“Israel is an anti-Semitic country. » Armed with banners with shocking slogans, hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men blocked a major highway in central Israel, near Bnei Brak, for nearly three hours. At the origin of their protest: the adoption by the Israeli Supreme Court of a text allowing the State to impose on ultraorthodox Jewish students of the seminary to carry out their military service.
Until then, there was an exception for these young people: the ultra-Orthodox parties, politically powerful in Israel, had obtained that the students of their seminaries could not be mobilized. But while more than 600 IDF soldiers have been killed since the resumption of the conflict in Gaza and tens of thousands of reservists have been mobilized, a part of the population and the government considered that this exception was no longer tenable.
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32 arrests
Hundreds of men sat on the road or lay on the ground of one of the country’s main thoroughfares for hours in protest. And as police tried to force them out, one protester told Associated Press reporters that “the entire Orthodox public would rather go to jail than join the army.”
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The ultraorthodox view their religious studies as helping to protect the state. But above all, many fear that closer contact with secular society through the military will move the faithful away from strict observance of the faith.
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At the scene, police clashed with protesters who lay under their vehicles to block them and called them “Nazis.” They made 32 arrests, according to The Times of Israel.
