It was never about soldiers: Yitzhak Pindrus makes the Haredi case on the draft

The draft law is the condition Israel's Haredi parties have put on joining any coalition, and the case for the exemption is rarely argued in English by someone who has to win it. Yitzhak Pindrus, a United Torah Judaism MK and former mayor of Beitar Illit, sat down with Jonathan Freedland and Yonit Levi for the kind of adversarial political interview Unholy almost never does. Jonathan said as much on air.

Pindrus's central move is to refuse the terms of the argument. The fight, he says, was never really about soldiers.

The state stopped drafting us

Yonit pressed the arithmetic: 400 exemptions under Ben-Gurion against roughly 66,000 today, three years of war, and an army asking for 10,000 soldiers. Pindrus's answer was his own biography. He served in the IDF himself, and says some 400 mainstream Haredi men went through training alongside him in 1998 and 1999. His question is why that stopped. His answer is that Israeli policymakers decided in the late 1990s and early 2000s to stop bringing Haredim into the army, which in his account turns the exemption into something the state chose rather than something his community extracted.

The 400 he counts in that training cohort are not the 400 Ben-Gurion-era exemptions cited earlier in the episode. They are two different figures, and the account of why enlistment wound down is his.

He disowned the faction behind the banners comparing IDF service to Nazi camps, calling it disgusting and saying it broke away from the mainstream Haredi leadership around 2013. The real question, he argues, is not whether Haredim serve but whether secular Israel can live with a separate Orthodox community existing on its own terms. Most of the left pushing the draft, he says, would be appalled if 66,000 Haredim actually enlisted. A host put back to him that it is the army, not the left, making the demand.

Not trying to take over the country

Jonathan challenged the historical framing: the original exemption covered a small scholarly elite, and universal yeshiva study is a modern invention rather than a tradition. Pindrus accepted the numbers and turned them into his proof. The community has gone from a remnant in 1948 to a quarter or more of children entering first grade, and the model, he says, works.

Asked whether the draft is the only obstacle to sitting with the anti-Netanyahu bloc, he went back to 1977 and 1992.

"The people are afraid of us because they think we want to take over the country. We're not trying to take over the country and we're not trying to be in power."

What the party wants, on his account, is protection for its schools and its way of life. He cannot see any government being formed by anyone until the draft is settled, and says a boy leaving his house already expects to be arrested.

Who pays

The sharpest exchange came on money. Jonathan set out the stipends, discounts and subsidies a large low-income Haredi family receives, and the resentment he hears from religious Israelis who work, pay tax and send sons to the army. Pindrus rejected the figures outright and accused the officials behind them of lying. He reads seventy years of Israeli policy as a sustained attempt to close his community down, and says the enrolment figures show it failed. That claim, and his figures on education budgets, are his own and are contested.

Then came the concession his critics rarely hear.

"If you want a solution for the financial problems, there is a solution. Get the math better in our schools."

Teach maths and English properly, pay the teachers to do it, and the economic problem is solvable inside Haredi education. He says he has put exactly that to officials at the finance ministry.

Shabbat in the West Bank

Jonathan described what he had seen travelling in the West Bank: arson and intimidation against Palestinian villages, concentrated on Shabbat, and a senior rabbi's description of it as a desecration of God's name. Pindrus said he did not know the details of what happens there, then agreed the rabbi was not wrong. It is against everything the Torah teaches, he said.

The interview closes on Rabbi Dov Landau's removal of two long-serving MKs, Moshe Gafni and Uri Maklev, from the party list. Pindrus did not pretend to be comfortable with it, and described it as how rabbinic leadership works: the same authority that put him on the list in 2019 can take others off it.

In their debrief, Yonit's reading was that Pindrus had told them, without embarrassment, that Torah study protects Israel more than the IDF does. Jonathan's was that the draft is a proxy for a wider fight over whether the community may remain as it is, and that no coalition looks buildable until it is resolved. The full interview is on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.