For four decades, ultra-Orthodox parties have helped determine who would become Israel’s prime minister. Ahead of the October 27 election, their greatest asset—the ability to sell eighteen Knesset seats to the highest bidder—has become their greatest vulnerability.
Just days before dissolving itself, the 25th Knesset passed two laws benefiting the Haredi community. The first was granted constitutional status and effectively came down to a single sentence: Torah study is a foundational value of the heritage of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. The second had practical implications: it barred military police from arresting yeshiva students who had failed to report for duty after receiving draft notices. The Supreme Court froze its implementation less than twenty-four hours later.
The outcome of the four-year term for the most effective bargaining bloc in Israeli politics borders on the absurd: a declaration with no consequences and a provision with no effect. The ultra-Orthodox entered Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in December 2022 with eighteen seats, unprecedented budgetary commitments, and the promise of the ultimate prize—a law exempting tens of thousands of religious-school students from universal military conscription. They are leaving the term with a text containing not a single operative provision and with roughly 72,000 young men formally classified as draft evaders.
The October 27 vote, therefore, is about far more than another battle to secure 61 seats. It is a test of the model on which Israeli politics has operated since the late 1970s: a model in which an ideologically non-Zionist minority sells its votes to both camps in exchange for autonomy, funding, and exemption from an obligation that the rest of society bears in blood.
Sixty-One Votes Against Ten Million People
Israel’s electoral system is structured in a way that makes political leverage a rational strategy. The entire country constitutes a single electoral district. All 120 Knesset seats are allocated proportionally among party lists that cross the 3.25 percent electoral threshold. There are no constituencies, no first-past-the-post seats, and no runoff election. A party that receives four percent of the vote wins five lawmakers and the full right to bargain over the fate of the government.
Then comes a procedure that magnifies the effect. After an election, the president consults all parliamentary factions and assigns the task of forming a government not necessarily to the leader of the largest party, but to the lawmaker whom the president believes is most likely to assemble a majority. The distinction is crucial. In 2021, Naftali Bennett became prime minister even though his party had won only seven Knesset seats, and not all of its lawmakers supported the government that was ultimately formed.
The threshold for political confidence is similarly flexible. The Bennett-Lapid government was approved by a vote of 60 to 59, with one abstention from a lawmaker belonging to the Islamist Ra’am party, which at the time became the first Arab political party in Israel’s history to sign a coalition agreement with a Zionist bloc. In the 1990s, Yitzhak Rabin’s minority government survived with outside support from Arab factions that were not formally part of the coalition.
Polls conducted in the summer of 2026 give no camp a secure majority. By late July, the Zionist opposition parties, excluding the two Arab lists, were polling at 60 to 61 seats. The Zionist parties of the governing coalition were at roughly 34 seats without the Haredi parties and 50 to 52 with them. Channel 14, which is sympathetic to Netanyahu, showed a more favorable picture: 45 without the ultra-Orthodox and 62 with them. A ten-seat spread between polling organizations is itself diagnostic: the country is so divided that even measuring the division has become a political act.
The arithmetic leaves Netanyahu an extremely narrow path. Without Shas and United Torah Judaism, the right-wing bloc fails to secure a majority under any scenario. The ultra-Orthodox understand this—and have understood it throughout the past four years.
The 1947 Deal: How the Secular Founder of the State Planted a Time Bomb
Relations between the Zionist project and ultra-Orthodoxy began not with compromise, but with mutual rejection. A substantial part of the rabbinical establishment in Eastern Europe regarded the attempt to establish a Jewish state by secular means as a usurpation of the messianic role. Agudat Yisrael, founded in Poland in 1912, emerged specifically as a movement opposed to secularization and political Zionism.
David Ben-Gurion addressed the problem not ideologically but transactionally. In 1947, as he sought to present a unified Jewish position to the United Nations commission, he guaranteed the future status quo: the Sabbath as the official day of rest, kosher observance in state institutions, marriage and divorce under the authority of rabbinical courts, and autonomy for the religious school system. The calculation was instrumental and, as events later showed, fundamentally mistaken in its central assumption. Ben-Gurion believed that the Haredi world, devastated by the Holocaust, was a disappearing relic that could be allowed to live out its remaining years inside a protected enclave.
