Here's a Thought. Maybe Stop Kidnapping Our Children.

A Direct Word to the Israeli Government on the Day of the Protests

Across central Israel today, the streets are burning. Bnei Brak is shut down. Highway 4 is blocked. Police are arresting young men by the dozens. Tires are on fire. Charedi protesters are facing off against riot units. The country is, by any measure, in a state of civil unrest that has not been seen in decades.

Let us be clear about something at the outset, because this article will not be honest if we do not say it: we do not endorse the violent elements of these protests. The mainstream Charedi gedolim have consistently taught that the proper response to State coercion is peaceful non-cooperation — sitting and learning Torah, accepting arrest if it comes, refusing to capitulate, but not blocking highways, not burning tires, not endangering police officers. The Peleg Yerushalmi style of street confrontation is not the position of Rabbi Dov Landau shlita, Rabbi Moshe Hillel Hirsch shlita, Rabbi Dov Lando shlita, or the main Lithuanian Charedi Roshei Yeshiva. That is the documented mainstream position, and we hold it.

But here is the part the establishment refuses to hear:

You created this. Not us. You.

You created the conditions that have driven a normally peaceful community to a breaking point. You created the unrest by your own deliberate, sustained, politically-motivated campaign of escalation against bnei yeshivos who were doing nothing more than sitting in a beis medrash and learning the Torah their ancestors have learned for three thousand years.

Here is a thought, since the protests are inconveniencing your country today: maybe stop kidnapping our children.

What You're Actually Doing

Let us state, in plain language, what the Israeli State is doing right now, this week, on the ground, in cities across the country.

You are sending Military Police units to private Charedi homes at four o'clock in the morning. You are taking eighteen-year-old yeshiva bochurim — boys, in many cases, who have lived their entire lives in the beis medrash, who have never broken a law, who have no criminal record, who have not committed any act of aggression against anyone — and dragging them from their beds. You are putting them in handcuffs in their pajamas. You are transferring them to military prisons. You are doing this in front of their mothers, in front of their younger siblings, in front of every yeshiva bochur in the neighborhood who watches and understands what could happen to him next.

You have, this week, announced — through the Kol B'Ramah reporting that Yeshiva World News quoted at length, with a senior source in the Police Operations Division speaking on the record — that a coordinated mass-arrest operation will be carried out in Charedi cities across central Israel. The instruction, the senior source said, is to arrest "every draft evader identified in the central region… with no exceptions." Border Police battalions are being requisitioned. Undercover detectives are stopping cars on Highway 10 in Beit Shemesh, pulling Charedi families over to check whether anyone aboard is a Torah student.

This is not law enforcement. This is not the orderly application of an existing legal framework. This is the systematic targeting of an entire community for the criminal offense of practicing its religion the way it has practiced it for thirty centuries.

And then you are surprised that there are protests in the streets.

We Don't Endorse the Protests. But Let's Be Honest About Where They Come From.

Every Charedi mother whose son was taken from his bed in the past three weeks has had to explain to her younger children why their brother is in prison. Every Charedi father whose family has lost the daycare subsidies that allowed his wife to work has had to explain to his children why the family budget no longer works. Every Charedi teenager who watches the news has seen the rhetoric in the secular Knesset, the contempt on the television panels, the cartoons in the newspapers depicting bnei Torah as parasites. Every Charedi grandfather who survived Stalin or Hitler has had to wonder, with full historical seriousness, whether the country he hoped would be a refuge for Jews has decided to become the latest regime to make Torah study a punishable offense.

This pressure has been building for two years. The arrests of the Tel Aviv brothers in August 2025. The April 2026 dawn arrest in Gilo. The Highway 10 stops. The mass-operation announcement. The Supreme Court rulings. The Attorney General's twelve documented meetings demanding escalation. The cancellation of subsidies. The threats to housing assistance. The promised arrests of "every draft evader… with no exceptions."

And then you wonder why people are in the streets.

We say again, with the full weight of editorial responsibility: the mainstream gedolim do not endorse blocking highways. The mainstream gedolim do not endorse violent confrontation with police. The mainstream gedolim have repeatedly called for peaceful non-cooperation rather than physical resistance. The community that is following the gedolim is the community that is sitting in the beis medrash, davening Tehillim, accepting arrests when they come, and supporting jailed bochurim and their families. That is the position of Daas Torah.

