At midday Tuesday, Rabbi Dov Lando declared the death of “the bloc.” The coalition has always weathered crises, challenges, and storms, but as elections approach, whether through a coordinated move or not, the draft law became the detonator. The blast may well trigger the dissolution of the Knesset and, at least in theory, the end of the religious-nationalist bloc as we know it.
Except the bloc never really existed. In practice, it has always been a marriage of convenience between ultra-Orthodox autonomy and parts of the right-wing parties: the ultra-Orthodox extract enormous budgets to sustain their project of insularity and draft evasion, while their coalition partners receive automatic green lights to advance their own policy agendas, which may yield short-to-medium-term results.
But this marriage of convenience did not collapse simply under popular opposition to the draft evasion law, or even under internal coalition rebellion. It ran headlong into reality. The numbers leave no room for doubt: If current trends continue, by 2065 fewer than half of Israeli society will be Zionist. This is an existential threat, and it is not some distant hypothetical. It is unfolding right now.
The economic burden of the ultra-Orthodox
As the landmark research by Michael Sarel, Ariel Karlinsky, Tom Sadeh, and others has shown, the economic burden is staggering. A non-haredi Jewish household loses roughly NIS 6,100 per month, the gap between taxes paid and services received, while the average haredi family collects a monthly surplus of around NIS 4,000, and an Arab family around NIS 1,000. The updated figures are considerably starker, approaching a monthly loss of NIS 9,000 for the average non-haredi Jewish household.
How did we get here? This is the outcome of a failure well known in computer science as the “starvation problem”: a condition in which a task is perpetually assigned low priority until it receives no resources at all and ultimately causes the entire system to crash.
The haredi challenge was always treated as the less urgent problem. But the massive growth of haredi society, combined with the loss of control over its radical fringes and the contempt shown toward state institutions, all at the height of a brutal war, sent the public a message it could not ignore: This challenge must be prioritized now. It is both important and urgent.
The duty of political leaders
But the starvation problem is only part of the story. The other part is simpler: Paying political parties that demand no ideological compromise is far easier than making painful political concessions. This is why politicians across the spectrum feel an irresistible pull toward the addictive substance known as the haredi parties. This political heroin tempts any politician seeking cheap electoral gains, even when the economic cost is unbearable.
So if the Knesset does dissolve, this is the moment of truth for the opposition leaders: Yair Golan, Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, and Avigdor Liberman. They must say clearly and without equivocation: The haredi parties will not find refuge with us. We will not be partners in the continuation of the draft evasion project, and we will not allow the transparent attempt to return to a kingmaker position to obscure the need for a genuine solution to this existential challenge.
This is the duty of leaders. But more than that, it is the reality already felt by voters on the ground. Across the political spectrum, the public will not forget how the haredi political machine conducted itself during this war. Voters will not forgive their leaders for another round of appeasement, another willful blindness, another failed doctrine that brings us closer to the next disaster.
The writer is the CEO of the Ribo Center.