The deferment of military service for yeshiva students under the principle that “Torah study is their vocation” was introduced according to the same logic: initially for roughly 400 men, with the aim of rebuilding centers of Torah scholarship destroyed in Europe. The quota remained in place until 1977, when Menachem Begin’s government removed the numerical limits. From that moment onward, the exception ceased to be an exception and became an institution.
The numbers reveal the scale of the miscalculation. By the mid-2020s, the ultra-Orthodox community accounted for roughly thirteen to fourteen percent of Israel’s population, and according to demographic projections by the Central Bureau of Statistics, its share is expected to approach one fifth by the 2040s. The protected enclave has become one of the fastest-growing segments of Israeli society, while the cost of maintaining its autonomy has fallen on a secular tax base that is shrinking in relative terms.
1977: When Bargaining Became a Profession
The political monetization of this demographic resource began after one-party dominance collapsed. Until 1977, the left-wing camp—first Mapai and later Labor—formed governments with virtually no serious alternative. Likud’s victory in 1977, followed by the 1981 election in which right and left finished almost level, with 48 and 47 seats respectively, created a new political configuration. Neither bloc could any longer count on governing solely with ideologically compatible partners.
Small parties became scarce political commodities. The ultra-Orthodox were the ideal commodity for a reason that is rarely stated explicitly. Israel’s division between right and left is defined primarily by attitudes toward the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian issue. Historically, Haredi parties did not hold rigid positions along that axis: territory and borders were not among their overriding priorities. They could sell their support to either camp without paying a serious ideological price.
That position made the Haredi parties the only force in the Knesset whose price was determined less by political convictions than by a budget line. Their list of demands has remained remarkably consistent for half a century: funding for community and religious education, authority for rabbinical courts, exemption of yeshiva students from military service, and noninterference by the state in the content of religious curricula.
Three Parties, Two Lists, and Not a Single Voter Who Decides Independently
The ultra-Orthodox camp appears monolithic only from the outside. Formally, two lists compete in elections; in reality, there are three parties with different sociological bases, different rabbinical hierarchies, and different degrees of willingness to compromise.
Agudat Yisrael represents Hasidic communities divided among various courts, the largest of which operate their own educational institutions and nominate their own political representatives. Decisions are made by the Council of Torah Sages.
Degel HaTorah represents the Lithuanian Haredi tradition. It split off in 1988, when Rabbi Elazar Shach broke with the Hasidic leadership. The party’s leading religious authorities today are considered to be Rabbis Dov Lando and Moshe Hillel Hirsch. Their directives determine how the faction’s lawmakers vote and which coalition it joins. Since 1992, the two organizations have run together on the United Torah Judaism list for a purely pragmatic reason: running separately would expose each of them to the risk of failing to cross the 3.25 percent threshold. Internal disputes over the allocation of seats, cabinet portfolios, and budgets have nonetheless never ceased.
Shas occupies a separate niche. Founded in 1984 by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef with the support of the same Rabbi Shach, the party grew out of resentment over discrimination against Sephardim within the Ashkenazi yeshiva system and religious institutions. Its social base is broader than the strictly Haredi community. A significant share of Shas voters are traditional Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin who do not themselves study in yeshivas and do serve in the military. The difference in electoral composition explains the difference in rhetoric—and will become crucial in October.
The defining feature of the camp lies not in theology but in the mechanics of decision-making. A Haredi lawmaker is not an autonomous political actor. Coalition choices, votes on fundamental legislation, and decisions to relinquish cabinet portfolios are all determined by rabbinical councils. A negotiator who reaches an agreement with Aryeh Deri or Moshe Gafni has not necessarily reached a final agreement, because the decision can be overturned by an authority that did not participate in the negotiations and is not accountable to the electorate.
The Stinking Trick: A Manual for Bringing Down a Prime Minister
The classic demonstration of this mechanism came in 1990. Labor leader Shimon Peres engineered a no-confidence vote against Yitzhak Shamir’s national unity government and began assembling an alternative coalition with the ultra-Orthodox parties. The deal collapsed after Rabbi Shach publicly opposed an alliance with the left and two Agudat Yisrael lawmakers simply failed to appear for the decisive vote. Shamir ultimately formed the government, while the operation entered the Israeli political lexicon as the “stinking trick.”
