”
He added that he is calling upon “heads and leaders of the hareidi community to act towards eliminating this unacceptable trend from within their community, as well as expelling the violent perpetrators.”
The IDF began several years ago to mandate service from within the hareidi-religious population as well as from the secular sector.
Service for those who are observant Jews is a much more complex matter, however, due to restrictions on relations between the genders, kashruth parameters and other Torah observance issues.
There have been cases of officers who do not allow the accommodations for the hareidi-religious soldiers under their command as they are required to do under IDF regulations. This has created untenable situations for the soldiers in a number of instances and difficult dilemmas for everyone else as well, politically and militarily. As a result, many hareidi rabbonim still advise the yeshiva students in their communities to avoid army service if at all possible due to the difficulties involved.
Extremist factions within the hareidi communities have attempted to enforce those edicts with violence.