Both the Jerusalem Post and the Haaretz yesterday reported on proceedings before Israel's High Court of Justice in the ongoing suit challenging Israel's 3-year old Tal Law. The Law (background article) provides for postponement of military service for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students. Its enactment was impelled by a 1998 High Court decision that struck down a long-standing arrangement exempting yeshiva students from the draft.
The Tal Law was supposed to encourage Orthodox students to enlist by giving them the option to take a "decision year", during which they can leave their yeshiva and decide whether to enter the IDF for a short period of time, followed by reserve duty; enlist in alternative national service; or return to their studies. For the past three years, the Court has been considering a petition filed by the Movement for the Quality of Government in Israel seeking to declare the law unconstitutional. The group would like to see Orthodox students subject to the draft in the same manner that all others are. The government says that more time is needed to see if the law achieves its goal.
Everyone concedes that the decision year option, so far, has been a failure. Yeshivas do not publicize it, students do not know about it, and an alternative civil national service program has still not been created. In 3 years, only 31 students have been inducted into the military. Another 178 are in the process of being drafted and 48 are waiting to be assigned to the alternative civil national service. They were all part of the 1,115 students who took advantage of the decision year. Currently 41,000 yeshiva students remain exempt from service, a 35% increase since 1998.
