Today’s post comes to you from Chelm, which, from so many points of view, is what Israel has become in these surreal days.

Yesterday, the High Court of Justice began a hearing on the haredi conscription law. You can find a good 3000-word summary of the 75-year history of this issue, up to April 2024, here. Since the temporary stay that the Government gave itself to come up with a new law expired this year on April 1 (not an inappropriate date), there is no longer a legal basis for the exemption of haredim from national service. In the hearing yesterday (Sunday), the Government was not represented by the Attorney General, since he refused to back the Government’s decisions. It seems to me that, if you are not going to take the advice of your legal adviser, you need to replace your legal adviser with someone whose advice you do respect, but what do I know?

Adv. Doron Taubman, representing the government, argued that it did not dispute the fact that it was legally required to draft haredi men and that to refrain from doing so was illegal. However, Taubman argued that the Defence Ministry had the prerogative to decide when and how to enlist these haredi men into the IDF and that the court should not intervene.

On the issue of funding, Taubman agreed that yeshivot should not receive funding for haredi men who ignored draft orders. However, even though the law exempting haredi men expired, they had not actually been summoned yet and therefore were not violating any draft orders. The government could thus continue issuing the funding. In other words, he argued that the deadline has no significance and the lack of resolution can continue indefinitely.

During his address to the court yesterday, the chair of The Movement for Quality Government in Israel’s chairman, Adv. Eliad Shraga, cited his six children who are all currently serving in the war. Petitioners also included a group of 240 women who are mothers of soldiers. I mention this to underline how raw emotions are on the side of the petitioners. For none of them is this a legalistic debate.

Everyone knows (or should realise) that, regardless of what decision the court comes to, the situation on the ground is not going to change overnight. The primary, if unspoken, objective of this hearing is to find a way to prevent the civil war that threatens to erupt between the haredi world and the non-haredi world.

It does seem to me that, in the immediate wake of October 7, and in the months since, there have been not insignificant stirrings in some parts of the haredi sector. Small groups of haredim have enlisted, and others have gone to the front to offer food and emotional and spiritual support to the soldiers. There is the beginnings of a movement to form yeshivot hesder within the haredi community, a channel popular in the national religious sector, combining religious study with military service over an extended period.

However, any attempt to go head-to-head with the haredi community, and any attempt to impose a blanket solution from above on the entire haredi community, will never succeed. There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, who are declaring that they will die rather than enlist. This looks to me remarkably like saying that either you let me study Torah in my every waking moment, or I will give up my life and not study Torah on earth at all.

This presumably makes sense within their haredi world, and is interpreted as a death that is a Kiddush Hashem, a sanctification of God’s name, but it is a sickening rejection and scorning of the life that tens of thousands who live, serving in the army to preserve the Jewish state, and dedicating their every spare moment to Torah study. If our victory depends on our military endeavours and God’s intervention, then we do not need to divide the people into soldiers and learners, we can strive to make each person a soldier and a learner.

Yesterday, the mayor of Kiryat Shmona, one of the evacuated Northern towns, met with senior army officers to ask some tough questions about the conduct of the ‘war’ on the Northern border. (The quotation marks around ‘war’ in that sentence reflect the fact that Hizballah – which is arguably the de facto government of Lebanon – has been, for months, daily targeting Israeli military installations and civilian centres all along the Norther border. The army has responded by bombing launch sites and targeting Hizballah personnel. Tens of thousands of Israelis have been evacuated from the border area. Is that a war? If not, what is it?

Anyway, the mayor met with senior officers hoping to receive clarification about the prospects for the development of hostilities, projected plans for returning civilians to their homes and places of education and employment, and so forth. These seem to be legitimate questions, and one would expect the officers to approach such a meeting with a measure of sensitivity for the suffering this uncertainty is causing the population, and its elected representative, the mayor. In a family blog, I hesitate to quote from the meeting, but it is reliably reported that, at one point, the Chief of Northern Command told the mayor to ‘stop f***ing with my mind, go back to your hotel, and await orders.’

Elsewhere in Chelm, members of Knesset, meeting last week with representatives of the families of hostages, screamed uncontrolledly at them, and could not be called to order. (I should add that, to my surprise, I was impressed to see that Itamar ben-Gvir appeared to keep calm and attempted to lower the temperature in the room, although the Chair did not actually allow him to speak.)

And now we have, I think, a proposal on the table for the freeing of the hostages, the dead and the alive. Of course, the proposal was revealed to the world by Biden (since Bibi could not be seen to be proposing it without the extreme right leaving the government). Bibi was then able to avoid having to confirm or deny that it was a proposal Israel had made.

The next stage was for Bibi to show the details of the proposal to the war cabinet, but to refuse to show them to the wider cabinet (which would need to endorse the agreement for it to become official), since, apparently, he had no faith that the details would not be leaked. So, we apparently have a Prime Minister that has appointed an Attorney General whose advice he won’t take, and who has appointed to positions such as Minister of Justice, Finance Minister, Minister of the Interior, people whom he cannot trust not to leak details of sensitive documents presented in Cabinet meetings. I’m not sure Chelm does this justice.

Apparently, Bibi met with Smotrich this morning to go over the deal with him. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have both stated that if Israel adopts the plan, they will leave the Government.

This morning, a new item appeared. A Hamas representative stated that they will not consider Biden’s proposal until they know that all of the parties in the Israeli government support it.

Perhaps the Chelmiest part of this whole insane situation is that almost everyone – and principally the US, the rest of the world, the families of the hostages, Bibi – behaves as if there is another side with whom Israel can strike an agreement. It has been clear from October 7 (and earlier, for those not seduced by the ‘conception’) that there is no other side. Hamas cannot be trusted in anything they do or say. On October 7, they carried out a horrific pogrom. Since October 7, they have, every day, gained ground, spreading lies, offering up Gazans as sacrifices, playing the Israeli trauma expertly, sitting quietly and letting this country tear itself apart.

Tangentially, to remind you of the level of brutality of October 7, Israel has held, since the days after October 7, unidentifiable remains of a body of someone from Nir Oz. Just yesterday, eight months after the most sophisticated forensic identification project in the history of the world began, the experts, including archaeologists, were able to identify the remains as those of Dolev Yehud, z”l, previously believed abducted to Gaza. Dolev, a civilian paramedic, went out on October 7 to treat injured fellow-kibbutzniks while the kibbutz was occupied by terrorists, leaving, in his shelter at home, his eight-month pregnant wife and three children aged five to nine. A week and a half later, his wife gave birth.

Next week, I think we’ll talk about the French Open tennis and the cricket T-20 World Cup…but then again, this week I thought we were going to talk about the next stage in the air conditioning saga – so, who knows?