Israel Is Committing Antisemitism Against Its Own Jews

As the Haredi draft revolt escalates into mass arrests and death, the Zionist state is exposing what it has always been.

July 4, 2026 | Istanbul Airport | Gaza | Tal Al-Rabee

For years, I have listened to comrades in the liberation movement debate the tactics needed to dismantle fascism and colonialism. I respect the energy they bring, and these conversations are vital. But after three years of escalating genocide against my people, after witnessing the mass slaughter of my community and continuously mourning family and friends, something shifted in how I listen.

I no longer need to convince anyone that Israel will fall. I know it will, without a doubt, not just because our resistance is real and necessary, but because of what Israel does to the world. Every time the occupation murders children in agonizing ways, rapes Palestinian hostages on camera, kidnaps and assaults Europeans in international waters, or arrests Haredi settlers for refusing to enlist in the occupation’s army and then brags about it, every contradiction the Zionist state exposes is simply the symptom of a genocidal system collapsing under its own weight.

At the heart of this collapse is the lie that holds up compulsory military service in the occupation, the lie that force can be disguised as belonging and obedience sold as unity. The Zionist state calls it duty and frames serving in the occupation forces as the future of the Jewish nation, as if that future could be owned by a uniform when in reality it is built on shattered homes, stolen land, and the relentless erasure of Palestine’s Indigenous people.

I have seen the footage and heard the witness accounts. Israeli occupation forces grab young ultra-Orthodox men by their payos and drag them from beneath buses while mounted officers charge into crowds with their faces hidden behind black masks. Clouds of skunk spray burn skin and close throats until every breath becomes a struggle. The screams cutting through the air are the sound of the Israeli state enforcing “obedience” on its own Jewish settlers.

What stands out is not that this happens because it happens to Palestinians daily, but that it is happening to Jews in the name of Jewish safety. The colonial state claims to be a refuge born from centuries of persecution and the Holocaust. Yet the moment a Haredi settler refuses to enlist, not out of solidarity with Palestinians but to protect his insular religious world, the same machinery used in Palestinian neighborhoods is turned against him. His Judaism is only valuable if it serves the occupation. His body only matters if he is willing to kill Palestinians.

This reality is the beginning of the state’s undoing. It did not begin yesterday. It goes back to 1948 when Israel was founded on the Nakba. David Ben Gurion, chief architect of that ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, exempted four hundred yeshiva students under Torato Umanuto, the doctrine that full-time Torah study replaces military service. This was never about respecting faith but was a political calculation. Ben Gurion needed legitimacy, and post Holocaust religious scholars gave the colonial project a veneer of continuity. Over decades, that exemption grew into a privilege shielding hundreds of thousands of Haredi Jews, keeping Jewish settlers divided and making refusal seem impossible until it no longer was.

In June 2024, the Occupation’s Supreme Court ended the exemption and arrest warrants were issued for those who dare to defy the draft. When young Haredi settlers resisted, driven by theological objection rather than liberation or human rights, the state deployed water cannons, skunk spray, and batons. By mid 2026, tens of thousands of Haredi Jews blocked roads in protest. The violence eventually turned deadly when a fourteen-year-old boy was run over by a bus during a draft protest in Jerusalem, proving that the state’s machinery of control is just as lethal to its own settlers as it is to Palestinians. The response was always the same with more violence and more arrests, but coercion cannot manufacture consent. It cannot force a man to kill for a state that treats him as disposable the moment he says no.

The Haredim are not innocent in this. Their refusal is rooted in the same supremacist logic that built the Zionist state, just expressed through religious arrogance instead of military violence. Both embody Jewish supremacy, though in different forms. The Haredim preach theological superiority and separate themselves from the world while benefiting from the colonial project. The Zionist state turns Jewish identity into a weapon, actively persecuting, beating, and imprisoning its own Jews. The Haredim may withdraw, but Israel industrializes antisemitism. This is what Israeli society looks like when Jewish supremacy is normalized at every level.

This is why some people conflate Judaism with Zionism. Israel has forged this equation itself through propaganda and its claim to speak for all Jews, yet it persecutes them when their interests diverge from the state's agenda. By targeting religious Jews, the state has become the very thing it claims to shield them from.

Colonialism survives by normalizing violence and fracturing populations so some feel secure while others bleed. For more than seventy-eight years, the Haredi exemption managed this fracture. Now the refusal is shattering it as young ultra-Orthodox settlers learn what Palestinians have always known, that when you resist the occupation, the savagery of colonialism appears.

I protect my energy from endless strategic debates not because I doubt Israel’s dismantling but because I know it is dismantling itself. Every exposed contradiction and every arrested Haredi settler echoes the collapse of a system built on lies and sustained by violence. It was never a refuge and never about safety, but always about control, land, and the erasure of Palestinians.

I do not know this from theory but from a lifetime of watching a state commit genocide against my people while claiming to protect Jews. I know it because a system this fundamentally fractured cannot hold. The only question left is how much pain it will inflict before it finally falls.