The IDF scenes service members who took over the Haredi communities had a deeper meaning for both sides, because the Haredim are largely exempt from Israel’s mandatory military service – just one of the many ways in which they remain outside the mainstream of Israeli society. In fact, almost half of Haredi males choose not to work, relying on state funding and philanthropic aid to feed them and their families. About 42% of haredim live below the poverty line, almost four times more than other Israelis.
The relationship between Haredim and secular Israelis has been at odds since the beginning of the country. Zionism, which advocated building a Jewish national home in the Land of Israel, originated with secular Jews, mainly from Eastern Europe. The haredim, on the other hand, believed that only the Messiah could establish a Jewish state, that only God would decide when to return the Jews to their ancestral land. The humans trying to speed up the process were committing a serious sin.
The Haredim worked obstinately, both inside and outside Palestine, to thwart the political efforts of the Zionists. The Zionists in Palestine responded with violence. In 1924, an assassin took the life of Jacob de Haan, a Dutch Jewish author and activist who became a Haredi as an adult, the day before he traveled to London in the hope of persuading the British government to reconsider his promise to “See with favor ”The establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. After the Holocaust, it was the Zionist movement that became the main Jewish political force; anti-Zionist movements were largely destroyed, with the exception of the Haredim, whose community survived despite the large number of those killed by the Nazis. Many of the survivors migrated to the United States; most of the others moved to Israel.
Hoping to present a united front to the United Nations committee that investigates the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, the driving force behind the creation of a Jewish state, made a series of aggressive promises to ultra-Orthodox leaders. In the new state, he said, Saturdays would be made an official day of rest, kosher food would be served in all kitchens in the state and there would be no civil weddings. In addition, when it came to education, each of the three Jewish communities – secular, modern orthodox and haredim – would have autonomy, as long as essential subjects such as mathematics, foreign languages and history were taught.
But even these concessions were insufficient to bring the Haredim into the national fold. On October 20, 1952, the Prime Minister paid a visit to a small apartment not far from where Bnei Brak City Hall is today. He went to see the preeminent haredi leader of the day, Rabbi Abraham Yeshayahu Karelitz, known as Hazon Ish, the same figure Kanievsky cited 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 received orders from Hazon Ish.
As Yitzhak Navon, Ben-Gurion’s political secretary at the time and later Israel’s fifth president, told me in an interview in 1990, the rabbi graciously welcomed Ben-Gurion. The two men talked about Spinoza and other philosophical subjects, 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?” Hazon Ish responded with an allegory from the Talmud. “If two camels meet on a narrow path, and one camel is carrying a burden and the other is not, then the unloaded camel must yield,” he said. And it was the religious Jews who carried the greatest burden, by far. “We carry the yoke of many commandments,” he continued, with the clear implication that secular Jews did not carry a yoke and lacked values.