Yosef Eisenthal was dragged by a city bus for several hundred meters through Jerusalem on the night of 6 January 2026 during a demonstration against drafting ultra-Orthodox Jews into Israel’s military. The 14-year-old protester was declared dead at the scene.
Shock and condemnation rippled through Israeli society in the aftermath of Eisenthal’s death. Several Israeli leaders, including President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, expressed their grief and called for a thorough police investigation.
But by week’s end, the story became old news, and any ounce of sympathy for the ultra-Orthodox dissipated as another rally against conscription broke into riots on Sunday when demonstrators stormed a conference held by the Israeli army’s ultra-Orthodox brigade. Again, condemnation came, but this time against ultra-Orthodox protesters.
“What this death did was simply make it clear that we're talking about two very different groups, basically Haredis [ultra-Orthodox] and all other Jewish Israelis. Even to the extent where they don't even have to be Jewish,” Ori Goldberg, an Israeli analyst, told The New Arab, referring to the bus driver who is Palestinian.
“Which is why even the thoroughly politicised national police ultimately ended up withdrawing the charges of aggravated murder and not appealing the judge's decision to send the bus driver on house arrest. So, nobody cares.”
The Israeli public is a mosaic of juxtaposing identities - from the Russian punk scene to religious nationalists to Tel Aviv’s secular techies - but often what ultimately unites these various groups is war and conscription. So as the ultra-Orthodox continue protesting against being drafted, simmering tensions in Israeli society and in the government are turning explosive.
Since Israel’s founding, the ultra-Orthodox have enjoyed blanket exemptions from mandatory military service required for all Jewish Israeli citizens. In 2017, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled against the ultra-Orthodox exemption and mandated the government to pass a new law regarding military service for the ultra-Orthodox or Haredim.
With this decision, the court granted the state temporary extensions to its ruling, allowing the government to continue issuing deferrals for Haredim. These extensions, however, expired in June 2023, and two years later, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the government must enlist Haredim into the military immediately - barring any legal mechanism exempting them from service.
With that verdict, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara then instructed the military to begin drafting tens of thousands of Haredim. Despite some 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men between the ages of 18-24 eligible for military service, more than half of those eligible have evaded the draft and are therefore subject to arrest.
Amid the enforcement crackdown on Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox leadership in the government has pushed for the state to pass a law exempting its constituency from service. But the pressure to pass such a bill has dragged the government deeper into crisis.
Currently, factions of the Haredi parties are threatening not to vote for the 2026 state budget if an exemption bill isn’t approved. If the budget isn’t passed by its 31 March deadline, then the parliament may dissolve and trigger early elections.
Since the draft exemption expired in 2023, some Israeli media analysts have warned that it could be the downfall of Netanyahu’s coalition. Goldberg doesn’t see that outcome materialising, seeing Haredi leadership threats as mere bluffs.
“The Haredi leadership is either in disarray completely or they are gradually coming around towards realising that any kind of bill they pass about Haredi conscription with this government will undoubtedly be much, much better for them than any sort of bill that a different government might pass,” Goldberg said. “Netanyahu's coalition appears to be getting stronger, not weaker.”
As the Haredi parties cause a commotion in parliament, their spiritual leadership quietly gathered last week, in a meeting that excluded their lawmakers, to endorse the current exemption bill on the table - a version promoted by Boaz Bismuth, a parliament member from Netanyahu’s Likud party.
This bill sets a small and gradually increasing enlistment target for Haredi men. Yet critics of the legislation say the slow level of recruitment doesn’t meet the military’s needs and that the penalties for evading service are too lenient.
Despite making a decision, internal disagreement among the rabbis remains a prominent sticking point. While one of the rabbis supports compromise regarding the exemption bill, Yaakov Aryeh, the rabbi of one of the most influential ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel, has vocally opposed the current iteration of the bill and supported actions against the draft.
“Their power is in their absolute unity and in their dependability, that's what they can offer…a massive parliamentary voting block because they'll just simply do what the rabbis have agreed to do. But if the rabbis are not in agreement, then that means they're not as dependable as they once were, which immediately decreases their political value to somebody like Netanyahu,” Goldberg said.
While on the surface the Haredim appear to be a thorn in Netanyahu’s side, the two actually enjoy a symbiotic relationship. Historically, the ultra-Orthodox skewed more to the left in politics (specifically given their opposition to nationalism), but that has changed in the last few decades, according to Kimmy Caplan, a historian at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University.
Israel’s Haredi youth have shifted to the right for a variety of reasons, such as deeper integration into Israeli society (often being third and fourth-generation Israelis) and the outsized influence of religious nationalism, specifically Kahanism, a Jewish supremacist ideology that emerged in the 1980s.
“The population has moved to the right as far as the popular Haredi opinion, and they found much more of a partnership with Netanyahu in the sense that they give Netanyahu full support on anything and everything, as long as they get what he is generously willing and still is willing to give them,” Caplan told TNA.
Netanyahu, ever the political mastermind, has relied on his ability to wield deals with other parties to survive in government - ultimately becoming Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.
As the current coalition appears fractured over the current bill, specifically over the legislation’s penalties for draft dodgers, Israeli media is warning that this might finally be the nail in the coffin for Netanyahu. Others caution against making such predictions.
“The amount of prophecies regarding Haredi society has failed miserably,” Caplan said.
“There are so many factors here that no one has any way to either control or analyse what will play out in a certain situation or at a certain junction, more or less than something else that would play out otherwise. So, it’s a toss-up.”
Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based journalist covering Palestine and Israel. Her work has been featured in Middle East Eye, The National, and Gulf News.
Follow her on Twitter: @jess_buxbaum
Edited by Charlie Hoyle