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"There Is No Greater Lie"

• 8 min read
"There Is No Greater Lie"

Those are not our words. They are the words of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — leader of the Religious Zionist party, a man who has spent two years demanding Charedi enlistment and calling our non-service "outrageous" — standing at the Katif Conference and saying it aloud: "There is no greater lie than saying that the burden on those serving depends on drafting Chareidim." The prosecution's own ministers are now testifying for the defense. Let us enter the testimony into the record — all of it.

I. What Smotrich Said

Speaking at the Katif Conference for National Responsibility in Yad Binyamin, the Finance Minister dismantled the central accusation of the entire draft campaign in two sentences. There is no greater lie, he said, than the claim that the burden on those serving depends on drafting Charedim — because there are over one hundred thousand reservists who already served in the army, and the army has not succeeded in bringing them back into reserve duty.

He went further. The arrests of bnei yeshivos, he warned, will not only fail to produce results but are tearing Israeli society apart — "arrests cause Jews to physically fight each other on the roads." And while he restated his own position — that Charedim should ultimately be recruited, "through agreement and through a gradual process" — he aimed his sharpest fire at the maximalists in his own national camp, including members of his own party, who sank the draft law: purists, he said, who demanded one hundred percent instead of ninety and thereby prevented a historic breakthrough.

II. Consider Who Is Saying This

To measure the weight of this testimony, remember who Bezalel Smotrich is — because he is nobody's Charedi apologist. This is the man who declared in February 2024 that "the current reality in which Haredim do not serve in the army cannot continue" and called the situation outrageous. The man who told the Jerusalem Post a year later that Charedi non-service was "painful" to him, and that the moment had arrived precisely because — so he then believed — the IDF finally "needed and wanted" Charedim. The leader of a party that prides itself on fusing Torah with military service, whose voters have carried a crushing share of the reserve burden, and which pledged to vote only for a law producing "real and rapid enlistment." The minister who, to this day, withholds his support from the Basic Law: Torah Study, to the loud frustration of the Charedi parties and press. (And, as Israel's own media has documented, a man whose personal path ran through deferment until age twenty-eight, years of yeshiva and a law degree, and fourteen months of service — so the complexity of weighing Torah against the draft board is not foreign to his biography, whatever he now demands of others.)

When that man stands at a podium and calls the campaign's foundational claim a lie — when the witness for the prosecution concedes the core of the case — the trial, on its merits, is over. And he is not standing alone.

III. The Likud MK With the Data

Days earlier, Likud MK Amit Halevi — four years on the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee — laid out the numbers behind Smotrich's sentence, and they are devastating.

The IDF, Halevi said, does not suffer an overall soldier shortage at all: recruitment grows every year, but the army channels vast numbers into surplus non-combat and administrative roles while starving its frontline units. The famous "shortage of 12,000," he clarified, exists only in the forward combat brigades, because of the expansion of operations in Syria and Lebanon — a problem of allocation and standards, not of manpower. The reserve collapse, he explained, traces to Ehud Barak's "small and smart army" doctrine, under which dozens of brigades were closed and roughly one hundred thousand reserve soldiers were discharged from the system — soldiers the army then literally could not locate when war broke out, because of changes to its own computer systems and unit structures. The committee demanded they be brought back. In practice, of those hundred thousand trained combat veterans, only fifteen thousand were recalled. "Instead of bringing back the remaining 85,000 trained combat soldiers," Halevi said, "the public is being told there is a manpower shortage."

And he named the deeper disease: a Chief of Staff who writes letters to the media and generals who fancy themselves social engineers, while — after four years of his asking in committee — no plan for victory has ever been presented to the cabinet. Political generals, he said, are what lay at the heart of the October 7 failure. His prescription: establish three additional combat brigades, tighten combat-fitness standards, and let the army stop moonlighting in sociology.

IV. The Four Thousand — The Number That Ends the Argument

And if any doubt survives, there is the disclosure that came, of all places, from the left: former justice minister Chaim Ramon, publishing data from the Knesset's own Research and Information Center. In the five months after October 7 — the hour of the state's greatest declared desperation for soldiers — about four thousand Charedi young men applied to enlist on their own initiative. What did the army do with them? It ruled 3,120 of them "unfit," overwhelmingly on medical grounds — this from an army that happily assigns low-profile soldiers to intelligence, computers, training, and the Home Front Command. Of the 880 found eligible, it recruited only 540. Out of four thousand willing Charedim, the IDF took 13.5 percent — and barely three of every five it had itself declared fit. Ramon's own jaw-dropped conclusion: the numbers strengthen the claim that the IDF is not prepared to recruit masses of Charedim, and in fact does not want to.

Channel 14's Shimon Riklin added the part everyone in the system knows: the IDF never wanted to draft Charedim — there is not one senior officer, past or present, who does not say so in private conversation. The generals simply will not interfere with a campaign that serves other purposes. The moment the politics changed, he wrote, no one would say a word about recruiting Charedim.

