For years, the IDF deliberately forged and increased by hundreds of percentage points the number of Haredi recruits, a report on Reshet Bet radio claimed, Wednesday morning. Military officials lied to all the government agencies, lied to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, to the Chief of Staff and to the Defense Minister, in order to meet what appear to have been impossible recruitment objectives. Indeed, according to the report, the real recruitment figures have been doubled and even tripled each year, over the past decade.
In 2017, the IDF reported that 3,070 Haredi soldiers enlisted, when in fact only 1,300 were recruited. To support this claim, non-Haredi recruits were used to pad the lists of actual Haredi recruits – and the added soldiers were either soldiers who had spent a year or two in a Haredi school, or even entirely non-religious recruits.
The report does not, however, define who were those non-religious recruits, which is a very important distinction. Did the IDF HR simply grab a list of secular recruits and tacked it on to the Haredi list, or were they more nuanced and included dropouts from Haredi society, who no longer practice their parents’ tradition but are, for lack of a better definition, from Haredi stock. It’s the difference between an outright lie and a bureaucratic stretching of the truth.
Responding to the report after its publication, the head of HR for the IDF, General Moti Almoz said “there was no desire to inflate the numbers. They came from our interpretation that they are Chareidim. It’s possible some people made a mistake, but there was no malicious intent and certainly no forgery.”
Incidentally, it would be wrong to attack the IDF for the entire charade, since it wasn’t the IDF that created the problem. It was a political reality in which Haredi parties are an essential component of government coalitions – both left and right – which has been wielded to create an inequality in this area. The military apparently failed by acquiescing to the unreasonable demands of the high court rather than stating honestly that without the criminalization of avoiding the draft they just can’t do it. And then they failed again by lying and insisting that they could.
In the years 2013-2018, the IDF operated a special Haredi recruitment office, headed by a Major, which was pressured to increase Haredi enlistment in keeping with the Tal Law. According to this morning’s report, the special office forged the number of Haredi soldiers who were being recruited, in order to silence critics of the IDF.
THE TAL LAW
The Tal Law, enacted in 2002 following the recommendation of the Tal Commission, headed by retired Judge Zvi Tal, attempted to manage the IDF Haredi draft by replacing the old status quo arrangement known as Torato Umnuto (Torah study is his job), according to which a person who exclusively studies Torah and is not engaged in any other means of earning his livelihood may postpone his military service every six months, until he reaches the age of exemption from the draft.
The problem was that when this arrangement was first granted, back in 1948, only about 400 yeshiva students were included, out of a population of 600,000 – about 0.07%. Even as late as 1977, only 800 Haredi students were included in this deal. But by 2005, a whopping 40,000 young Haredim were already included.
According to the Tal Law, at age 22, a yeshiva student is granted a year during which he must decide whether to continue his studies or leave yeshiva to join the employment market. Should he choose to work, he must enlist for an abbreviated military service, or spend one year doing national service.
Over the ten years during which the Tal Law was being implemented, the vast majority of Haredi men preferred to continue their studies, so that the law did not prove to change the recruitment figures under the Torato Umnuto system. Therefore, on February 21, 2012, the High Court of Justice ruled that the Tal Law was unconstitutional.
THE FORGERY
According to official IDF figures, by the time the Tal Law was killed by the high court, only 1,300 Haredim were enlisting each year. Without the law, even with declining figures, double and triple numbers of Haredim were reported to have been drafted. The problem is that those were not real Haredim for the most part, and the number of actual Haredi yeshiva students who answer the call to defend their country has remained about the same: around 1,300 each year. With some exceptions:
In 2011, there were only 600 Haredi recruits, which the army reported as 1,200 Haredim.
At the end of 2018, the IDF established a Haredi Management Office, headed by Lt. Col. Telem Hazan, deputy commander of the Paratroop Brigade. He carried out a meticulous investigation of the actual number of Haredim who were serving in the IDF at the time and came up with 1,650 soldiers, a figure that included Haredim who were serving in non-Haredi units.
According to the report, Lt. Col. Hazan was then asked to increase those numbers, or “round them up” to match the fake 2017 official figure of 3,070 Haredi recruits.
Former Defense Minister Amir Peretz (served a year and six weeks in 2006 and 2007), expressed what everyone aware of this report must be feeling, regardless of our political affiliation: “If we have made decisions in the past based on false, incorrect data or data that no one knew how to estimate, it’s a serious matter. Woe to us if the culture of lies has become part of the system in the Ministry of Defense and the IDF.”
The IDF’s initial response said: “The IDF recently discovered a mistake in counting the number of Haredi soldiers in recent years. When the mistake became known, lessons were learned regarding the counting criteria and the strict adherence to the truth required by the entity counting the Haredi soldiers within the IDF.”
A clear and honest response, by all means, although it’s disheartening to discover the IDF was routinely making the same mistake, year after year after year, erroneously padding the numbers of Haredi recruits with double their numbers in non-Haredim. That’s some mistake.
But then the IDF statement went on to say: “It should also be noted that the figures for the 2018 recruitment year (ending June 2019) have not yet been compiled.”
Not compiled? We’re almost in 2020, how long does it take to use IDF computers to count to 1,300?