Daniel sent us this one, and it's a big one — tracing how religiously observant communities went from being a minority the state made a pragmatic deal with to the indispensable backbone of any governing coalition. The core tension is this: some of these groups explicitly reject Zionism, others fuse religious commitment with hardline nationalism, and the current coalition simply cannot survive without parties whose core constituencies don't serve in the military and contribute minimally to the economy. How did Israel get to this point? Has the ability to govern always depended on religious endorsement?
Right into it then. To understand how we got to Itamar Ben Gvir as Minister of National Security, you have to go back to the original bargain — a letter David Ben-Gurion wrote in nineteen forty-seven to Agudat Yisrael, the main ultra-Orthodox political body at the time.
The famous status quo letter.
June nineteenth, nineteen forty-seven, before the state even existed. Ben-Gurion was trying to secure Haredi support for the partition plan, and he made four core commitments: the Sabbath would be the official day of rest, kosher food in all state institutions, religious courts would handle personal status law — marriage, divorce, conversion — and the big one, yeshiva students would be exempt from military service.
How many students are we talking about in nineteen forty-seven?
Four hundred young men. That was the entire yeshiva population the exemption covered. It was a pragmatic gesture to a decimated community — the Holocaust had destroyed the great European yeshivas, and Ben-Gurion saw this as preserving a remnant of Torah scholarship. He wasn't building a permanent political arrangement. He was solving an immediate problem.
That four hundred has become what today?
By twenty twenty-five, the yeshiva population exempted from military service stood at roughly sixty-six thousand. That's not four hundred scholars in a few institutions — that's an entire parallel society. The number has grown by a factor of over one hundred and sixty. And here's the thing most people miss: the status quo letter was never codified in any Basic Law. It wasn't a constitutional document. It was a letter from a political leader to a political party, and it became the foundation of seventy-five years of Israeli governance almost by inertia.
The original deal was ad hoc, not principled — and it ballooned far beyond what anyone envisioned. But to answer the question about whether governance always depended on religious endorsement, we need to look at who actually ran the country in the early decades.
Mapai, Ben-Gurion's Labor Zionist party, dominated from nineteen forty-eight until nineteen seventy-seven without ever needing religious parties for a majority. They governed with secular coalitions. The National Religious Party — Mafdal — was often in those coalitions, but as a junior partner, not a kingmaker. Mafdal traded ideological influence on religious education and settlement policy for coalition loyalty. They were reliable, predictable, and they never held the balance of power alone.
They did extract concessions. The religious education system, the state religious schools, the chief rabbinate's monopoly on personal status — all of that was built during the Labor era. Mafdal wasn't powerful, but it was effective.
Right, and that's the pattern. Religious parties learned early that coalition participation pays. You don't need to win elections if you're the marginal seat that gets a prime minister to sixty-one. The nineteen seventy-seven election changed everything. Menachem Begin's Likud broke Labor's hegemony, and he built a coalition that included Mafdal and Agudat Yisrael. For the first time, religious parties weren't just window dressing for a secular government — they were essential to the math.
Begin himself was traditionally observant, which changed the dynamic. He wasn't a secular socialist making accommodations for the religious — he was one of them, culturally at least.
That's a key point. Begin's Likud fused Revisionist Zionism with traditional Jewish identity in a way that resonated with Mizrahi voters who had been marginalized by the Labor establishment. Which brings us to the nineteen nineties and the emergence of Shas.
Shas is the real turning point in this story. Explain what it was and why it mattered.
Shas was founded in nineteen eighty-four, but it exploded in the nineteen nineties under Aryeh Deri. It's an ethnic-religious party for Mizrahi Haredim — Jews from Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds who had been largely excluded from the Ashkenazi Haredi world of Agudat Yisrael. Shas combined rabbinic authority — specifically the spiritual leadership of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef — with social welfare populism. It built a political machine that delivered schools, welfare offices, and municipal services to working-class Mizrahi communities that felt abandoned by both the secular left and the Ashkenazi religious establishment.
It wasn't just a religious party. It was an ethnic protest movement wrapped in religious identity.
And that made it electorally explosive. In nineteen ninety-nine, Shas won seventeen seats — still its high-water mark. It was pulling voters who weren't strictly Haredi, people who identified as traditional, Masorti, who kept some observance but weren't fully Orthodox. Shas blurred the line between religious party and identity politics in a way that no Israeli party had done before.
