Inside the reconstructed sports complex at the at the Israel Defense Forces’ Re’im Base during its reopening ceremony on Feb. 24, 2026. Photo: FIDF

There is an argument I have been having with myself since October 7, 2023.

It goes like this: the Haredi community should serve in the IDF. The burden of defending this land cannot fall on some of us and not others. When a soldier’s name or obituary comes across my phone — and they come too often, and I read every one — I think about who is not standing next to them. I think about it with grief, and sometimes with anger, and I will not pretend otherwise.

And then I think: what do I do with that anger?

I live in a Haredi neighborhood in Beit Shemesh. I shop in Haredi stores, nod to Haredi neighbors, and watch Haredi children play in the street outside my window.

After one of the harder weeks — a week when the names of the dead came fast — I walked into a local shop and stood at the counter and looked at the Haredi man across from me. He was not my enemy. He was not even, in any meaningful sense, my opponent. He was a Jew, trying to live as he understood a Jew should live, in the land we share.

I bought what I needed and I went home, and I sat with the discomfort of holding two things at once.

This is what I have come to believe: the policy is wrong. The exemption is wrong. In a country where 18-year old boys leave their mothers and go to Gaza, where they come back changed or don’t come back at all, a blanket exemption for any community is a wound in the national fabric that we cannot keep ignoring. I believe this. I will keep saying it.

And I also believe this: anger at a policy is not the same as contempt for a people. The Haredi community is not a monolith. There are Haredim who serve, quietly and without fanfare. There are Haredi families giving tzedakah, saying Tehillim, feeling the losses of this war in ways that don’t always make the news. There are Haredi mothers who are also afraid.

What worries me is what I see happening in Israeli discourse: the justified frustration over draft exemptions bleeding into something uglier. Contempt. Mockery. A sense that the Haredim are not quite full members of this nation and perhaps never were. I understand where that feeling comes from. I do not think it leads anywhere good.

The Jewish people have spent 2,000 years being told we are not quite full members of whatever society we happened to be living in. We know what that rhetoric does. We know how it ends. I am not willing to direct it inward, at our own, even when I am furious at the choices their leaders have made.

My son is serving. When I think about him, I do not think about the Haredim. I think about him, about his unit, about the specific and irreplaceable weight of his life. My anger, when it comes, is not only about the Haredim. It is about the unbearable arithmetic of war, and the fact that some families feel and carry more of it than others, and the desperate wish that it were otherwise.

We can demand change. We must demand change. The exemption should end, through law, through negotiation, through whatever democratic means this fractious and magnificent country can use. We can hold that position firmly, without apology.

And we can still walk into the store. And nod. And remember that the man across the counter is also ours, and we are his, and that whatever comes next, we are going to have to figure it out together.

That is the only version of this I know how to live.

Gila Isaacson is Managing Editor of JFeed.