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Their Most Devoted Soldiers Just Found Out the Truth

• 8 min read
Their Most Devoted Soldiers Just Found Out the Truth

The Chief of Staff says the army faithfully honors the order that is supposed to protect its observant soldiers. The rabbis who actually send their sons to serve say they do not believe a word of it. Every Jew in this land should stop and consider what that means.

Last week, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir assured a room of Religious Zionist rabbis that the military operates consistently in accordance with the Joint Service Ordinance — the directive that governs the integration of male and female soldiers while, on paper, providing accommodations for observant soldiers: exemptions from mixed-gender events, from performances by female singers, and the like. It was meant to be reassuring. It was anything but.

I. "I Don't Believe a Single Word"

Rabbi Ohad Tirosh is the Rosh Yeshiva of the hesder yeshiva in Eli — an institution that does not sit on the sidelines of this question but sends its talmidim into the army, into combat, year after year. Speaking at his Parshas HaShavua shiur, he answered the Chief of Staff with a bluntness that is very hard to wave away: the camp must remain pure, he said, yet female combat soldiers are being integrated regardless — and as for Zamir's assurances about the Joint Service Ordinance, "I don't believe a single word."

He has earned the right to say so. He has been involved in this fight, he noted, for twenty years — long enough to watch the IDF draft the Joint Service Ordinance and then, in his telling, systematically and deliberately do everything in its power not to implement it, generals who signed it included. And his deepest point was not procedural at all. The mixing, he insisted, is not a tactical question. Taharah — the purity and sanctity of the camp — is the very foundation of the army's strength. What do soldiers do before they cross into Lebanon or Gaza? They accept upon themselves the yoke of Malchus Shamayim. That, Rabbi Tirosh argued, is what gives a Jewish army its power — and it is precisely what the Chief of Staff does not understand.

The Forum of Soldiers' Wives for the Kedushas HaMachaneh backed him at once. More and more rabbanim and educators, they said — like the broader public — no longer believe the empty talking points of senior officials, because the reality on the ground is one of extensive mixing that harms combat soldiers hour after hour and erodes both the readiness and the kedushas hamachaneh of the IDF. They placed the responsibility squarely on the Defense Minister and the Prime Minister: remove the agenda of the Yohalom, the army's Gender Affairs Directorate, and restore the sanctity of the camp.

II. This Is Not One Rabbi's Complaint — It Is a Pattern

Were Rabbi Tirosh a lone voice, one could perhaps dismiss him. He is nothing of the kind. He is one signal in a pattern that has become impossible to ignore.

This month, more than twenty-five hesder yeshivos — the institutions that supply a great share of the Religious Zionist combat soldiers the army depends on — announced that they would stop sending their students to the Armored Corps over the integration of women. These are not draft-refusers; they insisted their students would serve. They simply would not send them into that.

Around the same time, Rabbi Yigal Levinstein, head of the Bnei David pre-military academy in Eli, told his students not to enlist in Sayeret Matkal — the most elite commando unit in the entire army — after the IDF integrated its first female soldier into its ranks. And he said something that cuts to the heart of every reassurance the army offers: do not trust the promise that you will serve only in "separate teams." He warned that after the training course, fighters are folded into joint operational companies in which male and female soldiers operate together as a matter of routine. There is, he concluded, simply no halachic permission to serve in such a framework. The separation that is promised at the front end dissolves the moment the cameras are gone.

And then there was Lebanon. Just days ago, the wives of soldiers in an armored battalion published a photograph from their husbands' own quarters: a female soldier bedded down among the men, the foot of her cot touching theirs — in the unit of a commander who is himself a religious man. The outrage that followed was not manufactured by outsiders. It came from the families of the very soldiers living it.

The common thread runs through every one of these stories. Separation is promised. Separation dissolves.

III. And the Establishment Is Not Bending

Confronted with all of this, the army's response has removed any remaining doubt about its priorities.

Zamir did not retreat. The expansion of women into combat roles, he declared, is "of immense operational importance," and the IDF "will continue to act to expand it" — and the new frameworks would be implemented in full compliance with the Joint Service Order "without compromise." The pilot program placing women in armored roles will begin, on schedule, with the November draft, the boycott of twenty-five yeshivos notwithstanding.

The posture toward dissent was even more telling. When Rabbi Levinstein issued his ruling on Sayeret Matkal, the Chief of Staff had him struck from the invitation list to the very meeting convened to address the crisis — barred from the room. In protest, the heads of the pre-military academies boycotted the gathering altogether. And from the other direction, hundreds of female officers — among them six brigadier generals and thirty-five colonels and lieutenant colonels — wrote to Zamir and to Defense Minister Katz demanding that they halt the rabbis' "intervention" entirely, warning that giving the rabbis ground could invite insubordination.

Read the signals together and the message is unmistakable. The religious concern will be heard politely, accommodated at the margins, and then overridden. It will not be permitted to slow the integration by a single step.

IV. The Survey: A Wake-Up Call

And then a new survey arrived that should stop every Torah Jew in his tracks — for what it reveals not about the army, but about the people of this land.