This is also the period when religious parties first demonstrated they could bring down a government. The nineteen ninety "stinky trick" — tell that story.
March nineteen ninety. Yitzhak Shamir was prime minister of a national unity government with Labor. The US Secretary of State, James Baker, was pushing for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Shimon Peres, the Labor leader, thought he could pull down the government and form a narrow coalition to advance the peace process. He engineered a no-confidence vote. But Shas and Agudat Yisrael, who had been part of the coalition, abstained — and the government fell. Peres then failed to form his own government because the Haredi parties wouldn't join him. Shamir ended up back as prime minister with a narrow right-wing religious coalition. The whole episode was branded the stinky trick, and it demonstrated something fundamental: the religious parties had veto power. They could make or break governments, and they knew it.
By the nineties, the religious parties had graduated from junior partners to essential players. But the next rupture is what created the current far-right configuration, and that's the two thousand five disengagement from Gaza.
This is the hinge. Ariel Sharon, a Likud prime minister, the father of the settlement movement, unilaterally withdrew from Gaza and evacuated twenty-one settlements. For the National Religious community, this was an earthquake. They had spent decades building settlements in Gaza, encouraged by the state, told this was the vanguard of the Zionist project. Then a Likud prime minister — their political ally — dismantled them. The betrayal narrative was overwhelming.
The political response wasn't to move toward the center. It was to radicalize.
The National Religious camp split. The moderates stayed with what became Jewish Home, but a significant faction moved toward harder-line positions — more nationalist, more willing to challenge state authority, more open to ideas that had previously been beyond the pale. This is the soil in which Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit grew. The disengagement convinced a generation of National Religious activists that the old strategy — work within the system, trust the Likud leadership — was a failure. They needed their own political vehicles, and they needed leaders who wouldn't compromise.
Which brings us to Kahanism. Let's talk about Meir Kahane, because Ben Gvir and Smotrich are often described as his ideological heirs, but I think a lot of listeners don't know the full story.
Meir Kahane was an American-born rabbi who founded the Jewish Defense League in the United States in nineteen sixty-eight. He moved to Israel, formed the Kach party, and was elected to the Knesset in nineteen eighty-four on a platform that included expelling Arabs from Israel, annexing the territories, and establishing a halachic state. His rhetoric was explicitly racist and anti-democratic. In nineteen eighty-eight, Kach was banned from running in Israeli elections under a new law prohibiting parties that incite racism. In nineteen ninety-four, Kahane was assassinated in New York, and the US State Department designated Kach a terrorist organization.
The party is banned, the leader is dead, the movement is internationally designated as terrorist. End of story, right?
Not even close. Kahane's ideology survived through a network of activists and small organizations. One of them was a teenager named Itamar Ben Gvir, who was so openly Kahanist that the IDF refused to draft him. He had a picture of Baruch Goldstein — the man who massacred twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers in Hebron in nineteen ninety-four — hanging in his living room. Ben Gvir was a marginal figure for decades, a provocateur who showed up at demonstrations and represented far-right activists in court. Nobody in mainstream Israeli politics would touch him.
Now he's Minister of National Security. How did that normalization happen?
First, Netanyahu's political survival strategy. After the twenty nineteen to twenty twenty election deadlock — four elections in two years — Netanyahu couldn't form a government without expanding his coalition. The center and left wouldn't sit with him while he was under indictment for corruption. The Arab parties were politically toxic for a right-wing coalition. That left the religious and far-right parties as the only viable partners.
Even then, Ben Gvir's Otzma Yehudit was too toxic on its own. They needed a merger.
In twenty twenty-two, Netanyahu brokered a merger between Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionism party and Ben Gvir's Otzma Yehudit. Smotrich provided institutional legitimacy — he's a product of the National Religious establishment, a lawyer, a former minister. Ben Gvir provided the street energy and the hardcore base. Together they won fourteen seats, the third-largest bloc in the Knesset. And in the coalition negotiations, Ben Gvir demanded and received the newly expanded Ministry of National Security, with authority over the police.
A man who was considered too extreme for the IDF to draft now oversees Israel's police force. That's not just a political shift — that's a complete inversion of the old order.
Smotrich got the Finance Ministry plus authority over settlement planning in the West Bank. Think about what that means. The person controlling Israel's budget and the person controlling internal security are both from a faction that, at its ideological core, rejects liberal democracy and views the state's institutions as vehicles for a messianic project.
