ZSK:
1. The ‘Bagatz’ is THE wedge preventing any cooperation in Israeli society in general, and plays incessant divide-and-conquer to achieve their own goals.
2. My focus was on ‘conscientious’, as in ‘due to matters of conscience’. The fact that those ‘matters of conscience’ are of the type ‘that to the non-Charedi majority boils down to cultural preservation’ doesn’t change anything. The ‘non-Chareidi majority’ doesn’t decide matters of Halacha or Hashkafa for us.
3A. You said – I don’t disagree with this and I’ve said so on more than one occasion on this forum. However, I do not consider such a good enough reason for Charedi and RZ men to not serve. – Well, גדולי ישראל do not agree with you. I don’t know what planet you live on if you think the Gerrer Rebbe wants to (or needs to…) bring down a government just to get his grandson out of the draft.
3B. “the Charedi leadership should be making real attempts to work with the IDF to make service possible” – Something that cannot take place under ‘Bagatz’ progressive dictatorship. Both of us know that, and you have also said so yourself.
4. Here you almost explicitly agree with what I said in 3B.
5. That is probably what will eventually happen once the Bagatz is out of the way, and real change to the IDF becomes possible. It doesn’t look like that is happening anytime soon.
6. I don’t have the time or the stomach to write in detail about politics. Suffice it to say that the usual דעת בעלי בתים deflections of blaming everything גדולי ישראל say that they don’t like on power politics won’t cut it here. It is clear that there is a broad and deep consensus here between a wide range of Rabbonim, Rebbes, and Roshei Yeshiva, which goes way beyond ‘politics’.
7-8. That is true, but only because those were the majority of the ‘Chareidim’ filling the quotas until now… The anti-Chareidi camp is starting to understand that, and they want real Chareidi blood, not the fake variety.
9. IMHO, the IDF isn’t so stupid, and they look the other way rather than drafting kids they don’t want. They play this same game לכתחילה with boys from strongly anti-Zionist communities and ‘Hilltop Youth’, among others. If they really wanted them, they wouldn’t ‘buy’ the psychiatrist stories.