It’s interesting that the calls to revoke voting rights come mainly from the side of those for whom the results of Knesset elections are in any case meaningless. They founded the state, it’s their state, and as such they are entitled to treat elections and their results as nothing more than a social amusement. No more than the results of polls.
So the conclusion that those proposing these ideas are infringing citizens’ rights that they previously had has nothing to stand on.

There is no comparison at all between a Haredi draft-dodger and a secular draft-dodger. A secular or Religious Zionist draft-dodger is an ordinary lawbreaker; every group is expected to have a fringe, and they need to be handled as usual and with moderation, as is done today. A Haredi draft-dodger, by contrast, is part of a rigid and cunning ideological group that chose a vile, dangerous, and ever-growing path for decades, and the response needs to be as harsh as required to break that stubborn rear guard and iron forehead. On the theoretical level it’s really parallel to the difference between dealing with a nationalist terror attack, where a terrorist from an enemy people uses terror against us, and dealing with a criminal shooting in which someone shoots someone else in order to extort him, and the like. A fringe is a completely different phenomenon from a mainstream. There is a major difference in the level of the problem and in the level of means required to defeat it.

Isn’t the difference between revoking voting rights and other sanctions obvious?! Putting a person in prison for breaking the law is obvious—after all, he broke the law! But revoking the right to vote is harming his very basic democratic right.

I agree with Papagayo. Even prisoners have the right to vote. You can’t take away people’s democratic rights.
Still, there are politicians for whom it’s very convenient that Haredim not vote, because they weren’t planning to join with the Haredim in a coalition anyway, and every Haredi who doesn’t vote helps them.

You have to do what is required to solve the problem. If the sanctions are too harsh, those suffering from them are welcome to come enlist and free themselves from the burden of the sanctions. Their sanction is on their own heads. Revoking the right to vote, for example, is really not the far edge of sanctions but a modest beginning.

You sound like a communist. No, we do not do whatever is required to solve the problem. There are limits. Tyranny of the majority and harming democracy is a limit.

There are limits, fine, but revoking voting rights from someone who persists in his rebellion as part of a large organized movement that for decades has been spinning everyone with all kinds of lies is deep, deep within the limits. This is not about punishment but about incentive: let him kindly stop offending and enlist. If in your opinion revoking voting rights is yucky, then propose something that will work (and quickly). I have no special attachment to revoking voting rights specifically, only to whatever will actually deliver the goods. Or are you suggesting that we stand around like golems and let those people from that determined and ideological society continue on their bad path with a little discomfort here and there. What do you propose, my principled sir?

A question for all the justice-seeking commenters:

What is the ruling regarding a parasitic Haredi like me, who dodged his national duty to serve in the army not because of his Haredi identity or his Torah study, but for the simple reason that living in Israel is not worth, in my eyes, sacrificing 30 months of my life under the command of people whose mentality and worldview I do not like, to put it mildly. For that reason I got an exemption on mental-health grounds and spared myself paying a price that was not worth its return to me.

Now I’m unsure: should I be judged as a classic draft-dodger and treated with “moderation,” or since I also happen to be Haredi should I be judged as a Haredi draft-dodger requiring especially harsh treatment?
(And there is room to discuss under the parameters of “one prohibition does not take effect upon another,” and whether classic draft-dodging falls under the category of a more inclusive prohibition applying also to those who are not Haredi; think carefully about it.)

From several comments here I learn that the right to vote is a more basic right than the right to liberty. That is an astonishingly fascinating position, and it opens a new window for me into the meaning of the term “human rights” in the eyes of enlightened lovers of democracy.

Eli, I don’t understand the question. You described the typical Haredi (and your reasoning too is roughly at his infantile level). Someone like you should be thrown in prison for the rest of his life and deprived of all civil rights. Exactly as we said.

Yoav, exactly what I wrote above. You are completely right. This is an expression of the intellectual and moral distortion among enlightened democrats, for whom democracy and civil rights (not human rights) have become a religion.

The upper Yoav wrote above that tyranny of the majority and harm to democracy is a limit, meaning heaven forbid, heaven forbid that voting rights be revoked, while from the words of the lower Yoav it seems that revoking voting rights is legitimate just like imprisonment. If you are one person, please clarify your words.

