Alon Mizrahi:
”Two interesting developments in Israel from the recent 24 hours, both directly related to Israel's militarist (read: genocidal) mindset and Netanyahu's policy of forever war/apocalypse:
First, a group of reservists notified the IDF it would not be returning to serve in Gaza, for reasons that include both humanitarian considerations ('I did not understand why they asked us to burn down apartment buildings') and the futility of fighting as regards returning Israel's captives. This is not a big group: only a few dozens signed the letter. And, more importantly, they limit their refusal to Gaza, thus allowing the IDF to use them somewhere else free other soldiers for Gaza. This also comes extremely late in the day, so it is not a huge and dramatic deal. It is, however, a crack in the wall, and a major reason for infighting and instability.
Second, and much bigger, is a decision by the Israeli Supreme Court to declare illegal the special status given to young Haredi (ultraorthodox) kids, which exempted them from otherwise mandatory military service. And this, compared to the tokenistic refusal by the reservists, is a huge deal.
The special arrangement for Haredi Jews goes back to the early 1950s, when Ben Gurion created it to allow ultraorthodox Jews to live in Israel and lot give up their Torah-centered lifestyle.
There are around 1.5 million Haredi Israelis and they are the youngest demographic, meaning they are becoming a bigger percentage of Israeli society (Remember that there are approximately 7 million Jews in Israel in total).
The issue of Haredi military service has been a staple of both secular Ashkenazi politics, and the Ashkenazi religious right. Those groups see the IDF as the center of both Israeli culture, and the source of their elevated status in the Israeli hierarchy.
Just as important, for those two groups, destroying the traditional religious Jewish way of life means the triumph of Zionism over the Golah, which they despised since the very beginning (in their stupidity, they believe they represent a model of Jewish power, as opposed to the weakness of the Jewish diaspora. They have no idea how weak and hysterical they appear to the rest of the world).
Also, in their strategic stupidity, liberal Zionists pushed to make Haredi mobilization a burning issue as Israel is fighting a long and unwinnable war: the result is not going to be tens of thousands of Haredi kids joining the IDF, it is going to be social strife and infighting on an entirely new scale.
You see, there is no way in hell the leaders of the Haredi communities will allow their boys to be recruited. It is not happening: it will be the ruin of all they believe in. And those are actual believers. They are not playing. They will go to war (against the state of Israel) and they will go to jail or leave the country. But they are not joining the IDF.
And so what we're going to see in the near future is an Israel thrown into fierce inner clashes (right-left, secular-religious, Haredi-Ashkenazi) just as it heads into a new major war while being led by a divisive and toxic psychopath.
Watching Israel right now is like watching a prophecy of doom, happening live.”