What should Israel do when the Status-Quo is anything but?

When David Ben Gurion drafted the Status-Quo Agreement following Israel’s independence in 1948, it aimed to codify Israel’s identity as a home for observant Jews: It asserted Shabbat as the legal day of rest, nationwide Kosher observance and affirmed religious marital standards and Jewish education requirements.

The following year, it added military exemption grants for 400 ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students. Today, this policy still applies but is now applicable to over 60,000 eligible haredi men of drafting age.

From the state’s inception, religion was not simply a component of Israeli life, but a core identifying foundation. Yet 76 years later, only 15.5% of Israeli Jews regard the coexistence of religion and state as an “extremely important” value, according to the Israel Democracy Institute. What began as a pragmatic compromise has polarized Israeli society to new heights.

With an evolving religious and political landscape in the country, contentious issues have shifted, with some becoming less pressing, while others continue to dominate headlines. The haredi draft exemption is one issue that remains at the forefront of controversy, dividing the country between those who are mandated to risk their lives and those who don’t share in this same commitment. It is something I have keenly felt during the current war with Hamas as my friends sacrificed their lives to serve on the front lines while others remained untouched by this trauma.

In 2015, former Israeli President Reuven Rivlin delivered a speech, calling for integration across Israel’s fragmented cultural and religious communities by mapping Israeli society into four groups: Arabs, secular Jews, national-religious Jews and ultra-Orthodox Jews, demanding a “new Israeli order” that treats each group as an equal sector of society (Rivlin). Using Rivlin’s speech as inspiration, I am proposing a new Status-Quo, one that highlights and values the needs of every citizen in Israeli society in 2025. My reimagined agreement would distinctly value each group’s individual characteristics but simultaneously integrate all four for the sake of a unified Israel. If one group’s needs are prioritized over those of others, how can we ever achieve a state of compromise?

My new Status-Quo Agreement would group Israeli society into the same four sects that Rivlin identified in the Four Tribes speech. It would expand the agreement beyond a religion-and-state-centered document, highlighting religious needs for religious individuals and secular needs for secular individuals. If the religious needs of the ultra-Orthodox are imposed on the lives of secular Israelis and vice versa, a compromise must be forged.

Through the Hope Curriculum practice, a visionary framework that encourages bold thinking, I reimagined two core parts of the Status-Quo: education and military conscription. The Hope Curriculum, which enables imagination to flourish despite its unrealistic nature, encouraged me to envision a new mandatory national service program, with various available service options for everyone and exemptions granted to no one. Rather than a one-size-fits-some military enlistment system, options would include half a day of service and half a day of learning for yeshiva students or community volunteer opportunities for Arabs who do not wish to serve in combat.

Complementing my reformed national service program, I would create a mandatory apolitical education track on national service taught at all Israeli schools and yeshivot. The program would familiarize students from a young age with their civic duty and responsibility to give back. Because this issue has become so divisive amongst Israeli society, change needs to begin early, before children are indoctrinated with polarizing ideas.

I realize my revamped Status-Quo Agreement, particularly the changes for military service and education, sound boldly aspirational, but that is precisely the point. Without optimism toward Israel’s future, change will never come, and we will forever be stuck in a time-capsule 1948 Status-Quo. If we desire a stronger, fairer Israel, we must dare to envision one.

So, I leave you with this: What does your reimagined Israel look like? What role will you play, as an American, in building a future that embodies, not resists, the reality of Israeli society today?

Olivia Fishman, 21, from Los Angeles, is a rising sophomore at Washington University. She spent a year studying in Israel and is passionate about Israeli politics.