Just another Thursday in Israel - The Jewish Standard

Last Thursday evening, thousands of ultra-Orthodox men descended on Israel’s central highway arteries during rush hour, shutting down Routes 1, 4, and 6, blocking train tracks near Ben Gurion Airport, smashing the windshield of a government minister’s spokesperson’s car. In one particularly grim episode, a 93-year-old man was struck by a car at the Geha Junction near Bnei Brak and hospitalized with serious head injuries. Police deployed stun grenades. A frustrated female driver got out of her car holding a sharp object. Protesters wearing Holocaust-era yellow stars faced off against motorists who just wanted to get home.

Welcome to another Thursday in Israel.

This is not a one-off. Since the High Court ruled in 2024 that charedi men must be subject to conscription, the Jerusalem Faction — an extremist ultra-Orthodox group numbering some 60,000 members — has operated what it cheerfully calls a “national alert system” to mobilize wildcat protests the moment a draft evader is arrested anywhere in the country. Highways have been blockaded. A Supreme Court justice’s home was stormed and his car smashed. Rioters broke into a Beit Shemesh police station. And through it all, the Netanyahu government — dependent on charedi parties for its coalition majority — has watched with its hands conspicuously in its pockets.

So here is a question worth asking seriously: Can some of these protesters simply be deported?

The answer is possibly yes, and almost certainly no.

On paper, the legal tools are right there. Israel’s Entry into Israel Law gives the Interior Minister sweeping discretionary authority to revoke visas and expel foreign nationals. The grounds include criminal activity, public disorder, and any conduct deemed a threat to public security. Participating in a riot qualifies. Blocking a highway is a criminal offense. And there are, by reliable estimates, approximately 15,000 foreign yeshiva students — Americans, Canadians, Europeans, Australians — studying in Israel on A/2 student visas, subsidized, remarkably, by the Israeli government, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars annually. These students are explicitly prohibited from engaging in activities outside of studying. “Shutting down the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem highway” does not appear anywhere on the approved curriculum.

Israel has shown it will use deportation selectively when it is politically motivated to do so. A 2017 law bars entry to foreign BDS supporters. American academic Norman Finkelstein was deported in 2008 and given a 10-year ban. Lara Alqasem, a graduate student, was detained at the airport over her leadership of a campus pro-Palestinian group. If you wore a “Boycott Sabra Hummus” T-shirt to Ben Gurion, the state took notice.

And yet foreign yeshiva students who help shut down the country’s highway system? Crickets.

The reason, of course, is politics. The charedi parties — Shas and United Torah Judaism — are the glue holding the current coalition together. The Interior Ministry, which would have to sign any deportation order, is politically sensitive terrain. And the very government that is theoretically enforcing conscription orders is simultaneously advancing legislation to restore daycare subsidies for the children of draft evaders. The legal framework exists. The political will does not.

But here’s the harder question: even if deportations happened, would they solve anything?

Probably not. The disorder on Israel’s highways is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is a decades-old arrangement — struck between David Ben-Gurion and Haredi leadership in 1948, when the number of exempted yeshiva students was in the hundreds — that has mutated into a blanket exemption for some 80,000 draft-age men during a shooting war. The High Court has ruled the exemptions unconstitutional. The IDF has warned of combat soldier shortages and reserve army burnout. And the protesters blocking traffic know perfectly well that the government needs them more than it needs order on Route 4.

Deporting a few hundred foreign students would make for satisfying headlines in some quarters. It would accomplish roughly as much as removing a handful of bees when the hive itself is the problem. The foreign students are participants in a system; the system would hum along without them.

The real leverage is economic and legal: cutting subsidies to yeshivot that harbor draft evaders, enforcing criminal sanctions consistently, and — most importantly — a governing coalition willing to make charedi conscription a condition of political survival rather than a bargaining chip to be eternally deferred.

In the meantime, if you were trying to drive from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv on Thursday evening, you had all the time in the world to contemplate these questions. Stuck on Route 1, going nowhere, listening to stun grenades in the distance.

Torah study as a profession is an ancient and honorable tradition.

Blocking ambulances is not.

Stephen M. Flatow of Long Branch, formerly of West Orange, is an attorney and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror “(now available in an expanded paperback edition on Amazon) and is the president of the Religious Zionists of America-Mizrachi.)

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