Let's unpack the distinction between Smotrich and Ben Gvir, because they're often lumped together but they come from different traditions. Smotrich is National Religious — hesder yeshiva, settlement movement, the old Mafdal infrastructure. Ben Gvir is Kahanist — the banned party, the terrorist designation, the street provocateur. How do those ideologies actually differ?
The National Religious tradition has always been Zionist. It sees the state as having religious significance, the beginning of redemption, but it works within state institutions. The hesder yeshivas, where students combine Torah study with military service, are a perfect expression of this — religious commitment and national service integrated. Smotrich is the radicalized version of this. He still operates within the system, but he wants to transform it from the inside. His control of the Finance Ministry and settlement planning is the mechanism.
Ben Gvir's lineage is different. Kahane didn't see the state as holy — he saw it as a vehicle for Jewish power, and he was willing to destroy it to achieve his goals. The Kahanist tradition is more nihilistic about existing institutions. Ben Gvir has moderated his rhetoric to be electable, but the underlying worldview is the same: Arab citizens are a demographic threat, the courts are an obstacle, and state power should be used aggressively against internal enemies. His position as police minister isn't just a cabinet post — it's an opportunity to reshape law enforcement according to that worldview.
The Temple Mount visit in twenty twenty-three was the symbolic statement. As National Security Minister, he went up to the site, which previous Israeli governments had carefully managed to avoid escalation. The message was: the old rules don't apply, and I have the power to break them.
Right, and that's the fusion that makes this moment different. The older Haredi parties — Shas and United Torah Judaism — at least accept the state's existence as a practical matter. They want resources for their communities. They want the draft exemption preserved. They'll negotiate. Ben Gvir and Smotrich want to fundamentally reshape what the state is.
Which brings us to the structural dependency. Walk me through the math.
In the twenty twenty-two Knesset, the religious parties held thirty-two of one hundred twenty seats. That's Shas with eleven, United Torah Judaism with seven, Religious Zionism with fourteen, of which Otzma Yehudit held six. Netanyahu's coalition had sixty-four seats total. Without those thirty-two religious party seats, the coalition collapses to thirty-two — not even close to a majority.
Could a secular coalition be formed?
In theory, yes. The opposition parties — Yesh Atid, National Unity, Yisrael Beiteinu, Labor, and the Arab parties — could theoretically reach sixty-one. But the Arab parties, primarily Ra'am and Hadash-Ta'al, are politically toxic for right-wing and even centrist Jewish voters. Yisrael Beiteinu's Avigdor Lieberman has made opposition to Haredi political power his entire brand, but he also refuses to sit with Arab parties. The math doesn't work without someone breaking a long-standing red line.
The structural reality is: any right-wing or center-right coalition needs religious parties. A center-left coalition would need Arab parties, which is politically radioactive for Jewish voters. The system is trapped.
It's getting more trapped over time because of demographics. The Haredi population is growing at about four percent annually, compared to roughly one and a half percent for the general Jewish population. The Israel Democracy Institute projects that Haredim will be sixteen percent of the population by twenty thirty and twenty-three percent by twenty forty. Those voters will translate into more Knesset seats for Haredi parties.
Those voters are concentrated in communities that are economically separate from the rest of the country. Let's talk about the economic dimension, because it's not just about political power — it's about who pays for what.
The numbers are stark. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, Haredi labor force participation is about fifty-two percent, compared to seventy-eight percent nationally. That means nearly half of Haredi working-age men are not employed — they're studying in yeshiva full-time, supported by state stipends and often by wives who do work. Forty percent of Haredi families live below the poverty line. Yet the Haredi parties consistently demand increased yeshiva funding, larger child allowances, and subsidized housing.
The twenty twenty-four budget made this explicit. Four point five billion shekels in coalition funds directed to Haredi educational institutions and settlement outposts. That's not hidden — it's line items in the budget.
At the same time, defense spending went up six percent. So you have a coalition that is simultaneously increasing military expenditure and subsidizing a population that doesn't serve in the military. The fiscal contradiction is becoming impossible to ignore.
Which brings us to the draft issue, and this is where the May twenty twenty-six crisis comes in. Explain what's happening right now with the Haredi draft law.