The conclusion all sides drew at the time turned out to be wrong. The Haredi alliance with the right did not become unconditional for many years. In 1992, Shas joined Yitzhak Rabin’s government alongside Labor and the left-wing Meretz party: 44 plus 12 plus six seats produced a 62-seat majority. After Shas left, Rabin’s cabinet became a minority government. In 1999, Shas, with a record seventeen seats, joined Ehud Barak’s center-left government, where it was joined by United Torah Judaism with five lawmakers.
There are counterexamples as well. In 2003, Ariel Sharon preferred an alliance with the anti-clerical Shinui party. In 2013, Netanyahu left both Haredi parties in opposition after reaching agreements with Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett. The Bennett-Lapid government formed in 2021 without the ultra-Orthodox parties and survived for just over a year.
History offers two clues. First, the Haredi parties are tied to the right-wing camp by nothing more than current political calculation. Second, governments without them are possible, but tend to be short-lived because they require coalitions composed of ideologically incompatible elements.
Seventy-Two Thousand
The central conflict of the current political cycle emerged at the intersection of demography, law, and war.
The legal history of military-service deferments is the story of a positional war that the state repeatedly lost against its own Supreme Court. An exemption initially granted by administrative decision was subsequently enshrined in legislation several times, and the Court repeatedly struck those laws down on the grounds that they violated the principle of equality. The legal basis for the blanket deferment finally expired in June 2023. The government temporarily ordered that yeshiva students not be drafted, assuming it would have enough time to pass new legislation.
In June 2024, the Supreme Court settled the matter: the government had no authority to grant such an exemption through an executive decision and was required to apply the general Military Service Law to the Haredi population. What followed was a process no one had planned. The military began issuing draft notices and later arrest warrants for those who failed to report. By July 2026, the number of Haredi men aged 18 to 24 who were eligible for conscription but had not entered service was estimated at roughly 72,000. Arrests occurred primarily during identity checks and attempts to leave the country, turning every airport into a potential flashpoint and triggering mass protests within the community.
At the same time, a second variable was changing. Nearly three years of fighting—Gaza, Lebanon, two campaigns against Iran, and constant tension in Judea and Samaria—created a manpower shortage that fell heavily on reservists. According to available data, since October 2023, 27 percent of reservists have served a cumulative 150 to 300 days, while another 20 percent have served more than 300 days. These are people who have lost businesses, jobs, academic years, and substantial parts of their family lives.
The collision of these two sets of statistics created a political bomb. The dispute ceased to be a technical argument over quotas and became a question about the nature of the state itself.
In substance, the problem is more complicated than the slogans deployed by either side. Almost no one is demanding that every yeshiva student be sent immediately into combat units. Most Arab citizens of Israel are likewise not subject to conscription, while the Israel Defense Forces have long maintained units adapted to Haredi requirements, including kosher standards and gender separation. Supporters of conscription see those units as proof that integration is feasible. The ultra-Orthodox leadership sees something else: a mechanism that, after several years of military service, returns to the community a young man who has been exposed to an alternative way of life. Secular critics add a third concern: large-scale adaptation of the military to religious requirements could restrict women’s professional opportunities within the armed forces.
Beneath the technical details lie three questions for which no consensus exists. Should the military adapt itself to the community, or should the community adapt itself to the military? Should civilian service be regarded as equivalent to military service? Does a group have the right to preserve almost complete autonomy if its security and maintenance are paid for by others?
Demography Versus Arithmetic: Why Time Is Working Both for Them and Against Them
The economic dimension of the dispute is usually overshadowed by politics, although it is precisely economics that will shape the long-term outcome.
The Haredi model is built around prolonged study by adult men in religious academies rather than participation in the labor market. Depending on the estimate, employment among ultra-Orthodox men hovers around half, while it is substantially higher among secular Jewish men. The model is supported by government stipends, child allowances, and funding for religious educational institutions, while elementary education for boys across a substantial part of the system does not provide full instruction in mathematics, English, and the natural sciences. In other words, it does not create the educational foundation required for eventual entry into the skilled labor market.
