While Washington resumed heavy strikes on Iran, Israel exercised restraint. At home, however, legislation protecting Haredi Torah students from conscription opened a bitter argument about religious liberty, national security and the burden of service.
Israel spent July watching one war reignite beyond its borders while another struggle intensified within them.
As the United States resumed major strikes against Iran, Israel conspicuously remained on the sidelines. Yet inside the Knesset, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition pressed ahead with measures protecting ultra-Orthodox Torah students from military enforcement, despite wartime personnel shortages and the unusually public objections of the Israel Defense Forces’ chief of staff.
The contrast was striking. Abroad, Jerusalem showed restraint. At home, the government accepted a political confrontation over who should bear the burden of defending the nation.
Torah study and the burden of service
On 14 July, the Knesset approved a temporary measure suspending the arrest, investigation and prosecution of qualifying Haredi men who had failed to report for military service. The legislation turned a long-standing pattern of mass non-enlistment into something approaching temporary statutory protection.
Later that month, by 63 votes to 52, the Knesset also passed a new Basic Law recognising Torah study as “a fundamental value in the heritage of the Jewish people and the State of Israel”. As a Basic Law, the measure carries quasi-constitutional significance in a country without a single written constitution.
The religious argument should not be dismissed lightly. Torah study has sustained Jewish identity through exile, persecution and attempted annihilation. A state that calls itself Jewish cannot treat the study of its foundational Scriptures as culturally irrelevant.
Nor should religious liberty be casually sacrificed to administrative convenience. Haredi leaders fear that compulsory service in a largely secular institution could erode a way of life built around intensive religious formation and obedience to rabbinic authority.
Yet religious liberty is not the only moral claim at stake.
Israel remains a country at war, with soldiers and reservists carrying extraordinary burdens. Each year, about 13,000 Haredi men reach military age, but fewer than 10 per cent enlist, according to figures cited by a parliamentary committee. Many Israelis therefore see the new arrangements not as a principled protection of conscience but as a wartime exemption for the country’s fastest-growing Jewish community.
That perception threatens the solidarity on which any citizen army depends.
An extraordinary warning from the army
IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Eyal Zamir made his objections unmistakable.
In a letter to Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz, Zamir described the legislation as “clearly and unequivocally inconsistent” with the army’s needs. He objected particularly to a provision requiring a committee of senior military officers to determine which yeshiva students qualified for protected status.
Such an arrangement, he warned, would undermine legitimacy and trust among those who serve.
It is remarkable for a serving chief of staff to speak so directly against his government’s legislation, especially during wartime. His intervention exposed the depth of the concern within the military: this is not merely a quarrel between secular and religious Israelis, but a question of personnel, readiness and confidence in the fairness of national service.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel resigned in protest, declaring that she could no longer support a government that, in her judgement, was harming national security during war.
The High Court of Justice then temporarily froze the arrest-protection law on 15 July. That intervention further complicated an already explosive contest between the government, the courts, the military and the Haredi parties.
The political cost is also becoming visible. A Channel 12 poll conducted during the controversy found former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot leading Netanyahu by 43 per cent to 34 per cent as the preferred prime minister. Eisenkot’s Yashar party is positioning itself as a serious challenger ahead of Israel’s October election.
The deeper issue, however, is not electoral advantage. It is whether Israel can honour Torah study without treating military sacrifice as someone else’s vocation.
A sound settlement will require more than denunciation. It should accommodate genuine religious conviction while insisting that citizenship carries responsibilities as well as rights. Service need not be identical in every case, but sacrifice cannot be indefinitely confined to the same families.
Scripture honours both the teacher and the protector. It gives no warrant for political arrangements that make one neighbour’s life safer by placing a disproportionate burden upon another.
Israel stays out as Washington strikes Iran
While division deepened at home, Israel refrained from joining renewed American operations against Iran.
President Donald Trump declared the US–Iran ceasefire finished after Iranian attacks on commercial shipping in and around the Strait of Hormuz. American forces then struck scores of Iranian military targets, with one later series of attacks reportedly reaching about 140 sites.
Israel did not participate in those operations, and Iran initially avoided striking Israel even as it retaliated against American allies across the Gulf.
The restraint appeared deliberate. Israel had already pursued its principal military objectives against Iran earlier in the year, and there was little appetite in Jerusalem to reopen a front whose pace and limits would be controlled primarily by Washington and Tehran.