The High Court of Justice has repeatedly ruled that the blanket exemption for yeshiva students violates the principle of equality and lacks a legal basis. The exemption was never properly legislated — it was extended through temporary provisions and administrative orders. In twenty twenty-four, the court gave the government a deadline to pass a new law. The coalition couldn't agree on one. The Haredi parties demanded the exemption be preserved essentially unchanged. The more nationalist factions, including elements of Likud, wanted at least some Haredi recruitment. The deadline passed, and technically the exemption expired.
Practically, nothing changed because the army isn't going to forcibly conscript sixty-six thousand yeshiva students.
The government has been issuing deferments while negotiating, and the High Court is losing patience. In May twenty twenty-six, this is reaching a breaking point. If the court strikes down the exemption and the government can't pass a replacement, the coalition could collapse. But if the government passes a law that preserves the exemption, it faces massive public backlash — polls consistently show that seventy percent or more of Jewish Israelis support some form of Haredi conscription.
The coalition is caught between its Haredi partners, who will leave if the exemption is eliminated, and public opinion, which will punish them if it isn't. That's the definition of a structural crisis.
The Haredi parties know their power. United Torah Judaism and Shas have made clear that the draft law is a red line. Without them, Netanyahu loses the Knesset. Early elections become inevitable. And in those elections, as we discussed, the Haredi share of seats could actually grow.
Let's address a misconception here, because I think a lot of people outside Israel assume all religious Jews are Zionists. That's not the case at all.
It's one of the most important and least understood features of Israeli politics. Significant Haredi communities explicitly reject Zionism as a heretical movement. The Satmar Hasidic sect, based in New York but with a large presence in Jerusalem, is the most prominent example. Their theology holds that the Jewish people were exiled by God as punishment for sin, and only the Messiah can end that exile. Any human attempt to establish Jewish sovereignty before the messianic era is rebellion against divine will.
Yet Satmar participates in Israeli municipal politics. They vote in Jerusalem elections. They take state funding for their institutions.
That's the paradox. The Edah HaChareidis, the most extreme anti-Zionist Haredi umbrella organization, doesn't vote in Knesset elections and doesn't take state money. But Satmar and other groups make pragmatic calculations. They'll take resources from a state whose legitimacy they deny. The theological opposition to Zionism doesn't prevent political engagement when it serves community interests.
Which is the "extract resources without legitimating the system" approach. And it works because the system is designed to accommodate it.
Another misconception worth addressing: people talk about "the religious parties" as a unified bloc, but they're deeply divided. Shas and United Torah Judaism often disagree on economic policy — Shas, with its working-class Mizrahi base, is more willing to support welfare spending and labor protections than UTJ, which represents a more insular Ashkenazi community. Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit are far more nationalist and militaristic than the Haredi parties, who are primarily concerned with community autonomy. These groups are in coalition together, but their interests don't naturally align.
The only thing that unites them is the leverage that coalition math gives them. When they're all needed to reach sixty-one, they all get what they want.
That leverage is growing. If we look at the demographic projections, by the twenty thirty Knesset elections, religious parties could hold thirty-five to forty seats. At that point, the question isn't whether religious endorsement is required to govern — it's whether any government can be formed without granting religious parties effective control over the state's character.
Let's step back and pull this together. We've traced the arc from Ben-Gurion's nineteen forty-seven letter — four hundred yeshiva students, a pragmatic gesture to a shattered community — to a twenty twenty-six coalition where thirty-two seats depend on parties whose core constituents don't serve in the military and contribute at half the national rate to the economy. The religious-secular divide isn't a culture war. It's a structural feature of the political system.
Baked in by the original compromise and reinforced by every subsequent coalition. Every time a prime minister needed religious parties to reach sixty-one, the bargain got more expensive. The nineteen seventy-seven election made them kingmakers. The nineteen nineties gave us Shas and the demonstrated power to bring down governments. The two thousand five disengagement radicalized the National Religious camp. And the twenty nineteen to twenty twenty election deadlock created the conditions for Kahanism's normalization.
The far-right religious parties — Ben Gvir and Smotrich — represent something qualitatively new. The older Haredi parties at least accepted the state's existence as a practical reality. They wanted to be left alone. Ben Gvir and Smotrich want to transform the state. It's Kahanist ideology plus National Religious institutional power plus coalition leverage.
They're in the cabinet. Not protesting outside. Running the police and the treasury.