But there is a limit to what a community can absorb before some of its members lose the discipline the gedolim are demanding. There is a point at which State pressure produces, predictably and inevitably, the kind of street response that fills the news today. The State knows this. The State is creating these conditions deliberately. And the State must understand: the responsibility for the unrest in the streets does not belong primarily to the people in the streets. It belongs to the institutions that made the conditions that produced the people in the streets.

This Isn't About the Military. Everyone Knows That.

Let us name what the establishment refuses to name in public.

The State is not pursuing this campaign because the IDF needs the manpower. That justification is, on the documented record, false.

Brigadier General Shay Tayeb told the Knesset in November 2024 that the IDF can absorb only 3,000 Charedim per year due to its lack of religious accommodation infrastructure. Three thousand. The number is a hard ceiling, not a target. Even if every Charedi summoned reported tomorrow morning, the IDF could not place most of them in service. The "we need the soldiers" rhetoric is incoherent with the IDF's own published absorption data.

In the 2024–2025 draft cycle, the IDF summoned 24,000 Charedim. 1,539 reported. That is 6.4 percent compliance under maximum legal pressure — and the State's response to this 6.4 percent figure is not to question the entire framework but to escalate enforcement. The State has chosen, after seeing that its policy produces 6.4 percent compliance, to intensify the pressure rather than reconsider the policy. No rational manpower-driven framework would make that choice.

So if it isn't about the soldiers, what is it about?

It is about politics. It is about coalition dynamics. It is about the Attorney General's documented campaign to use the conscription question as a wedge against the entire Charedi political bloc. It is about the secular establishment's seventy-eight-year project to reshape Charedi identity, redirected now through judicial coercion and police action because every previous mechanism has failed. It is about the visible humiliation of a community whose growing demographic weight the establishment cannot otherwise control. It is about political gain extracted from the suffering of bnei Torah and their families.

The establishment knows this. We know this. The honest secular columnists who have written about the structural incoherence of the policy know this. The IDF's own published data confirms it. The campaign continues anyway, because it has never been about the army. It has been about politics, all along.

The Economic Sanctions Hurt You More Than Us

Here is something else the establishment has not quite figured out.

You have, over the past two years, imposed a sequence of economic sanctions on Charedi families with draft-age sons. You have canceled daycare subsidies. You have revoked property tax discounts. You have terminated public transportation benefits. You have eliminated housing assistance. You have stripped the financial supports that allowed Charedi families to maintain large households on modest incomes.

You assumed these sanctions would fracture the community. They have not. They have produced the opposite effect.

The Charedi community has absorbed the financial hit by deepening its internal solidarity. Gemachim have expanded. Charedi mutual aid networks have multiplied. Diaspora Charedi communities — particularly the American Yeshivishe and Chassidic communities, which provide enormous philanthropic support to Eretz Yisrael — have stepped in. The community that the sanctions were supposed to break has, instead, found that the sanctions are accelerating the very communal integration the establishment was trying to undermine.

Meanwhile, the secular establishment has paid a price the Charedi community has not paid. Diaspora Jewish philanthropy that previously flowed to Israeli secular institutions has, in significant quantities, redirected toward Charedi support. International Jewish opinion has hardened against the policy. The State's diplomatic position has weakened. American Charedi communities are increasingly asking whether their dollars should support a State that is jailing the bochurim those dollars also support. The sanctions are hurting Israel internationally far more than they are hurting Charedi families internally.

This is a decree we have absorbed. We have absorbed worse. Two centuries of Cantonist conscription. Seventy years of Soviet suppression. The Holocaust itself. The Charedi community is the world's most experienced institution at absorbing State pressure, because the Charedi community is the institutional descendant of every Jewish community that ever survived State pressure across three thousand years. The sanctions hurt. They are not pleasant. They will not break us.

The Physical Taking Is Different

But here is where the line moves, and where the State should understand the difference.

