It sounds like an exciting time for a historic shift toward drafting haredim into the IDF.
Some 24,000 summonses have already been sent to the ultra-Orthodox since summer 2024.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir has committed to sending every haredi 16.5-year-old a draft notice on time like any other 16.5-year-old in the country.
There are also calls by Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara and within the IDF to send out draft notices to the remainder of the 80,000 draft age eligible haredim; on Tuesday, the military announced a new operation to arrest draft dodgers.
Zamir and Baharav-Miara are both under pressure by the High Court of Justice, which, due to draft dodging, already took away funds to haredim in April and August of 2024.
And yet, without Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leaning into this issue heavily, real progress will be limited.
No one really fully understands the current haredi financial situation. But it is apparent -since few if any yeshivot have closed - that the government either found other ways to get the yeshivot money through the byzantine budget process, without labeling it the way the old canceled subsidies were labeled, or the haredi community has found enough private donors to keep themselves in business without having to do the army or work too much.
Likewise, the IDF can send larger and larger volumes of summonses to the haredi population, but if none of them feel that they have anything to lose, most will ignore them.
If they neither will lose serious money to support themselves, nor face arrest, nor lose some other important privilege, such as the right to have an active driver's license and drive, why would they break decades of "tradition" of not serving in the military?
And right now, out of around 80,000 haredim who are draft dodging, likely some single digit or small double digit number have faced a short period of arrest.
Basically, the odds of winning the lottery are higher than the odds that any given individual haredi draft dodger will be arrested.
And there are many other measures, such as driving or even voting sanctions, but no one is even discussing those.
It might be a big deal that Netanyahu finally leaked his goal of 10,500 haredim in the army for the next two years, meaning around 5,250, or between 40-50% per year.
But it will only be so if he makes sure that financial sanctions will actually apply and if he ensures that the haredim do not find another way to fill the money gap that such sanctions could potentially create.
It seems very unlikely that the prime minister will do so, however, because this would lead the haredim to topple his government.
Of course, he could calculate that if he takes real action on this issue and goes to the election on it, he may win back some of his current doubters and the premiership once more.
However, until now, it has seemed crystal clear that even 19 months after a couple of thousand Israelis have died in the current war, Netanyahu would not be willing to risk direct confrontation with the ultra-Orthodox.
If he does not put some "skin into the game" then increased combined efforts by Zamir, Baharav-Miara, and the High Court of Justice may make some nominal difference, but the historic seachange that much of the public is waiting for due to the post-October 7 era will probably be delayed once again.