The Price of Showing Up
Also, is Likud headed for disaster? And, who really controls Israel?
Families of reservists and activists in favor of recruiting ultra-Orthodox, demonstrate outside PM's office in Jerusalem June 12, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/FLASH90)
It’s Sunday, August 16, and “I met a young conscript during reserve duty who told me he could not see any future,” said Ori Oberman, a reservist and one of the authors of a new Taub Center study examining the expected impact of prolonged service on reservists and their families. “The young soldier knows that once he is discharged, he will be called up for reserve duty again and again. He cannot see his future.”
It’s been over 1,000 days since October 7, and for many, the time has been marked by days back and forth from reserve duty, some serving as many as 400 days—more than a year. The average reservist, who served 233 days, is expected to lose nearly 5 percent of their salary in the long term, the report reveals. Among reservists who are fathers and served between 290 and 320 days—a population the researchers said numbers more than 100,000 people—the expected salary loss is about 6 percent. Under more severe estimates, the damage to wages could reach about 20 percent. These are prime working years, drawn from the most productive stretch of a working life.
Among salaried spouses, 30 percent reported a hit to their pay and 3 percent were simply fired. Among the self-employed, 73 percent said their business suffered. And non-employment among reservists’ spouses jumped 40 percent between the autumn of 2023 and the spring of 2025—while the comparable figure for women whose partners stayed home didn’t move at all.
Roughly 70,000 students served in 2024/25. Among Jews and others, enrollment dropped below its 2018/19 baseline for the first time—and it fell hardest on women aged 22 to 24 and men aged 25 to 29, the very ages that set the academic and professional track for life.
As one would expect from intense fighting and long stretches of absence, the damage is more than professional. Kids whose parent was called up showed sharper emotional and behavioral regression than kids whose parent wasn’t. A separate study found that reservists’ spouses suffer particularly high levels of anxiety, depression, and burnout—higher than any other group—alongside impaired functioning at work and at home.
Underneath it all sits Israel’s version of the “affordability” issue—a pressure most families are feeling that politicians believe will be the hinge issue of the election; fitting for a country in which cost of living has always been secondary to security in voting priorities. Every party, with the notable exception of the ultra-Orthodox, has signaled toward easing the burden: financial compensation, housing benefits, promises of Haredi service. The war on all fronts will likely not be changed by the election, but the conditions of service likely will be—regardless of who wins.
“In a combat soldier’s training, there is something called the ‘fog of the route,’” Master Sgt. (res.) Roshel Moshayev, who has completed about 350 days of reserve duty, told Ynet. “They teach you that uncertainty is a constant part of your life. As reservists, our entire lives have become shrouded in fog: our studies, careers, jobs and families.”
After many of America's recent wars, the question that greeted returning soldiers was how to relate to those who had sacrificed for a conflict that was deemed unnecessary or was simply unpopular. Israel’s question is simpler and harder: how to keep asking for sacrifice without breaking the people who answer.
Graffiti of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stating “Who believes him is afraid,” which is a play on words from the well-known Israeli song “Who believes (G-d) is not afraid.” October 21, 2012. (Nati Shohat/Flash90)
At the top of Likud, a debate is underway these days: Does this election look more like the loss of 1992 or the rout of 1999?
As in 1992—when Shamir lost to Rabin and the Oslo Accords were born—this race, too, is marked by the opposition outflanking the right-wing government from the right, against a security backdrop, with a reserve-general chief of staff heading the camp. Back then, it was the wave of stabbings and the murder of the teenager Helena Rapp, and the public’s belief that only Rabin would know how to deal with Gaza (or at least that Shamir couldn’t). Labor blurred its real intentions toward the Palestinians and wrapped them in tough, hawkish rhetoric. Today, too, it’s Gaza. Jared Kushner and his people are stunned to learn that Golan, Bennett, Eisenkot, and Lieberman have all lined up against the Board of Peace plan.
The second ingredient was the “Corrupt—we’ve had enough of you” campaign and a deep disgust set against the backdrop of prolonged rule. The third was wasted votes on a scale that would have had the Environmental Protection Ministry issuing an emergency pollution alert. Back then it was Tehiya; now it’s a spectacular collection of party splinters, from Feiglin through Zilikha to Winter—and the danger to Religious Zionism hasn’t passed yet either.
