They Came for the Children

When the Israeli High Court Decided the Way to Break the Torah World Was to Strip Its Three-Year-Olds

There is a moment in every legal system when the robe stops being a robe and becomes a costume. When the words "law," "equality," and "rule of law" stop describing what the court is doing and start camouflaging what the court is actually doing.

Senior constitutional attorney David Peter, in a published legal analysis this week, argues that Israel's High Court of Justice has reached that moment. His critique is not the standard Chareidi protest. It is something more dangerous to the Court — a clinical, structural takedown from a serious legal mind, written in cold prose and aimed at the foundations of the Court's recent rulings on Chareidi conscription.

Peter opens by asking his readers to set aside, for a moment, their feelings about whether bnei yeshiva should serve. Forget the conscription debate, he says. Look at what the Court is actually doing. Once you do, the picture is genuinely frightening — and it has implications that reach far beyond the draft.

The Myth of a Universal Draft

Peter's first claim will surprise most Israelis: there is no general mandatory draft in Israel. There never has been.

Israeli law obligates a citizen to serve only when the pokeid — the IDF's conscription officer — issues that specific citizen a personal draft order. The officer is empowered to act according to the IDF's manpower needs and according to government policy. That is the entire mechanism. It is the same mechanism that has, for decades, kept Arabs, Druze women, certain religious populations, and other minority groups out of the army's ranks without controversy and without any specific legislation carving out their exemption.

This is not a Chareidi loophole. It is the architecture of Israeli conscription law itself.

An Invented Requirement

Then comes the move that Peter calls a legal fabrication.

Beginning in the 1998 Rubinstein ruling and accelerating through the decades since, the High Court manufactured a rule that exists nowhere in Israeli statute: that the existing legal framework — perfectly adequate for every other minority — was somehow insufficient for Chareidim. The Court declared that a specific, explicit law would be required to justify exempting yeshiva students from service.

No such law was demanded for any other group. No such law was demanded for the population categories that have been kept out of the IDF for over seventy years through the same administrative discretion. The requirement materialized only when the population in question was Jews who learn Torah.

Obediently, the Knesset passed the requested law. Then, in 2014's Rubinstein v. Knesset, the Court struck it down. It struck down the next attempt. And the next. Each time, the stated reason was that arrangements protecting a Chareidi exemption violated equality.

Pause on this. The Court's position is that when the elected parliament — through normal democratic legislation — extends an arrangement to a Jewish minority, this constitutes a violation of equality so severe that the Court must annul the law. When precisely the same kind of arrangement exists for non-Jewish minorities, by mere administrative practice with no legislation behind it at all, the Court has nothing to say.

This is not equality. This is a doctrine in search of a target.

The Last Voice of Restraint

Peter notes that there was once a justice on the Court who pointed at this and said, in essence, the emperor has no clothes. His name was Asher Grunis, and he served as President of the Supreme Court from February 2012 until January 2015.

Grunis was the rarest figure on the Israeli bench: a justice who genuinely believed the Court had no business intervening in most political and parliamentary decisions. He rejected the doctrine of "reasonableness" as a tool for striking down government action. He dissented when his colleagues fired three elected mayors weeks before an election. He dissented in the conscription cases. He warned that the Court's expansive doctrines were inventing legal authority where none existed.

Grunis retired a decade ago. Today, in the words of Peter's analysis, there is not even a Grunis — not a single voice on the bench willing to say what every fair observer can see.

Even now, in the April 12, 2026 contempt-of-court hearing, the closest thing to a restraint-minded voice on the panel — Justice David Mintz, who rarely speaks during hearings — broke his silence not to defend the rule of law against the Court's overreach, but to demand harsher enforcement against Chareidim, accusing the police of "giving power to the mob."

The bench is now uniform. There is no Grunis. There is no internal counterweight. There is only the direction of travel.

Three Steps Beyond the Law

In its most recent wave of rulings — culminating in the sweeping April 26, 2026 decision — the Court has done three things that Peter rightly identifies as bypasses of the law itself.

First, the Court ordered the IDF's conscription officer to issue draft orders to bnei yeshiva. The administrative discretion that the pokeid is statutorily granted — discretion the law itself defines as belonging to him — was overridden by judicial fiat. By this single act, every Chareidi who fails to report becomes, retroactively and through legal fiction, a "deserter" and a criminal. This is not the application of a law. It is the manufacture of a class of criminals through judicial decree.

Second, the Court instructed the police to make arrests. As Justice Sohlberg phrased it, the police are "not acting in accordance with their obligations." When 79,836 draft orders have been issued, only 7,029 have presented themselves at recruitment offices, and just 2,178 have actually enlisted — about 2.7 percent — the Court's response is not to question the underlying legal premise. It is to demand more police, more arrests, more raids on yeshivos.

Third, in the April 26 ruling, the Court imposed targeted economic sanctions, ordering the cancellation of daycare and after-school subsidies, the elimination of municipal tax and public transportation discounts, and the denial of discounted housing purchase programs — all of them tied to a parent's military status. Five welfare benefits, all conditioned on a citizen's submission to a draft regime that the Court itself manufactured, all imposed on the Jewish minority that the elected Knesset had repeatedly tried to protect.

There is no statutory basis for these sanctions. The Court invented them. The penalties target only one community, the only minority in Israel that has ever needed an explicit law to receive what every other minority receives by administrative practice alone.

A Question of Asymmetry

Peter asks the question that no one in the Israeli judicial establishment is willing to answer.

If the Court rules that the Knesset's elected majority cannot grant advantages to a minority — because doing so violates the majority's right to equality — then who protects the political rights of that majority? Who protects the right of any minority, anywhere, to receive arrangements through ordinary parliamentary means? Who decides which group is the majority and which is the minority on any given issue?

