Englishman, or Joe, or whoever you are – you wrote:
“They ARE contributing. Learning is the greatest contribution. Even if they don’t recognize that fact. AND they DID agree to the terms of Chareidi exemption from service. Ben-Gurion agreed to it with the Chazon Ish. And it remains current law.”
I said in a material way. You are answering something different. Nation-states must operate on objective criteria, such as taxes, votes, GDP, revenues, expenses, budgets, otherwise you get failed states like Afghanistan and Congo. If Israel turned into a failed state with a ruined economy because the government was measuring spiritual credit in figuring out its budget, there would be no more subsidies available for yeshivaleit, draft or no draft.
As far as the law is concerned, over 60 years, governments change, laws change, and facts on the ground change. Do you truly have so little understanding of demographic, economic, and political reality? I think, actually, you understand just fine, but are just obfuscating.
When I was a teenager, my US born friends in yeshiva had to register for the draft. But the law changed. The Americans have a constitution too, and even they have amended that several times. Less than 30 years before the agreement between Ben Gurion and the Chazon Ish, women where I live did not have the vote. That law changed too. When the law you speak of was enacted, there were a couple of thousand learners involved, and now the number is in the high tens of thousands, or more. And when the Supreme court strikes down a law, or the legislature enacts a replacement, It is the law no longer.
“Don’t talk that into yourself. They are NOT offering those options as national service. They will not offer Bikur Cholim as an alternative to joining the military.”
I beg to differ. I have had this conversation with MKs and with Israeli political leaders and diplomats personally, and with many secular Israelis who are prepared to tell their elected representatives to pursue these options, and I am also aware of the options for national service currently being used by National Religious young women instead of army, and such work in hospitals, schools, with the aged, with new immigrants, is precisely what they are doing right now. And what a wonderful opportunity for kiruv, too! so sad you ignore it.
“Many of those in elective power and many in the media would like nothing more than change our hashkofos. Perhaps they wont outright say as much, but that is part of their motivation.”
Forgive me if I rely on reality – they don’t care enough about your hashkofa to want to change it, except where it interferes with their freedoms or demonstrates what they perceive as inequality. You are spouting an antiquated world view, as if you hadn’t actually talked to a chiloni Israeli in the last 70 years. In Israel, secular “ideology” is all but dead. Look at Meretz, and how it has done in elections. Social protests as big as they are are about issues, like housing and education, rather than about socialist indoctrination.
“And we wouldn’t have had a holocaust oh HKBH didn’t will it. That too was a neis.”
I don’t know if I would call it a Neis, but it certainly was a part of HKBH’s ultimate plan. But I will leave it to others to judge the abhorrence of the comparison of the annihilation of 6 million Jews to the events which have allowed the largest number of Jews in history to learn and to live halachic Jewish lives.