The Bank of Israel and the Finance Ministry have warned for years that if current demographic trends and employment patterns persist, Israel’s per capita GDP will grow more slowly while the tax burden on the working segment of society will increase. The war has brought that horizon sharply closer. Defense spending has surged, the budget deficit has widened, and international rating agencies downgraded Israel’s sovereign credit rating in 2024, citing, among other factors, uncertainty surrounding structural reforms.
That is why, in the current political cycle, Haredi demands have encountered resistance for the first time not only from ideological secularists, but also from the economic wing of the right. Funding for ultra-Orthodox communities is no longer a budget item that can be quietly pushed through. It has become the subject of public accounting—and that accounting is being done by people who have spent three hundred days in the reserves.
Demography, meanwhile, continues to work in the Haredi parties’ favor: their electoral weight rises almost automatically with every election cycle. The paradox is that the same growth is making the old bargain increasingly unacceptable to everyone else. A protected enclave representing one percent of the population can be sustained. A protected enclave representing one fifth of the population is politically impossible.
The Legislative Frenzy and the Consolation Prize
When it became clear that the conscription law would not pass before the election, the Knesset shifted into what Israeli journalists called a legislative blitz. Within days, parliament pushed through a series of measures benefiting the Haredi parties. In return, they kept the Knesset functioning until the election date preferred by Netanyahu and helped the prime minister advance initiatives he needed, including curbing the powers of the government’s attorney general and reforming the media market.
The exchange was unequal, and both sides knew it.
The ultra-Orthodox received a Basic Law on Torah study. The original version equated prolonged Torah study with meaningful service to the state and allowed it to be taken into account when allocating rights and benefits, language that would have created a legal foundation for future exemptions. A wave of outrage, including from within the coalition, forced lawmakers to strip out the practical provisions. What remained was a declaration that Torah study is a foundational value of the heritage of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.
Its symbolic significance is not negligible. Israel has no single written constitution; its Basic Laws partially fulfill that role, meaning that even a brief declaration acquires constitutional standing. Aryeh Deri called the vote a victory for the world of Torah, while Moshe Gafni described it as the creation of a value compass for the state. Within the Haredi community itself, however, another question began to surface: was a constitutional compliment merely a consolation prize in place of the real trophy?
The practical law suspending arrests of those who failed to report for military service appeared far more consequential. It prohibited military police from detaining yeshiva students, opening new criminal proceedings against them, or continuing proceedings already underway. Its protections also extended to those who would reach draft age after the law took effect. Formally, the measure was due to expire on November 30, but given the election and the subsequent transition period, it could effectively have remained in force until the end of January 2027. No one had time to benefit from it: the Supreme Court froze the law less than twenty-four hours after its passage.
Something nevertheless remained. The Knesset repealed the previous government’s kosher-certification reform and expanded the possibility of gender-segregated education at universities. The Council for Higher Education was authorized to approve separate master’s and doctoral programs for men and women, while mixed institutions were permitted to introduce separate seating in classrooms on a voluntary basis. Secular Israelis viewed the move as the legalization of segregation, further deepening the divide between the two camps.
Objectively, that outcome benefits Netanyahu. The more aggressively the opposition attacks the Haredi parties over segregation and draft avoidance, the less room the ultra-Orthodox have to maneuver toward the opposing bloc.
Why They Could Lose This Time
The kingmaker model works on one condition: both sides must regard an alliance with you as acceptable. For the first time, that condition has weakened.
Avigdor Lieberman built the political identity of Yisrael Beiteinu around refusing to join a government with Haredi parties. A position that looked marginal for twenty years has become mainstream among secular right-wing voters, particularly after the third year of war. Polls in recent years have consistently shown that an overwhelming majority of Israelis, including a substantial share of Likud voters, support extending military conscription to the ultra-Orthodox.
At the same time, the opposition bloc is extraordinarily diverse, ranging from the left-wing Democrats to the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu and the Beyachad list led by Naftali Bennett. The durability of such a coalition is questionable, something its own participants acknowledge. Today it has only one common denominator: refusal to work with Netanyahu and a demand for equality in military service. Shas representative Asher Medina articulated the mirror-image perception when he warned against an alliance with the left, whose only common denominator, he said, was hatred of the Haredim.