I’m the upper Yoav, and we are not the same person.
And in response to the lower Yoav, I never said that voting rights are more important than liberty; of course both are very important. I don’t understand where you inferred that conclusion from.
Cut and Dried—I think revoking voting rights definitely will not lead to any positive result, only to more demonstrations, refusal, and imprisonment. It would be one huge disaster.
The direction we’re in now, in my opinion, with the Hasmonean Brigade, is the right direction. Haredim are starting to enlist by choice, dialogue is beginning between the Haredi public and the other publics; that’s where we need to be. I don’t understand why you are chasing our dark and bleak future by fighting the Haredim. We are on the same side.
Even if I thought coercion were the right path, revoking voting rights is definitely a line.
I don’t understand what the difference is between that and revoking citizenship from everyone in “Breaking the Silence” or “B’Tselem,” who greatly harm the State of Israel. It’s simply a line that a democratic state cannot cross.
Still, let them start by revoking prisoners’ right to vote before revoking it from Haredim.

You don’t understand the difference? Think again.

Upper Yoav, I agree that revoking voting rights would ignite fierce resistance. But in my opinion the problem is essential: every step that brings results will ignite fierce resistance, and a step that does not ignite fierce resistance will not bring results. I have no special fondness for revoking voting rights specifically; any effective step is acceptable to me. The difference, in my view, is that you are willing to accept long-term, gradual processes, and you think that although for decades we have been imagining such processes (the Tal Law, Shahar Kachol, Bina B’Yarok, Netzah Yehuda, I don’t know what else) and living in illusions, now, this time, it really truly will work—whereas I am already sick of it and have also lost trust. The leaders of the Haredi public, and many in the Haredi public itself, strongly oppose the goal toward which the rest of the publics are striving, and in long, slow processes I trust them to succeed in dragging things out and watering them down, as they have succeeded in doing until now. That is a central reason why I am looking for a sharp solution that will significantly improve the problem within 5–7 years. Granted, such a solution will likely lead at first to a major explosion, but on the contrary—as I said, if there is no explosion, that means the leaders of the Haredi public and the Haredi public itself believe, “we’ll get through this too.” If there is an explosion and we neutralize it, one way or another, the Haredi public will know that things cannot continue like this. I, after many years, have sadly weaned myself from the thought that the Haredim are on my side—they are on their own side, armed with one fairy tale or another.

I don’t understand why the discussion is about this punishment or that punishment, as if the Haredi public were a wayward child that needs to be educated.
You can simply declare that you are not interested in being partners with a public that does not operate according to the rules that seem right to you, which is a legitimate and accepted demand, and therefore in order to be a citizen in the State of Israel one must meet certain conditions. Whoever does not wish to meet the conditions cannot join the enterprise called the State of Israel.
This is a sensible and moderate approach that is not trying to force anything on anyone. It’s merely conditions for partnership in the enterprise, nothing more.

(Full disclosure: I am Haredi, and I think it would be good for everyone if the Haredi public disconnected from the state and ran an independent autonomy. Same for the Arab public. What’s the point of fighting?)

Cut and Dried, the main reason things like the Tal Law and Shahar Kachol did not succeed is only because the High Court / the Attorney General decided that there cannot be a base into which women are by definition forbidden to enter. The system was not prepared to accept the Haredim into the army, despite the good direction there was even then. The hope with the Hasmonean Brigade is that it will remain a good environment for Haredim, and nobody will stop it. If so, in my opinion, even though the Haredim will still be obligated to enlist, it is not fair to impose sanctions on them, since the cooperation was not halted because of them.
If that does not happen and the Hasmonean Brigade continues to thrive, then all the more so, of course there is no reason for sanctions.
I think the solution is honest dialogue with the Haredim and encouraging continued enlistment into the Hasmonean Brigade.

Once the insults and abuse from Michi, or from those who hang on his every word, used to bother me a little; today I already rub my hands with pleasure to watch what you always call the slippery slope—how the king disgraces himself before everyone’s eyes and competes with his incited flock over who can lash the little Jew harder. I’m waiting for the day you explicitly write that it is a commandment to gather up all the Haredim and put them in gas chambers. Just an innocent question: according to your approach, Michi, that military service is obligatory also for Haredim, that’s altogether just one commandment out of the 613 from which the Haredim dodge service (among them the Chazon Ish, the Brisker Rav, Rabbi Shach, Rabbi Elyashiv, and all the great luminaries of the generation). If they don’t kill the Haredim in gas chambers and they continue to multiply and one day become a majority in the state and control passes to them, what sanctions do you suggest we give the secular draft-dodgers, or the datilonim and Reform Jews, for all the remaining 612 commandments?

The question is whether after their voting rights are revoked, then their right not to enlist will already become legitimate, since the state does not recognize them as citizens, or not.

In my humble opinion, revoking voting rights is not legitimate, because it amounts to taking someone completely out of the game,
without leaving even the possibility of changing that decision.

If rights are revoked from everyone who does not enlist, whether Haredi, secular, or Religious Zionist,
then you forgot the Arabs. Also, many of them are Gaza residents who married Israeli Arab women.