The scenes of IDF service workers who took over the Haredi communities had deeper meaning for both sides, as the Haredim are largely exempt from Israel’s mandatory military service – just one of the many ways they stay out of the mainstream of Israeli society. Almost half of Haredi men choose not to work at all, relying on government funding and philanthropic help to feed them and their families. About 42 percent of the Haredim live below the poverty line, nearly four times as many as other Israelis.
The relationship between the Haredim and secular Israelis has been confrontational from the beginning of the country. Zionism, which advocated building a Jewish national home in the Land of Israel, grew out of secular Jews, mainly from Eastern Europe. The Haredim, on the other hand, believed that only the Messiah could establish a Jewish state, that only God would decide when the Jews would return to their ancestral homeland. People who tried to speed up the process committed a serious sin.
The Haredim worked tenaciously, both inside and outside Palestine, to hinder the political efforts of the Zionists. The Zionists in Palestine responded with violence. In 1924, a hitman took the life of Jacob de Haan, a Dutch Jewish author and activist turned Haredi as an adult, a day before he was due to travel to London in hopes of convincing the British government to reconsider its promise. “View with favor” the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. After the Holocaust, it was the Zionist movement that became the leading Jewish political force; the anti-Zionist movements were largely destroyed, with the exception of the Haredim, whose community survived despite the huge numbers murdered by the Nazis. Many of the survivors migrated to the United States; most of the others moved to Israel.
Hoping to present a united front to the United Nations commission investigating the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, the driving force behind the creation of a Jewish state, made a series of aggressive promises to ultra-Orthodox leaders. In the new state, he said, Saturdays would become an official day of rest, kosher food would be served in all state kitchens, and there would be no civil weddings. In addition, each of the three Jewish communities – secular, modern Orthodox, and haredim – would have autonomy in education as long as core subjects such as mathematics, foreign languages and history were taught.
But even those concessions were insufficient to bring the Haredim into the national fold. On October 20, 1952, the Prime Minister paid a visit to a small apartment not far from the site of the current town hall of Bnei Brak. He went to the leading Haredi leader of the time, Rabbi Abraham Yeshayahu Karelitz, known as the Hazon Ish, the same figure Kanievsky quoted to assure his followers that Saddam Hussein’s missiles would not hit them. Ben-Gurion needed the Haredi parties to form a coalition, and they accepted their orders from the Hazon Ish.
As Yitzhak Navon, Ben-Gurion’s then political secretary and later Israel’s fifth president, told me in a 1990 interview, the rabbi welcomed Ben-Gurion kindly. The two men talked about Spinoza and other philosophical topics, and then Ben-Gurion finally asked the question, “How can religious Jews and non-religious Jews live together in this land without exploding from within?” The Hazon Ish responded with an allegory from the Talmud. “If two camels meet on a narrow path, and one camel carries a burden and the other does not, the camel must give way without a burden,” he said. And it was the religious Jews who bore by far the greatest burden. “We bear the yoke of a great many commandments,” he continued, with the clear implication that secular Jews were not yoked and values were lacking.