That caution was prudent. Iranian retaliation triggered alerts across several Gulf states, while disruption near the Strait of Hormuz drove oil prices higher. Roughly one-fifth of the world’s petroleum liquids ordinarily passes through that strategically vital waterway, meaning local escalation can rapidly become a global economic shock.
Even amid the exchanges of fire, both Washington and Tehran continued to suggest that negotiations remained possible. Such diplomacy should not be romanticised. A ceasefire is only as trustworthy as the conduct it restrains. Nevertheless, leaving a door open to negotiation is not weakness when the alternative may be an expanding regional war.
Gaza changes its government, but not yet its weapons
In Gaza, Hamas announced on 6 July that it was dissolving the Government Emergency Committee that had administered civilian affairs during the war. Formal responsibility was to pass to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, a body of Palestinian technocrats operating under the US-backed transitional framework.
The announcement was significant, but incomplete.
Hamas was stepping back from direct civilian administration without, at that stage, surrendering its political or military role. The central question of disarmament remained unresolved. The governing principle advanced by the Board of Peace was clear: one authority, one law and one weapon.
Without disarmament, Gaza risks acquiring a government in name that controls little and an armed movement in fact that has surrendered little.
A later agreement announced at the end of July established a proposed timetable for transferring weapons and dismantling military infrastructure. Whether those promises become reality will depend upon verifiable action, not declarations alone.
Meanwhile, the European Union and its partners launched the €883.6 million Team Gaza Initiative to support early recovery, essential services and damaged infrastructure. The humanitarian need is undeniable. So is the need for careful oversight. Reconstruction money must reach suffering civilians without restoring the military capacity of those who brought devastation upon Israelis and Palestinians alike.
When Christian solidarity becomes one-sided
The Church of England’s General Synod added another layer to the controversy by voting in July to “hear” and encourage engagement with several Palestinian Christian declarations, including Kairos Palestine II: A Moment of Truth — Faith in a Time of Genocide.
Kairos II accuses Israel of genocide and presents the conflict through the language of occupation, apartheid, racism and settler colonialism. Jewish organisations, including the office of Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, urged the Synod not to endorse engagement with the document.
The amended motion did not adopt every accusation as Church doctrine. It explicitly rejected antisemitism and anti-Muslim hostility, lamented both Israeli and Palestinian deaths, and stated that hearing Palestinian Christians did not mean agreeing with all their claims.
That qualification matters. So does the suffering of Palestinian Christians. Their testimony should not be ignored simply because it is painful, politically inconvenient or expressed in language others find disturbing.
But Christian compassion must be joined to truth. Trauma does not make every historical claim accurate, and listening must not become a polite name for accepting a single, totalising account of a complex conflict.
Mirvis called the Synod’s decision “shameful”, describing Kairos II as a document “full of falsehood” that reduces the conflict to “a single warped narrative”. He warned that the vote marked “a sad day for Jewish-Christian relations”.
The Church must be able to hear Palestinian Christians without erasing Jewish history, minimising the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023 or treating Zionism as a simple synonym for colonial racism. It must also be able to defend Jewish people against hatred while speaking honestly about Palestinian suffering and the moral responsibilities of Israeli power.
Christian peacemaking requires more than choosing whose grief deserves a hearing. Every human being in this conflict bears God-given dignity. Every murder, hostage-taking, act of terrorism and unjust attack upon civilians must therefore be judged by moral truth rather than excused by tribal loyalty.
Pray for a peace politics cannot manufacture
Israel’s challenges cannot be reduced to one enemy or one battlefield. The country faces external threats, internal division and profound questions about the meaning of shared citizenship. Gaza has a prospective civil administration but not yet a settled monopoly on arms. Churches seeking solidarity risk deepening division when compassion is separated from careful truth-telling.
Christians should therefore pray with both conviction and humility.
Pray for Israel’s leaders, that wisdom and unity might prevail where political calculation and resentment now reign. Pray for those carrying the burden of military service, and for Haredi communities seeking to preserve a cherished religious life. Pray for innocent Palestinians who need protection, honest government and genuine recovery. Pray that hatred of Jewish people will be replaced by repentance and that hardened hearts throughout the region will be turned to flesh.
And pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
Treaties, transitional boards and ceasefires all have their place. Governments bear a God-given responsibility to restrain evil and pursue justice. But no diplomatic instrument can heal the human heart.
For Christians, the final hope of peace rests in Jesus the Messiah, the promised Son of Abraham and King of peace. He alone can accomplish what armies, parliaments and peace plans have never been able to secure: reconciliation grounded in both perfect justice and unfailing mercy.