A Country of Ten Million Has a Wartime Manpower Problem
Yossi Alpher — September 8, 2025
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
Q. What manpower problem? The IDF is moving into Gaza City ...
A. Without reserve units. The latest reserve call-up was ignored or loudly rejected by a significant percentage of reservists. After serving hundreds of days during the past two years of war in Gaza, they are staying home. Concern for families and businesses, fear of killing hostages, recognition that this war against Islamist guerillas cannot be “won,” concern over sanctions-related limitations on travel abroad, and even some degree of concern for Gazan civilians have all taken a toll on reserve readiness to fight.
Hundreds of reservists, including pilots, have signed protest petitions. Even IDF Chief of Staff Zamir’s publicly stated reluctance to expand the Gaza war at the expense of the hostages has taken its toll on reserve morale.
So reserve units, which in wartime are usually the backbone of Israel’s fighting force, are being reassigned to border and West Bank duties. The IDF is sending primarily standing or compulsory service combat units--now relieved of duty elsewhere by the reserves--into Gaza City even as it tries to call up additional tens of thousands of reservists. Needless to say, the young soldiers in compulsory service do not enjoy the implicit right of the reservists to opt out based on a host of difficult-to-dispute health, family, and psychological complaints, emergencies, etc.
Q. But numerically, how is this a manpower deficit?
A. Here we encounter the challenge posed by Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) refusal to serve. It goes back to the 1950s when Prime Minister Ben Gurion, concerned to redress the ravages of the Holocaust, exempted 400 Haredi Torah scholars from compulsory military duty. Over the decades, the Haredi exemption has expanded with the Haredi birthrate, today estimated at six percent per annum, tying Niger for highest in the world.
The ultra-Orthodox have long been the fastest-growing demographic in Israeli society; today they number around 1.4 million, or one-out-of-eight Israelis. At this rate, within a few decades a majority of Jewish school-age children will be Haredi, their families adhering to a fervently fundamentalist lifestyle that segregates them from the broader society, segregates women, denies them a modern education, and cultivates a panoply of racist and ignorant values.
To those 1.4 million Haredim add a like number of Arab citizens of Israel, who traditionally are not conscripted. This means the manpower basis for our military service calculations is not 10 million--Israel’s current population--but at best seven million eligible Israelis.
The dynamic of Haredi population growth and absence from military service was long tolerated due to both traditional sympathy for fervent religious study and Haredi political influence within ruling coalitions. Over the decades, it has become clear that a growing portion of Haredi youth do not actually devote their lives to Torah study but rather exploit their IDF exemptions to enter the labor market. This too was tolerated until lately.
Then too, not a few in the IDF looked at Haredi lifestyle demands--extra Kashrut, no contact with women, extra prayer time--and concluded the IDF was better off without this headache.
Since October 7, 2023, the exigencies of a two-year war with its huge economic and family pressures on reservists have changed that reality. Haredi protests that their youth are ‘martyring themselves for Torah’ and that their studies are far more important for Jewish national redemption are increasingly not tolerated by the public at large, which is constantly updated about the number of imaginary Haredi ‘divisions’ being diverted from the army. For their part, militant Haredi factions have developed an intelligence network to assist youth evading draft notices or arrest for draft-dodging.
Q. Chief of Staff Zamir has taken a tough stand.
A. Zamir has to: more than any of his predecessors, he needs the Haredi manpower. Lately, the IDF has sent draft notices to tens of thousands of army-age ultra-Orthodox men. These are backed up by the threat of arrest for desertion of those Haredi youth who are drafted but do not report for service. The Haredi parties in the Netanyahu coalition have responded by demanding that their traditional exemption be anchored in legislation. When their deadline was not met, they officially left the coalition--though for the time being they continue to support it in key Knesset votes.
Meanwhile, the IDF has established combat units ostensibly tailored to the perceived needs of Haredi male youth (or rather demands of their rabbinical leadership). These allow for prayer and Torah study and segregate the young men from female soldiers. The idea is to persuade the Haredi establishment that exposure of its youth, through military service, to free-wheeling, secular Israeli society at large will not ‘spoil’ it, and that after service the young men will continue to adhere to the Haredi lifestyle.
Note that throughout this controversy no one is even hinting at compulsory service for young Haredi women or for that relatively small kernel of male youth who genuinely do devote their lives to constant Torah study. In other words, even in a best-case scenario in which a compromise is reached, it will be based on a set of hypocritical standards regularizing asymmetric Haredi participation in the economy, politics and the security needs of the country: non-Haredi students will serve, Haredi students will not; non-Haredi women will serve, Haredi women can volunteer if they dare defy their elders.
Note, too, that Zamir’s reluctance to commit the IDF to further heavy combat that endangers the hostages, together with his well-advertised need for more manpower, have engendered threats from the coalition and the influential Netanyahu family to fire him. Recently Netanyahu was caught by a microphone admitting that he had dismissed both Zamir’s predecessor Halevy and Minister of Defense Galant because they refused to promote Haredi-exemption legislation.
Q. Bottom line?
A. Israel’s military manpower controversy uniquely involves issues of religion, politics, and demography. The problem will not go away: in the years to come it will be exacerbated by two factors. First, Israel as a whole is becoming more religious and more religiously conservative. Second, emigration: those Israelis not swept up by growing religiosity and militancy are increasingly leaving the country or at least considering leaving.
In 2024, a war year, over 82,000 Israelis left, while only 24,000 returned. Social Security statistics indicate that between March 2024 and March 2025 the number of Israelis living abroad rose by 24 percent. A brief visit to nearby Cyprus confirms this. It and Greece are filling up with Israelis who want to live beyond Israel’s borders yet remain a very short flight or boat trip away from businesses, extended family, and medical services.
The Haredi draft controversy also reflects Israel’s own growing Levant-style tribalism. More about this in our next Q & A, which will look at what we have learned about ourselves, or should have learned, over the past two years.
Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer.
