When the Jewish state was established in 1948, founder and first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion promised to allow some 400 rabbinical college students of military age to continue studying the Torah without interruption. They would not be drafted into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) like any other young Israeli, and they would not have the same normal obligations incumbent upon other citizens of the young state, which fought for its survival from the moment it was born.

At the time, Ben-Gurion had many other problems to deal with, including five Arab countries that attacked the Jewish state to destroy it. His historic promise wasn’t considered to be a genuine problem. No one imagined that within a generation or two, the number of people studying the Torah would double, triple, quadruple, and continue to soar at an exponential rate. Today, each class of young ultra-Orthodox Jews of draft age, numbers 15,000 rabbinical college students. Since military service in the IDF lasts three years (for men), the number of ultra-Orthodox Jews who should be serving in the IDF at any given moment is around 45,000. The reality is that the number of those actually serving is between 1,500 and 2,000, who are taking part in several fascinating tracks created especially for them in the Intelligence Corps and the Air Force.

Some 66 years after the founding of the state, the ultra-Orthodox have become a strategic threat to Israel, the country in which they live. Once a negligible population, numbering in the tens of thousands, they now make up about 1 million people. The Grade One class (6-year-olds) in the Israeli education system now consists of 50% ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arab Israelis, the two minorities that are about to become a majority. The population that serves, contributes and joins the workforce in Israel is losing its weight among the population. Once, secular Jews were a majority. Today, they are a minority.

Fortunately, the people in the knitted yarmulkes, affiliated with religious Zionism, serve and contribute disproportionately to their percentage of the population, but that doesn’t change the numbers or alleviate the concern. Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews rarely enlist to the army, resulting in a situation in which half of the country’s young people are not counted by the army in any given recruitment cycle. The IDF was once known as the “People’s Army.” Now it is “Half the People’s Army.” In another decade or two, it won’t even be that. Failing to serve was once a rarity. Today, it is a tangible and significant threat.