V. Meanwhile, the Snare Tightens on Real People

Against all of this, hold one small story reported by the Charedi journalist Sari Roth. After the Attorney General and the High Court ruled that Charedim must be enlisted and yeshiva budgets revoked, an avreich — his exemption now legally void — telephoned the enlistment center to ask what he should do. Do nothing, the soldier told him; wait until you receive an order. But should I come in now to enlist? he pressed. Not possible, came the answer; you must wait to be summoned. No summons has come, and none appears imminent. His kollel stipend, however, was halted two months ago.

He is one of roughly sixty-six thousand avreichim and bochurim now suspended in exactly this limbo: stripped of their exemptions, issued no orders, unable to "regularize" even if they wished to — and punished financially all the same. The state has built a trap with no exit and billed its occupants for the privilege. We documented the architecture of this snare in "We Were Just Following Orders" and "One Law for the Yeshiva, Another for Everyone Else"; here it is again, operating in real time on a hundred thousand families.

VI. Read the Witness List

Now assemble the record, because it has become remarkable. Who now states, publicly, that the soldier shortage is not the Charedim's doing and that the campaign's premise is false? Bezalel Smotrich — Religious Zionist minister and longtime draft advocate: "there is no greater lie." Amit Halevi — Likud member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, with the discharge and recall data. Maj. (res.) Dovi Yudkin — decorated combat officer: the IDF doesn't lack soldiers, it lacks management. Rabbi Yigal Levinstein — Religious Zionist rosh mechina: the shortage began elsewhere; the Charedim were never the manpower base. Chaim Ramon — a man of the political left, with the Knesset's own figures on the four thousand turned away. Shimon Riklin — with the private consensus of the general staff. And the army's own recruiters, who admit the arrests are emptying even the voluntary Chashmonaim track.

Right, left, Likud, Religious Zionism, the officer corps, the data. Every camp has now supplied a witness. The only people still reciting the manpower story are the ones running the campaign — and their own Finance Minister has just called it what it is. So ask the question that remains: if the premise is a lie, and its falsity is now conceded across the political spectrum, what is the campaign actually for? Our readers know our answer, documented across this series: it was never about soldiers. It is about the remaking of a community.

VII. Where We Thank Mr. Smotrich — and Where We Part

We conclude with the same honesty we ask of others. We thank the Finance Minister for saying the true thing, at a podium, on the record, against his own camp's orthodoxy — that took a measure of courage, and we do not take it for granted. But we owe him our honesty too: his remedy — recruit the Charedim anyway, "through agreement and through a gradual process" — asks for something that is not ours to give. The gedolim have ruled, and there is no negotiating table on which a Jew may place his children's neshamos; and the army now confessing through every one of these witnesses that it neither needs nor wants nor can absorb our sons has forfeited any claim to a "gradual process" toward taking them. What we ask of Mr. Smotrich is smaller and simpler: follow your own testimony to its end. If the burden on your voters was manufactured by the planners who shrank the army and cannot recall its 85,000 trained veterans — then go relieve your voters, Minister. The address is the General Staff, and you sit in the cabinet with it. Leave the beis medrash out of a problem it did not create and cannot solve — by the word of every witness, including now, baruch Hashem, your own.

May Hashem grant the leaders of this land the courage to follow truth wherever it leads, ease the burden of every weary soldier and his family, guard the sixty-six thousand suspended in the snare, and protect the Torah that protects us all — bimheirah b'yameinu, amen.

Sources

The testimony

  • Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich at the Katif Conference for National Responsibility — "there is no greater lie," the 100,000 unrecalled reservists, the warning that arrests set Jews fighting on the roads, and his criticism of the "purists" who sank the draft law — as reported by Yeshiva World News; his record: "the current reality in which Haredim do not serve in the army cannot continue" (Times of Israel, February 2024), Charedi non-service as "painful" and the "historic opportunity" (Jerusalem Post interview, January 2025), his party's pledge to back only "real and rapid enlistment" (Times of Israel, December 2025), his withheld support for the Basic Law: Torah Study (Israel National News), and his own documented service history (deferment to 28; 14 months' service)
  • Likud MK Amit Halevi (Kol Chai interview): the surplus of non-combat assignments; the 12,000 gap confined to frontline brigades expanded into Syria and Lebanon; Barak's "small and smart army" — dozens of brigades closed and ~100,000 reservists discharged, of whom only 15,000 were recalled; the absence of any victory plan; the generals as "social engineers"
  • Former justice minister Chaim Ramon, publishing Knesset Research and Information Center data: 4,000 Charedi applicants in the five months after October 7; 3,120 ruled unfit; 540 of 880 eligible recruited — 13.5 percent; Shimon Riklin (Channel 14) on the private consensus of senior officers
  • The report of Sari Roth on the avreich told to wait for a summons while his stipend was halted, and the ~66,000 avreichim and bochurim without exemptions, without orders, and without stipends

The structural relationship to other articles in this series