Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more   Watch now   When the police and the army have to flee the Haredim inside Israel, few red lines remain And predictions are that in 2050, the Haredi population will be close to 25% of Israel. Forget Iran. Forget the Palestinians. If you want to know what may take this country down, just look. Daniel Gordis Feb 17   READ IN APP   If you blinked during the first few seconds of the video above, which was posted by YNet on its Facebook Reels, you missed the important part. So watch it again … What you’ll see are two women wearing white shirts, being hurried away by police from a menacing crowd in Bnai Brak, a Haredi section of greater Tel Aviv. What’s with the white shirts? That’s what many women soldiers wear under their uniforms. Photo for illustration purposes only So what happened to their uniforms? They took them off, hoping that the gathering crowd might get confused and not realize that they were the soldiers that the enraged Jews were hunting for. Why were they in danger? Because a huge, seething, menacing crowd of Haredim—who incorrectly thought the women were there to hand out draft notices—were after them. The police came and extracted the soldiers. From Bnai Brak, right near Tel Aviv. Remember when we used to extract soldiers from some Arab village that they’d mistakenly entered over the green line? No more. Now, soldiers still aren’t safe in Arab villages, but they’re not safe in Bnai Brak either. And the police? Note that they’re fleeing too. Not turning around and facing down the crowd. The police had weapons. Had this been Arabs, what would they have done? Perhaps, some people are asking, it’s time to spread that net wider? Amazingly, the police (ultimately under the command of Itamar Ben-Gvir) had an explanation for the violence—the army screwed up. Main Heading (Red): The Chaos in Bnei Brak Main Headline: Tel Aviv District Commander Accuses: “The female soldiers passed through the city without coordination” Sub-headline: The Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Attacked: “We will not tolerate harm to soldiers” | The reactions to the riots The blame, they said, lay with the army (and not with the marauding Haredim), because the army should have coordinated with the police before sending soldiers into Bnai Brak. But soldiers in Israel go everywhere … to get home, to the playground with their kids at the end of the day, to the mall. What, to protect Haredi sensibilities, the IDF should get permission to enter parts of Israel? And what about when they are there to serve draft notices. Then it will be OK for the Haredim to attack them? You can only say that if you’ve given up on the idea of Israel as a sovereign state.