Furious protesters are denouncing Israeli security forces as “Nazis” – but this is not a scene from a pro-Palestinian rally on the streets of London or Paris. This clash is in the heart of Israel, in which hundreds of ultra-Orthodox men in white shirts, black fedoras and long black frock coats face off against the military police.<\/p>\n
The flashpoint is a building in the city of Modi’in, midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where a young ultra-Orthodox Jewish (or Haredi) man lives. The police have come to arrest him after he failed to report for military service.<\/p>\n
The clash in early October, seen by the BBC in a video, is one of many in recent months in which one of the deepest schisms in Israeli society has become ever more exposed.<\/p>\n
This widening fault line is playing out against the backdrop of the wars Israel is currently fighting, including the unresolved conflict against Hamas in Gaza – as well as increasing violence by extremist settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.<\/p>\n
Once a tiny minority, the ultra-Orthodox remain a group apart even as their numbers expand year by year. Currently, they are estimated to make up about 14% of the population, and the birth rate within the community remains far higher than among other Israelis. If their numbers continue to grow at a similar rate, they could make up one-third of the Jewish Israeli population by 2050.<\/p>\n
As the ultra-Orthodox community becomes bigger, so has the debate around the expense of supporting them with stipends so they can devote themselves to full-time religious study. Subsidies to the group are estimated to cost the government 35bn shekels (\u00a38.4bn) per year and, until recently, they were exempted from military service.<\/p>\n
Now they’re no longer an insignificant minority, they’re facing pressure to engage more with wider Israeli society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Furious protesters are denouncing Israeli security forces as “Nazis” – but this is not a scene from a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":656232,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":["post-656231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=656231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/656232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=656231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=656231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}