Economic sanctions, however unjust, are policy. We protest them, we contest them in court, we absorb their effects, and we continue. We've been there before. We know how to absorb financial decrees.

The physical taking of children is something else entirely.

When you send Military Police to a private Charedi home at 4:00 a.m. to drag an eighteen-year-old yeshiva bochur from his bed; when you put him in handcuffs in his pajamas in front of his mother; when you transfer him to a military prison; when you stop Charedi families on Highway 10 to check whether they're hiding a son who didn't show up at the recruitment office — you are crossing a different threshold. You are not imposing a financial penalty. You are not denying a benefit. You are putting your hands on Jewish children, in their homes, in the middle of the night, and taking them away.

Every Jewish parent in the world understands what this means historically. The Cantonist Decrees of 1827–1856 also involved the physical taking of Jewish children from their homes. The Yevsektsiya in 1920s Soviet Russia also involved the physical taking of Jewish children. The historical analogy is uncomfortably close, and the Charedi community has not failed to notice it.

This is the threshold the establishment crossed. And once it crossed, the dynamics changed. The community will absorb economic sanctions for as long as the State wants to impose them. The community cannot, structurally, absorb its children being physically taken from their homes for the offense of learning Torah. That is the threshold past which the discipline of peaceful non-cooperation, however much the gedolim teach it, becomes harder for ordinary parents and ordinary communities to maintain.

And that is why the streets are burning today.

What "We've Been Through Worse" Actually Means

We have. We've been through worse than economic sanctions, worse than property tax revocation, worse than the cancellation of daycare subsidies. We've been through Antiochus, Hadrian, the Crusaders, the Inquisition, the Cantonist Decrees, the Russian government of 1892, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. We've absorbed every regime that has ever tried to coerce Klal Yisrael away from Torah.

In all of those cases, the community survived. The Torah continued. The chain of mesorah held. And in all of those cases, the regime that picked the fight eventually paid the cost.

But the language "we've been through worse" should not be heard as triumphalist. It is exactly the opposite. It is the bitter acknowledgment that the Charedi community is now, in 2026, being forced to draw on the same survival reserves that previous generations had to use under regimes whose names we wish had never been spoken in connection with the Jewish state. The Cantonist boys hid in attics. Charedi boys today are watching their friends being dragged from their bedrooms. This is not a comparison the secular establishment should be comfortable provoking. It is not a comparison any Jewish state should be willing to invite.

Here's a Thought

So here is the thought, since the protests are inconveniencing your country today.

Maybe stop sending Military Police to drag eighteen-year-old yeshiva students from their beds at 4:00 a.m.

Maybe stop blocking highways in Beit Shemesh to check whether Charedi families are hiding their sons.

Maybe stop planning mass-arrest operations with instructions to arrest "every draft evader… with no exceptions."

Maybe stop announcing, publicly and proudly, that you are deploying Border Police battalions against the bnei Torah of Bnei Brak, Beitar, Modi'in Illit, and Elad.

Maybe acknowledge that the IDF can only absorb 3,000 Charedim per year and that you are sustaining a policy you yourself know cannot achieve its stated military purpose.

Maybe recognize that the conscription campaign is, on the documented record, a political project, not a military one — and that politicizing the bnei Torah is the kind of move that has historically produced consequences the State will not be able to control.

Maybe stop kidnapping our children.

We don't endorse the protests. But we understand them. And we are telling you, with the full weight of editorial honesty: if you keep crossing the threshold you crossed when you started taking children from their beds, the unrest in the streets today is the early phase of what is coming. You cannot push a community of two million people, who have absorbed two centuries of similar pressure from previous regimes, past the threshold of physical taking of their children, and expect the community to respond with diplomatic acquiescence. Some will. Some will follow the discipline of the gedolim. Some, predictably, will not. And the responsibility for the response belongs to the institutions that created the conditions, not to the people responding to them.

A Different Path

We have said this throughout our publication, and we say it again today.

There is a different path available. The path of recognizing what the Bnei Torah are — not parasites, not draft evaders, not criminals, but the bearers of the three-thousand-year-old mesorah that is, in the Torah's own framework, the operating mechanism by which Klal Yisrael has survived. The path of treating the Bnei Torah as the kohanim and levi'im of the modern era — the spiritual elite whose work generates the merit on which the State, the army, and the broader national life depend.

