As I understand it, the Israeli state has forced young Jews (but not Arabs!) into three-track welfare. You can choose which track, but you can’t escape them all. Not easily, anyway.
- Yeshiva/Kollel (necessarily inflated by government fiat).
- Army (“covert” welfare for the 80% or so, who add nothing).
- Prison (free room and board at least).
Study Torah, learn a profession, go to work; just stay away from the state army! Suicide Is the Primary Cause of Death Among Israeli Soldiers (bored out of their sanity). You’re not helping anyone by getting dressed up in green!
From Rafi Farber:
Let’s assume the IDF is holy. Let’s accept that, for argument’s sake. From a minarchist libertarian perspective that public defense is legitimate, that could certainly be argued from a religious Zionist minimal State perspective. But that doesn’t mean that serving in the IDF is holy. If everyone served in the IDF, everyone would starve because there would be no profit-driven division of labor. We’d turn into Mao’s Great Leap Forward where everyone was a soldier and simply die of starvation, just like the Chinese did, 45 million of them from 1958-62, when the whole country was drafted into a Chinese army all at once with Mao directing it.
If the IDF is holy, it needs support. It needs people outside of it in the economy to feed it. I’m one of those. Other people in Israel need people in the private sector to supply them with goods and services. When you get a job and make money, you are doing something holy because you are supporting the IDF that way. You are supporting the army, but you are also supporting everyone.
When you sit in the army and do nothing, you are not supporting the army. You are not supporting anyone. You are obeying politicians. That’s it. You are burdening the army. So the most courageous thing to do would be to simply leave and accept the consequences. If you are worried about prison, you need not be. You’re already in one.
Excerpted from The Jewish Libertarian, here.
