Almost every country with mandatory military service eventually asks the same question: what happens when someone's religion or conscience tells them they cannot serve. Some countries built an answer into their constitutions decades ago. Israel is still writing its answer in real time, one court hearing at a time.
This is a genuinely unresolved story. As of this writing, Israel's Supreme Court has not yet issued a final ruling on the law at the center of it. Here is how the legal question stands in Israel right now, and how two other democracies, decades apart, built their own answers to a similar problem.
Israel: a status quo that expired, and hasn't been replaced
For decades, Israeli law allowed men enrolled full-time in yeshiva (religious seminary) study to defer, and in practice permanently avoid, mandatory military service, a service obligation that applies to most other Jewish citizens. In 2017, the Supreme Court struck down the legal arrangement codifying that exemption as unconstitutional, ruling that it violated the principle of equality, and gave the Knesset a year to legislate a replacement. No replacement law passed. The arrangement's legal basis expired entirely on June 30, 2023.
In June 2024, a nine-justice panel ruled unanimously that with no law in place, ordinary conscription law applies to yeshiva students the same as anyone else, and ordered the state to stop government funding to yeshivas for students who had not enlisted or received a lawful exemption.
Germany: an individual right, written into the constitution
Germany took a different structural approach from the start. Article 4(3) of the German Basic Law, in force since 1949, gives every individual the right to refuse compulsory military service that involves the use of weapons, on grounds of conscience, and requires the state to provide an alternative. It applies to any citizen, regardless of religion, and is assessed person by person, not granted to an entire group by status.
In practice, someone seeking recognition applies in writing to a federal office, describing in detail the personal reasons behind their objection. If the application raises no doubts, it's approved; if it does, the applicant can be asked to attend an interview, and a rejection can be appealed to an administrative court. Approved objectors historically performed Zivildienst, civilian alternative service, often in hospitals or care work, rather than military duty. Germany suspended active conscription in 2011, but the constitutional right and the application process still function today for reservists and in emergency call-up scenarios: nearly 3,000 conscientious objection applications were filed in 2024 alone.
South Korea: from prison sentences to a screened alternative
South Korea took the furthest and most reluctant path toward the same destination. For over sixty years, the country imprisoned conscientious objectors, mostly Jehovah's Witnesses refusing military service on religious grounds, as a matter of routine criminal law. Roughly 19,000 men served prison terms, usually around 18 months, and South Korea reportedly accounted for the large majority of the world's imprisoned conscientious objectors combined.
That changed in 2018. In June, the Constitutional Court ruled 6-3 that a law with no alternative to either military service or prison was unconstitutional, and ordered the legislature to create one by the end of 2019. In November, the Supreme Court went further, ruling that genuine conscientious objection is a legitimate legal defense, reversing decades of precedent that had treated it as ordinary draft evasion. An alternative service system followed: applicants are individually screened by a government commission for the sincerity of their objection, and those approved serve 36 months, well over the standard roughly 21-month military term, working in places like prisons. The longer term has itself drawn criticism, including from South Korean commentators who call it a punitive compromise rather than genuine accommodation.
Same tension, different starting point
The German and South Korean systems, despite reaching their destinations by very different routes, one by writing the right into a constitution in 1949, the other by court order seventy years later, ended up structurally similar: an individual applies, a government body assesses whether the objection is genuine, and an alternative civic obligation, sometimes a demonstrably harder one, replaces the military one.
Israel's exemption, as it has existed for decades, was never built that way. It attached to group status, full-time enrollment in yeshiva study, not to an individual assessment of personal conscience, and it applied to tens of thousands of men without a screening process at all. The Supreme Court's rulings since 2017 haven't yet resolved what replaces that structure; they have mainly established that the old one, once its legal basis lapsed, could no longer stand unenforced. What comes next, something closer to the individual, screened model Germany and South Korea eventually settled on, some other structure entirely, or continued legislative delay, is the part of the story still being written.