On the other side, as in 1999, there’s a coalescing of the elites around what they see as a battle over the country’s future against the danger embodied by Netanyahu and his religious-Haredi coalition. Back then it was a media campaign unprecedented in scope and force, enormous illegal money from abroad, and the worlds of culture, law, and academia mobilizing to change the government. Sound familiar? Maybe—because of October 7, the [judicial] reform, and the anger at the Haredim. And maybe all of the answers are correct.
Likud has two pollsters (the third, Rafi Smith, was let go after saying in a recent interview that the right-wing bloc wouldn’t clear 50 seats). One forecasts grim results for Netanyahu, like the polls on Channels 11, 12, and 13. The other predicts a big win, or close to it. Netanyahu’s American polling adviser, John McLaughlin, belongs to the more optimistic camp. The trouble is that this is also what he forecast for Viktor Orbán last April, and we know how that ended.
What does the optimism rest on? On the premise that this is actually 1981: a huge victory snatched from the jaws of defeat, against the backdrop of a surprise security triumph and an intra-Israeli tribal war. Back then it was the Iraqi reactor; now it’s the Iranian one. “We were hours away from a massive strike that would have destroyed the remnants of the regime,” said a senior government figure—also a senior Likud figure—about the offensive Trump halted at the last minute last week. Maybe in the end it will look similar. For now, at least, the turn hasn’t come. In 1981, the defense minister behind the reactor strike, Menachem Begin, didn’t need a reserved slot.
Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon attends a Constitution, Law and Justice Committee meeting at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, March 23, 2026. (Oren Ben Hakoon/Flash90)
Why do the elections even matter if, in the end, one Gil Limon, the deputy attorney general, sits down and cancels the whole thing? The Udi Ronen affair somehow slipped by without much notice, but it shows where the decisions in this country are actually made.
After endless deliberations, the Knesset passed the law in November 2024 to deport the family members of terrorists, conditional on proof that they supported acts of terror. Of 130 cases the police flagged, some 55 requests piled up at the Interior Ministry. One was a request by Deputy Commander Udi Ronen of the incitement unit to deport two daughters of a terrorist from the Akari family—the terrorist who murdered a Border Police officer and a teenager. On top of that, the daughters celebrated on the morning of October 7.
But the case was jammed by the justice system in three ways. Limon instructed the Interior Ministry clerks to ignore every request (why? Just because). In the Supreme Court, Justice Kasher issued an order barring the police from proactively monitoring online activity. Stein—a sensitive Jew—objected, arguing that this amounted to a leftist hunt, and that the phrase “incitement unit” carries uncomfortable connotations. Attorney David Peter shot back: “And the name ‘morality squad’—that one doesn’t bother you?” Stein fell silent, embarrassed—but the order went out. In parallel, and for good measure, Ronen was frozen by the police commissioner at the attorney general’s demand, and effectively neutralized—this after the same operation had been backed all the way up by Commissioner Danny Levi and Minister Ben Gvir.
The upshot is that families like the Akaris are still here. By law they should have been deported long ago; per Baharav-Miara and Limon, they’ll stay on as our neighbors. In short, it turns out that shutting your eyes to a law isn’t enough—you also have to blind the police. Raja Haddad, an Israeli citizen who in 1997 murdered the yeshiva student Gabriel Hirschberg. Haddad walked out of prison, and has been reveling online ever since. He posts photos of himself grinning in the courtroom, boasting of murdering a Jew and glorifying terrorists. The incitement unit wanted to arrest him—but was blocked. Searching is forbidden.
This week, Supreme Court President Amit chided the Knesset for being too weak against the government. Somehow he missed the targeted thwarting of a law, carried out under the authority and jurisdiction of the very institution he heads. A state in which a biased official can paralyze legislation, and in which a single judge can issue an order freezing other laws, is not truly a democratic state. If the decision has been made to trample the law, at least let them not hide behind the pious facade of guarding the sovereignty of the people and the language of the legislator.
Due to August vacations, we will be taking a break tomorrow. We will be back on Tuesday.
English Editor: Ari Tatarka
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The most valuable aid the US can send to Israel now is a copy of the US Constitution.
https://newrepublic.com/article/60919/enlightened-despot
Israel remains a Judicial dictatorship because the government isnt willing to ignore them.