Ultra-Orthodox Israelis Rally Against Draft

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00:00Tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Israelis have held a mass rally in Jerusalem to protest against

00:06attempts to end their exemption from military service. Israel's Supreme Court ordered the

00:11conscription of the Haridim back in mid-2024 at the height of the war against Hamas,

00:16arguing it's a matter of equal protection and national security. Let's go to Jerusalem now

00:21and speak to Bloomberg's Dan Williams. Dan, beyond obviously the images that we were just

00:27showing now of those demonstrations, how much of a threat does this actually constitute to

00:32Netanyahu's government? I think the point of this rally was to remind Netanyahu that the Haridim

00:38are a formidable force demographically and in the democracy. They called this the million-man

00:45march. That was slightly overblown. We're talking about many tens of thousands, but certainly

00:49sufficient to shut down much of Jerusalem for the day, to cause some friction between protesters

00:55and police, protesters and residents, protesters and members of the media. Now, they didn't really

01:00come with articulated demands. The point was to show how many they are and how many people they

01:06could muster behind the idea that they should continue to be exempted from conscription. That

01:11is an arrangement dating back decades when they were a far smaller section of Israeli society.

01:17Now the Haridim make up some 13 to 15 percent, given that they generally tend to have large

01:22families. That's put a strain on the economy. It's also put a strain on the military, certainly

01:27during this war in Gaza when the IDF, the Israeli military, has suffered casualties on a level

01:32not seen in decades. So while they have numbers which give them a lot of clout and will make

01:38the government, this government certainly, because it's a right-wing government that has

01:41leaned on their sport traditionally, think twice about any serious review of those exemptions

01:45from the draft. Their numbers are also a source of rancor elsewhere in Israeli society among those

01:51sectors who do have to bear up, who do have to serve, who are not awarded those exemptions.

01:57So this is a running story. It's a story essentially that straddles the Gaza war, currently in a ceasefire,

02:03not officially over yet. Certainly Israel expects further conflict in the future and domestic

02:08politics. This is a very sensitive issue and it came to something of a head yesterday with

02:13this rally in Jerusalem.