Asked to choose between prioritizing the needs of religious soldiers and pressing ahead with the integration of women into the Armored Corps, the Israeli public split almost exactly in half: 50.1 percent said priority should go to religious fighters, 49.9 percent to expanding women's roles. Among Charedi respondents, 90.3 percent stood with the religious soldiers; among the broader religious public, 80.6 percent. But among secular Israelis, 65.2 percent said the integration of women should continue — even at the expense of the religious soldier's ability to serve.

Read that last figure again, slowly. In Eretz Yisrael — in the Holy Land itself — a clear majority of secular Jews would rank the expansion of women in tank units above the ability of their own religious brothers to serve in accordance with the Torah. Rabbi David Stav of Tzohar, who is far from our camp, read the same data as a "real and difficult problem" and a warning sign, though he framed it gently, as a breakdown of "discourse." We will name it more plainly. This is not a failure of communication. It is a measure of spiritual distance. When a Jew standing on the soil of Eretz Yisrael instinctively ranks an ideology imported wholesale from the secular West above the kedushah the Torah itself commands, the problem is not that the two sides are talking past each other. The problem is how far an entire generation has been led from its own Torah, until "women's rights" in a tank can outweigh the sanctity of a Jewish camp in the land Hashem gave us.

V. The Lesson We Will Not Learn Twice

Here, then, is what all of this means — and it is said with sorrow, not with satisfaction.

The Religious Zionist world made a wager, decades ago, and made it sincerely. The wager was this: that a Jew could give himself completely to the secular state and its army — train for its most elite units, bleed on its front lines, sacrifice as much as any Israeli alive — and that in exchange he would be allowed to keep his Torah whole inside it. No one can fault the devotion. The mesirus nefesh of these soldiers is real, and we have never once doubted it.

But look honestly at where the wager has led. The most dedicated religious soldiers in the country are now discovering, in real time, that it does not hold. Their own Roshei Yeshiva no longer believe the Chief of Staff. The army's most prestigious unit is being closed to their sons. The guarantees of separation dissolve in the field. Their kedushas hamachaneh is being overridden "without compromise" — and when one of their leading rabbis objected, he was thrown out of the room.

So ask the only question that matters. If this is how the army treats the religious Jews who serve it most devotedly — the ones who do show up, who do fight, who do bury their sons — what conceivable chance would the Charedim have inside it? The promise of a sealed, fully separate Charedi framework, untouched by all this mixing, is contradicted not by some hostile pundit but by everything the army is doing this very month to the soldiers who already wear its uniform.

We say this not to gloat. We say it to grieve, and to warn. The Charedi world will not make the same mistake. We will not hand our sons to a system that has just shown the entire nation, in plain daylight, that it will not in the end allow a Jew to serve as a Jew.

And so, with genuine love, we call once more on our Dati Leumi brothers — whose courage and sacrifice we honor without reservation — to look clearly at what is being done to them, and to draw the conclusion the facts are forcing into the open: that allegiance to the secular state has not protected your Torah, and was never built to. Come stand with us. Let the Torah, and not the state, be the thing around which we order our lives. As one front, with the Torah as our only guide, we are immeasurably stronger than either of us can ever be apart.

VI. The Camp Must Be Holy

The kedushas hamachaneh that these soldiers' wives are fighting for is no chumra dreamed up by the timid. It is the Torah's own stated condition for the Divine Presence to dwell among an army of Jews: "v'haya machanecha kadosh" — your camp shall be holy — "so that He see nothing unseemly among you, and turn away from behind you" (Devarim 23:15). A nation that forgets this has not grown more modern or more enlightened. It has only wandered further from the one true source of its strength.

May the Ribono Shel Olam open the eyes of all His children, return every Jew to the embrace of His Torah, and bring us together — under Him, and under nothing else — bimheirah b'yameinu, amen.

Sources

The statements at the center of this piece

  • Rabbi Ohad Tirosh, Rosh Yeshiva of the Eli hesder yeshiva, on the Joint Service Ordinance and the centrality of taharah to the army's strength, and the response of the Forum of Soldiers' Wives for the Kedushas HaMachaneh regarding the Yohalom (the IDF Gender Affairs Directorate) — as reported by Yeshiva World News
  • The survey on prioritizing religious fighters versus expanding women's integration in the Armored Corps (50.1% to 49.9% overall; 65.2% of secular respondents for continued integration; 90.3% of Charedi and 80.6% of religious respondents for prioritizing religious fighters), and the response of Rabbi David Stav of Tzohar

The pattern and the establishment's response

  • The boycott of the Armored Corps by 25+ hesder yeshivos; Rabbi Yigal Levinstein's ruling against service in Sayeret Matkal following the integration of a female soldier, and his warning that "separate teams" assurances dissolve into joint operational companies; the photograph of mixed sleeping arrangements in an armored battalion in Lebanon (June 2026)
  • Chief of Staff Zamir's statements that women's integration is "of immense operational importance" and will continue "without compromise," that the pilot proceeds with the November 2026 draft; the removal of Rabbi Levinstein from the dialogue meeting and the resulting boycott by the pre-military academy heads; the letter of hundreds of female officers (including six brigadier generals) demanding the rabbis' intervention be halted; Devarim 23:15 — v'haya machanecha kadosh

The structural relationship to other articles in this series