And here is the deepest question: if the Court's "equality" principle is invoked only against Jewish minorities, while other minorities' arrangements pass uncontested without specific legislation — what is the actual principle the Court is enforcing? Equality is plainly not the answer. The asymmetry is too consistent, too one-directional, too exact.

What we are left with is the conclusion Peter reaches by implication and that an Orthodox reader will reach explicitly: the Court's true principle, the one underneath the legal language, is the protection of a particular vision of secular Israeli identity from the demographic and spiritual reality of Torah-observant Jewry. Everything else is robe.

Punishing Children to Punish Parents

The April 26 ruling does something the Torah explicitly forbids. The Torah says: "Lo yumtu avot al banim u'banim lo yumtu al avot, ish b'cheto yumatu" — Parents shall not be punished for their children, nor children for their parents; each man shall be punished for his own sin (Devarim 24:16).

The Court has ordered the elimination of daycare subsidies, after-school subsidies, and reduced municipal taxes for families whose father is in yeshiva. These are not benefits aimed at the father. They are aimed at the child. They are how three-year-olds eat lunch. They are how seven-year-olds get afternoon care. They are how mothers — many of whom are themselves working — keep functioning households running.

Every legal system in the civilized world has, as one of its bedrock principles, the rule that children are not punished for their parents' choices. The Israeli High Court has now formally crossed that line and called it justice. It has done so without legislation. It has done so against the sole minority group that the elected parliament has repeatedly tried to shield from precisely this outcome.

A Word to Our Brothers in the Religious Zionist Camp

Peter closes his analysis by addressing — with sharpness and disappointment — those on the religious right who applaud the Court's actions because the outcome happens to align with their personal views on Chareidi service.

We want to make this point with the warmth it deserves. The Religious Zionist community contains some of the most devoted, self-sacrificing servants of the Jewish people in Israel today. Reservists who have served three hundred days. Hesder boys who have left chuppah dates to return to their units. Mothers who have buried sons. The pain in this community over the perceived inequity of military service is real, and it is not to be dismissed.

But Peter's point — and ours — is that ideology and tribal loyalty cannot become an excuse to celebrate a judicial coup just because, this time, the coup happens to be aimed at someone else.

When the Court invents legal requirements that exist nowhere in statute, when it overrides the elected Knesset's repeated legislation, when it directs the executive branch to issue orders, when it directs the police to make arrests, when it imposes economic sanctions without a single Knesset vote — these are not Chareidi problems. These are problems for any Israeli who believes in self-government and the rule of law.

If a court can do this to one minority today, it can do it to any minority tomorrow. The doctrine, once established, does not stay in its lane. The robe does not return to being a robe.

What is the difference, Peter asks bluntly, between this celebration on the religious right and the unconditional left-wing support for every action of the Court and the Attorney General — support driven entirely by the fact that the outcomes happen to be convenient?

The answer is: there is no difference. And that is the warning.

What This Moment Really Reveals

The Court's war on lomdei Torah is not, finally, a legal dispute. It is a theological one, fought in legal language by people who do not realize they are doing theology.

The unstated premise of every recent ruling is that Torah study is not a national contribution; that the spiritual labor sustaining the Jewish people for three thousand years has no public worth; that yeshivos are a private hobby like skiing or chess, deserving no more accommodation than any other lifestyle preference. Once you accept that premise, the rest of the rulings follow logically. Reject it, and the entire edifice collapses.

But the premise itself was never voted on. It was never legislated. It was never put to the people. It was simply absorbed into the judicial bloodstream of an institution that long ago stopped seeing the people it was created to serve.

This is the moment David Peter is pointing at. Not the moment the Court decided about the draft. The moment the Court stopped being bound by law at all.

A Court without a Grunis. A doctrine without a basis. A penalty without a statute. A nation of "deserters" manufactured by signature.

The right to live as a Torah Jew in the Jewish homeland is not a privilege the Israeli Supreme Court extends or revokes. It is the reason for the homeland. The justices may have forgotten this. The Ribbono Shel Olam has not.

Sources

Peter's analysis

• Yeshiva World News, "Senior Lawyer Posts Frightening Analysis: 'High Court Turned Chareidim Into Draft Evaders Via Legal Fabrication'" (April 2026)
• Matzav.com, "Attorney David Peter Slams High Court Ruling on Chareidi Draft as 'Legal Fiction'"

Justice Asher Grunis and judicial restraint

• Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project, "Judicial Conservatism and Intellectual Courage: A Homage to President (ret.) Asher Grunis"
• Times of Israel, "Supreme Court president Asher Grunis steps down" (January 2015)
• Wikipedia, "Asher Grunis"

The April 26, 2026 ruling and enforcement data

• Times of Israel, "High Court orders government to impose financial sanctions on Haredi draft evaders" (April 26, 2026)
• Jerusalem Post, "High Court forces Israel to enforce draft law, revoke benefits from evaders" (April 26, 2026)
• Times of Israel, "'There is no rule of law': High Court justices rail at failure to enlist Haredim" (April 12, 2026 hearing)
• Globes, "Supreme Court orders financial sanctions for draft evaders" (April 26, 2026)
• Israel Democracy Institute, "The Dramatic High Court Ruling on Economic Sanctions Against Haredi Draft Evaders" (April 27, 2026)

Background and statistics

• Times of Israel, "In historic ruling, High Court says government must draft Haredi men into IDF" (June 2024)
• Israel Policy Forum, "The Haredi Exemption" (February 2025)
• Jerusalem Post, "Israel's High Court unanimously rules to draft haredim into the IDF"

Torah source

• Devarim 24:16