New York (VINnews/Rabbi Yair Hoffman) Once, the state of Israel was called a democracy.  Sadly, it seems that this is no longer true.  It is a deep state posing as a democracy.

The recent move by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara proves this supposition. With one stroke of an unelected pen, she revoked the Section 46 income-tax credit for donors to yeshivos whose draft-age students do not report for IDF service.

Whatever one thinks about Chareidi Yeshiva students not pulling their own defensive weight, the fact is that democracy has been circumvented. 

The Knesset did not vote on this and nobody was elected to do it. A single officer, accountable to no voter, decided — and it became the law of the land.

That is not democracy. It is a mockery of what a democracy is about. And that is what is called a deep state.

What a Deep State Actually Is

A deep state happens when an unelected layer of officials — judges, attorneys general, legal advisors, regulators — oversteps its role and discovers that it can govern without ever standing for election.

A deep state does not need to abolish elections. It only needs to make them meaningless. Citizens vote. Parties campaign. Coalitions form. And then, when the elected government tries to do what it was elected to do, the unelected layer steps in.

The elected will is quietly strangled, and the citizen is told that what just happened to him was not politics. It was law.

Israel today is the textbook case. The High Court instructs the executive on how to use its discretion. The attorney general rewrites the tax code by memo. The legal advisors in every ministry tell elected ministers what they may and may not do. Every lever the public was supposed to control through its vote has been pulled, gently and without fanfare, into hands the public never chose and cannot remove.

The Chareidi community is the test case because it is the community most identified with values disdained by these officials. What is done to yeshiva students this year will be done to someone else next year. The machinery does not stop.

There Was Never a Universal Draft

Many Israelis do not know  that Israeli law has never required every citizen to serve. Not in 1949 – nor now.

The Security Service Law works on a single mechanism. A conscription officer issues draft orders. He has wide statutory discretion over who gets one. A citizen becomes legally obligated to serve only after the order arrives. No order, no obligation.

That is why Arab citizens have not been drafted. That is why Druze women have not been drafted. That is why entire categories of Israelis have lived their whole lives without ever being called up. The discretion is the law. It is the mechanism the Knesset chose, deliberately, so that a country full of different communities could share a single defense burden without grinding any of them into dust.

Chareidim were deferred under that exact discretion for three-quarters of a century. The arrangement was not hidden, not improvised, not extralegal. But beginning in the late 1990s, the justices announced something new and entirely of their own invention. The Chareidi deferral, they declared, was too important to rest on administrative discretion. It needed its own dedicated statute. Just for them.

The legal discretion that quietly handled every other deferred group in Israel was suddenly insufficient — for one group only. No new statute was demanded for the non-conscription of Arab citizens – nor anyone else. The doctrine pointed in one direction. It has stayed pointed there ever since.

The Knesset complied. It passed the law. The Court struck it down. The Knesset passed another. The Court struck that one down too. The reason given, every time, was equality. Each time the elected legislature voted to continue an accommodation that had existed since the founding of the state, the Court announced that doing so violated the rights of the majority.

A majority chose, through its representatives, to extend a long-standing protection to a minority. And that choice — the very thing parliamentary democracy was invented to make possible — was redefined by an unelected court as an attack on the majority itself. There is no clearer signature of a deep state at full operational capacity than this.

The fear of the deep state is likely the reason that President Herzog would rather risk alienating president Trump by refusing his request to pardon the Prime Minister.

Four Weapons, One Target

The picture is now clearer than even the Court’s critics dared predict. Four weapons. Same target. A coherent campaign.

One. The Court directed the IDF conscription officer to begin issuing draft orders to Chareidim. A court told an executive officer how to use his own discretion. It did not strike down a law. It did not interpret a statute. It walked into the executive branch and gave operational instructions. With one ruling, hundreds of thousands of citizens who had been lawfully deferred for seventy-five years became, overnight, presumptively in violation of the law.

Two. The Court turned the police into the enforcement arm of its own preferences. Citizens who last year were sitting in the beis medrash with their elected government’s blessing are this year being shoved toward criminal liability. Nothing in the underlying law changed. The only thing that changed was the Court’s instructions about whom to break.

Three. The Court reached into the budget — daycare subsidies, housing benefits, institutional support. Whatever one thinks of those programs, the question is who decides where state money goes. The Knesset writes the budget – the Court does not. The minute justices begin specifying which population loses which line item, they are no longer judging. They are governing – and that is a deep state by definition.

Four, fired this week. The attorney general revoked the Section 46 income-tax credit for donors to yeshivos she deems insufficiently compliant. Notice what just happened. The tax code of the State of Israel — the single most jealously guarded instrument of legislative authority anywhere in the free world — was rewritten by one unelected official, on one day, without one vote.

Conscription orders manufactured by judges. Police enforcement directed by judges. Budget decisions dictated by judges. The tax code rewritten by an attorney general. This is not a court system. This is not a legal advisory office. This is a parallel government — one that needs no elections, accepts no accountability, and recognizes no boundary on its own authority.

A Hard Word for the Religious Right

This is where the article will sting some readers, because it must. There are thoughtful people on the right, and especially in the religious world, who have spent years denouncing judicial overreach in the abstract — but who, when the overreach is aimed at pressuring Chareidim into the army, find themselves quietly content with it. They tell themselves they are not endorsing the means. They are only welcoming the result. They are kidding themselves.

That contentment is the same trap the right has accused the left of falling into for years. The left, we like to say, cheers whatever the Court does because the Court usually delivers what the left wants. Fine. But what does it mean when the right cheers the Court and the attorney general for delivering what the right wants? It means the principled critique of judicial activism was never really principled. It was a complaint about whose turn it was to be hurt.

A real commitment to constitutional limits is tested precisely when those limits get in the way of an outcome you happen to like. Anyone willing to look the other way when the deep state aims its weapons at someone else has surrendered the standing to object when those weapons swing around. And they always swing around. The machinery does not care which Jews it grinds.

What Comes Next

The Section 46 ruling will slide off the front page. The conscription rulings will too. The next outrage will replace them, and the one after that will replace that. But the precedents will not slide. The precedents will accumulate. The deep state, having tasted what it can do without a vote and without consequence, will only grow.

What stands at the end of this road is no longer a court or an attorney general’s office. It is a third house of government — one nobody elected, one nobody can vote out, one no citizen can appeal beyond. A government inside the government, weaponizing every instrument of state — the conscription order, the police, the budget, the tax code — against whichever citizens its unelected officials have decided to discipline this week.

The right does not need a sharper legal strategy. It needs to wake up. It needs to call this what it is.

The day a society loses the ability to tell the difference between an outcome it likes and a process it can defend is the day it has already lost its democracy. In Israel, that day is closer than anyone wants to admit.

The question is no longer whether the deep state exists in Israel. The rulings of the past month answered that. The only question left is whether the citizens of this country still have the will to take it back.