That path involves the State stepping back from its current trajectory. Canceling the mass-arrest operation. Reconsidering the sanctions. Recognizing the absorption-cap reality. Accepting the alternative Charedi defense frameworks (mishmar ezrachi, Hashomrim, civilian security networks). Treating the Charedi community as a partner in national life rather than as an enemy to be coerced.

It is the path of kavod haTorah — honoring the Torah and its bearers — which, as we have written across this publication, is in turn the path by which the nation that honors its Torah finds itself honored, midah k'neged midah, by the broader world.

The current path is the path of bizui Talmidei Chachamim — disgracing the Torah scholars within. The Gemara in Shabbos 119b told us, 1,700 years ago, what happens to nations that travel that path. The wound it produces has no remedy by conventional means.

The State of Israel still has time to choose the better path. But the choice is genuine, and the consequences are real.

In the meantime, here is the thought. Today. With the streets burning, and the police arresting, and the bnei Torah being dragged from their beds, and the country in a state of civil unrest the secular establishment did not see coming because it never quite understood the community it has chosen to attack:

Maybe stop kidnapping our children.

Maybe that would be a start.

Sources

Today's documented events

• Yeshiva World News, "Israel Police To Carry Out Mass Arrests Of Bnei Torah In Chareidi Cities" — citing Kol B'Ramah, with the Police Operations Division source quoted on the record: "every draft evader identified in the central region… with no exceptions"
• Beit Shemesh News — Highway 10 detention of Charedi passengers at the Yigal Alon Boulevard roundabout
• Yeshiva World News, "ARRESTS RESUME: Military Police Arrest Yeshiva Bochur" (April 27, 2026) — Gilo arrest
• VIN News, "Chareidi Leaders Unite, Declare 'War'" (August 7, 2025) — Tel Aviv brothers nighttime raid
• Yeshiva World News, "Police Demand 6 Border Police Battalions"
• Yeshiva World News, "Israeli Police Blocking Army Arrests Of Bnei Torah" — internal memo, 71,000 evader figure, 80% Charedi

IDF absorption and compliance data

• Times of Israel, "IDF sees increase in draft of Haredi troops, but is still far off from goals" (November 14, 2024) — Brig. Gen. Shay Tayeb Knesset testimony, 3,000-soldier absorption cap
• Times of Israel, "Students at flagship Jerusalem yeshiva dismiss danger of arrest as IDF cracks down" (August 8, 2025) — 24,000 summoned, 1,539 reported (6.4% compliance)
• Times of Israel, "Only 1,212 of the 24,000 Haredi men called up in past year have begun enlisting" (May 21, 2025)

Verified Charedi gadol statements opposing violent street protest while opposing enlistment

• Rabbi Dov Landau shlita — VIN News (September 2024); Yeshiva World News (April 2026)
• Rabbi Moshe Hillel Hirsch shlita — VIN News (September 2024)
• Rabbi Dov Lando shlita — Israel National News (November 2024 emergency gathering letter)

Documented economic sanctions

• AG Gali Baharav-Miara's twelve high-level meetings on the issue, documented across Israeli press
• Cancellation of daycare subsidies, public transportation benefits, housing assistance, property tax discounts — documented across Israeli press and Charedi community reporting

Historical parallels

• Cantonist Decrees (1827-1856): 70,000-84,000 Jewish boys conscripted at ages 8-25, taken physically from their homes
• Soviet Yevsektsiya and the suppression of Jewish religious life (1920s-1991)
• The pattern documented across the historical record of regimes that pursued forced conscription of religious Jews

The structural Torah framework

• Talmud Bavli, Shabbos 119b — "Yerushalayim was destroyed only because they disgraced the Torah scholars within it"; ein marpei
• Talmud Bavli, Sotah 21a — Torah magna u'matzla
• Rambam, Hilchos Talmud Torah 6:10 — Talmidei chachamim exempt from anaga
• Rambam, Hilchos Shemittah V'Yovel 13:13 — the kodesh kodashim category