"Did you make an army? So why are you wearing a kippah?" in one sentence addressed to Israel Hirsch, an IDF officer and captain in the reserves in a combat unit, a lawyer in the civil service and a resident of Hod Hasharon, a secular woman sitting next to him on the bus distilled the core of the criticism that has recently swept our country.
No more substantive discussion, no more discourse with data, numbers, trends and processes. It is the form of the ultra-Orthodox Jew that threatens regardless of his actions and service to the state. The same woman who spoke in a violent and ugly manner managed to distill into a brief and poignant situation the sense of helplessness felt by many citizens belonging to the ultra-Orthodox sector, who are disqualified in an ignorant, lordly and condescending manner only for their choice of belonging to the haredi sector and differentiation by dress and external features.
Being ultra-Orthodox in Israel 2023
(By the way, his father was with me on the team in the unit...) pic.twitter.com/87q4EHyidw
— Yinon Magal (@YinonMagal) June 19, 2023
I couldn't help but remember the demonstrators who came to my city, Bnei Brak, whom I asked if they wanted the ultra-Orthodox in the army, when the practical meaning was masses of young Haredim who look different and need religious needs of one kind or another as part of their military service. To this day, I have not received a response. The looks said it all. They want soldiers in the army, not ultra-Orthodox soldiers. Still, about 1,250 ultra-Orthodox soldiers enlist every year.
70% of them enlist in combat in various brigades and battalions. In addition, there are ultra-Orthodox "Netzach" tracks for combat supporters, in Military Intelligence, the Ground Forces and the Air Force, from programmers to electricians. Netzach Yehuda has an alumni community of more than 20,1999 military graduates from Haredi education. For the sake of comparison, in 30 only 100 Haredim enlisted. That means a 20-fold increase in <> years.
The employment rate of Haredi women in Israel is also much higher than the employment rate of women in OECD countries, reaching an all-time high of about 83%. The share of Haredi men working reached 53.5 per cent, the highest in the past 25 years.
Israel Jonathan Hirsch is not alone, journalists Chen Artzi Srour and Sivan Rahav Meir published last week about religious women who were attacked in the public sphere for no fault of their own. One of them is singer Ruhama Ben Yosef, who shared that she was shouted at "Take the rag off your head, go to hell," and Ayelet Vaknin, who was also screamed on the bus: "Stop having children every ten minutes.
A common denominator of all these violent, condescending and patronizing remarks: a terrible fear of external signs that in recent weeks have been presented on the eve of Arabia as the source of all the evil, poverty, troubles and stuckness in the country, and the lack of incisive, substantive and challenging discourse on the merits of issues rather than on the merits of people and sectors. Perhaps, following recent events, the studios and Givat Ram will understand that words and behavior have a dramatic effect and seep into the field quickly.
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