The military service and economic dependency issues are not solvable within the current coalition structure because the parties that benefit from the status quo have veto power over any change. You cannot pass a draft law that the Haredi parties oppose if you need their votes to stay in government. You cannot reduce yeshiva funding if the coalition agreement guarantees it. The system is designed to perpetuate itself.
The demographic trajectory makes it existential. When the Haredi population reaches twenty-three percent by twenty forty, the economic model breaks. You can't have a quarter of the population outside the workforce and outside military service without either a fiscal crisis or a social explosion. The question is whether the system can reform itself before that point.
For listeners trying to understand where this is heading, what should they watch?
First, the Haredi draft bill outcome this summer — twenty twenty-six. If the coalition collapses over it, early elections reset the board. If they pass a bill that effectively preserves the exemption, the status quo holds but public resentment builds. Second, whether Smotrich's settlement budget survives coalition negotiations. The four point five billion shekel question is whether the fiscal pressure forces cuts, and if so, who blinks first. Third, the demographic projections for the twenty thirty Knesset elections. If religious parties hit thirty-five to forty seats, the coalition math becomes even more constraining than it is today.
Is Israel approaching a constitutional moment? A point where the religious-secular compromise has to be renegotiated from scratch?
I think it is, but I'm not sure the political system can handle it. The original status quo was built on a shared understanding that the state needed religious buy-in to establish legitimacy, and the religious community needed state resources to rebuild after the Holocaust. That understanding is gone. What replaced it is raw political calculation — each side extracting what it can from the other, with no shared vision of what the state should be.
The Ben-Gurion bargain assumed a small, contained Haredi community that could be accommodated within a secular state. Nobody in nineteen forty-seven imagined a Haredi population of over a million people, a National Religious movement that controls settlement policy, or a Kahanist police minister. The bargain was designed for a different country.
That's the core question: is the current form of religious political power compatible with a functioning state? Not whether religious endorsement is required to govern — it clearly is, and has been for decades. But whether the specific form that endorsement now takes — with draft exemptions for tens of thousands, economic dependency, and far-right ministers who reject liberal democracy — is sustainable.
If the twenty twenty-six coalition crisis over the draft bill forces early elections, the religious parties' share of seats could grow. The crisis doesn't resolve the structural problem — it deepens it. The people who benefit from the current arrangement keep getting more votes.
That's the trap. The democratic process reinforces the structural dependency. The more the Haredi population grows, the more political power it has. The more political power it has, the more resources it can extract. The more resources it extracts, the more the community can sustain its separate institutions and high birth rates. It's a feedback loop.
The answer to the prompt's question — has the ability to govern always depended on religious endorsement — is no, not always. For the first three decades, Labor governed without needing religious parties for a majority. But since nineteen seventy-seven, the answer is increasingly yes, and since twenty nineteen, it's an emphatic yes. The question now is whether that dependency has mutated into something the state's founders would have recognized at all.
Ben-Gurion was a secular socialist who saw religion as a private matter that the state should accommodate for the sake of national unity. The idea that religious parties would one day control the police, the treasury, and settlement policy would have been incomprehensible to him. The current coalition's open hostility to the courts, to liberal norms, to the very idea of a secular public sphere — Ben-Gurion would have seen that as a threat to the state he built, not an expression of it.
Yet it's the logical outcome of the bargain he made. The status quo letter wasn't just an accommodation — it was an acknowledgment that the state needed religious legitimacy. Once you concede that, the only question is how much the religious establishment can extract in exchange for providing it. The answer, seventy-five years later, is: almost everything.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the nineteen sixties, scientists in Greenland discovered that horseshoe crab blood was so sensitive to bacterial contamination that it could detect endotoxins at concentrations of one part per trillion — a measurement tool so precise that it replaced the previous standard, which involved injecting rabbits and waiting to see if they developed a fever.
...right.
That's where we'll leave it. The religious-secular bargain in Israel isn't a culture war — it's the central structural feature of the political system, and it's approaching a point where the original terms no longer fit the reality. Whether the system can renegotiate those terms, or whether it breaks trying, is the open question of the next decade.
For listeners who want to dig deeper into the legal framework that religious parties operate within, we explored Israel's unwritten constitution and how the absence of formal constitutional constraints allows the status quo to persist in an earlier episode. Worth revisiting if this topic grabbed you.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Our producer is Hilbert Flumingtop. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts dot com. If you got something out of this one, leave us a review wherever you listen — it genuinely helps other people find the show. We'll be back soon.