At the same time, the Haredi parties’ bargaining position inside the right-wing bloc has also weakened. Lawmakers from the Religious Zionist parties did not support the conscription law in its final reading because it provokes resentment among their voters, many of whom serve in combat units and suffer disproportionately heavy losses. The Haredi parties discovered that they had no allies even among those conventionally regarded as part of the religious camp.
The differences within the Haredi camp itself are becoming critical. Moshe Gafni of Degel HaTorah has said that the previous arrangement will not be repeated: before any government is formed, a conscription law must first be passed. Technically, that is possible. A new Knesset can begin legislating while the outgoing cabinet remains in office in a caretaker capacity, and the Haredi parties can delay signing a coalition agreement and voting confidence in a new government until the legislation they demand is enacted. Shas uses softer language and has not renounced the right-wing bloc, although its basic condition is the same: it will not enter a coalition without resolving the status of Torah students.
The divergence is explained by sociology. The Lithuanian Haredi Degel HaTorah relies on a core constituency for whom the yeshiva question is existential. Shas depends on a broader traditionalist electorate whose members themselves serve in the military and may not appreciate blocking the formation of a government in order to exempt others from service. A demand that strengthens one party weakens the other.
Four Scenarios for October 28
The first scenario is restoration with payment in advance. Netanyahu secures 61 or 62 seats together with the Haredi parties, but pays upfront: the conscription law is passed before the confidence vote. The Supreme Court would almost certainly strike it down if it failed to include genuine recruitment quotas and sanctions. The government would immediately find itself in a new constitutional crisis, and the coalition would have an even stronger incentive than before to radically curb judicial power.
The second scenario is a coalition without the Haredi parties. The opposition bloc assembles 61 votes and forms a government in which equality in military service becomes the only issue that genuinely unites its members. For the first time in many years, the ultra-Orthodox would be excluded from the budgetary process while a binding judicial ruling requiring the conscription of their young men remained in force. The durability of such a coalition would be the central question, and the precedent of 2021 offers little reason for optimism.
The third scenario is a national unity government without Netanyahu. Some parties that refuse to serve under the incumbent prime minister are prepared to work with Likud if it changes its leader. Such an arrangement would provide the broadest possible political base for resolving the conscription issue because it would remove the personal divide surrounding Netanyahu. His willingness to relinquish the premiership, however, remains the least likely element of the entire equation.
The fourth scenario is deadlock and another election. Neither bloc secures a majority, the Haredi parties refuse to enter a government without guarantees, and the opposition fails to consolidate. Israel returns to the 2019–2021 cycle of four elections in two years, except that this time the backdrop includes an unresolved settlement in Gaza, troops in Lebanon and Syria, and severe budgetary pressure.
The End of the Bargaining Era
The ultra-Orthodox parties perfected a single political technique: turning the absence of ideology into a bargaining asset. For forty years, that technique worked almost flawlessly because Israeli politics was divided almost exactly down the middle and because the price of the bargain remained acceptable to most of society.
Both pillars have cracked. The divide has deepened, but it is no longer bipolar. A third fault line has emerged between those who serve and those who do not, and it cuts across the traditional division between right and left. The price of the bargain is no longer acceptable because the bill is now being calculated not in shekels, but in reservists’ days of service and in names engraved on military gravestones.
The central outcome of the outgoing Knesset is not simply that the Haredi parties failed to obtain the law they wanted. It is that they failed to obtain it under the most favorable configuration imaginable: eighteen seats, a prime minister critically dependent on them, complete control over coalition arithmetic, and four full years in which to act. All of that produced only a constitutional declaration and a provision that survived for twenty hours.
The situation suggests that their model has reached the limits of its effectiveness. Further growth of the community will increase its electoral weight while simultaneously reducing the political feasibility of satisfying its demands. Demography, which for forty years was its greatest political resource, is becoming its greatest political problem.
Only weeks remain before the vote, and Israeli politics is capable of producing almost any alliance, including those that currently appear impossible. One thing is already clear: whoever assembles 61 seats on October 27 will have to answer the question Ben-Gurion postponed in 1947, believing it would resolve itself. No coalition will be able to postpone it again.