Comments by one of Israel’s most senior ultra-Orthodox rabbis postulating that Jews may have been better off without a state have prompted controversy in the country.

In footage broadcast by Channel 12 on Monday, the 96-year-old Rabbi Dov Lando, the spiritual leader of the Degel HaTorah party, also said that soldiers adhering to “Religious Zionism” killed in Israel’s wars were dying because of what their rabbis had taught them. The remarks, made at a closed meeting at his home in Bnei Brak, have set off a political storm three weeks before Israel’s October 27 parliamentary election.

“They are killed because their rabbis teach them a distorted Torah,” Lando said, adding that many military operations are carried out “not for saving lives, but for the honour of the state”.

Lando’s comment came in response to a question about admiration among some ultra-Orthodox Jewish men – who have traditionally refused the military draft – for religious Zionists who combine Torah study with military service.

His comments aren’t new – they were first published in February 2025. However, their reemergence this week comes amid an election campaign in which ultra-Orthodox military service has become one of the sharpest fault lines in Israeli politics.

The Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that there was no legal basis for ultra-Orthodox seminary students to have exemptions from military service, and the government has since not been able to pass legislation restoring the exemptions. The issue has led to large protests on both sides of the divide.

“The question is not what he said, but why this discourse has been placed at the heart of the Israeli debate three weeks before the election,” Ehab Jabareen, a researcher on Israeli affairs, told Al Jazeera.

Better ‘without a state’

Lando’s party is one of the two factions of the United Torah Judaism (UTJ) alliance, which won seven seats during the last election in 2022, and had been part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government before its ministers resigned last year.

The bloc did continue to intermittently support the coalition government, however, and Netanyahu has been wary of removing the military exemption – despite widespread opposition to it from many in Israel – out of fear that the UTJ and similar parties would remove their support completely.

Along with his role within Degel HaTorah, Lando is also one of the spiritual leaders of Israel’s Lithuanian ultra-Orthodox community, which makes up roughly a third of the country’s estimated 1.45 million ultra-Orthodox Jews, also known as Haredim.

In May, he said he no longer trusted Netanyahu and called for parliament to be dissolved.

In the footage, he goes further. “It is possible to live well with the Arabs without a state,” he says, adding that international or Palestinian rule would have been “the best situation”.

Zionism, he argues, “caused the Arabs to hate us” and brought physical as well as spiritual disaster on the Jewish people. He describes secular Israelis as having built “a state of apostasy and heresy”.

The comments reflect non-Zionist and anti-Zionist positions that used to be dominant within ultra-Orthodox Judaism, but take on an overt reference to the possibility of living within a non-Zionist state, something that is even more controversial in Israel.

Ibrahim Khatib, a conflict studies scholar at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, said Lando’s remarks drew a line between Zionism and Judaism “from inside the Jewish community itself”, at a time when the official Israeli establishment “tries to bind them together”.

They also put to the test the narrative that Jewish communities in Arab societies were in danger and threatened, and that the Zionist movement came to “save them” at the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, he told Al Jazeera. However, Khatib cautioned that the ultra-Orthodox polity in Israel “is right-wing, its leaders hold right-wing positions, and some of them have made clearly offensive statements about Arabs and Palestinians”.

Political ammunition

Israeli opposition leaders moved quickly after the footage of Lando emerged this week, taking it as an opportunity to attack a figure from a party within Netanyahu’s electoral bloc.

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett – one of Netanyahu’s main challengers in the upcoming elections – called the remarks “anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist and anti-[Israeli military]”, but aimed his fire at Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who he said “back [Lando] and funnel tens of billions of shekels to him and his friends”.

Gadi Eisenkot, another opposition leader whose Yashar party has campaigned on enforcing the military draft, urged every Zionist party to pledge not to sit with Lando’s party.

Netanyahu, who publicly rejected Lando’s remarks in July when the rabbi accused the Religious Zionism movement of “incitement to murder” for its support of the drafting of religious seminary students to the military, has not yet commented.

Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats, put it bluntly: “Netanyahu is silent because without Rabbi Lando and his emissaries, he has no government.”

Jabareen sees Netanyahu’s silence as “calculated”.

“If Netanyahu attacks Lando forcefully, he pays a price with the Haredim he needs to form a government,” he said. “If he stays silent, he hands his rivals material to tell right-wing voters that the man who speaks of Zionism and security depends on a religious leadership that doubts Zionism itself.”

Who fights and who dies

The military draft of the ultra-Orthodox, Jabareen added, has turned “from an old dispute over religion and state into a question about the Israeli [social] contract itself: Who fights? Who dies? And who gets the exemptions, the budgets and the political influence in return?”

Mohammad Abu Rumman, an academic adviser at the Politics and Society Institute in Amman, said the significance of Lando’s remarks lay in the question that prompted them. The example of a young religious man who combines Torah study with military service, he said, “raises a question inside the ultra-Orthodox world itself: Why don’t we do the same?”

“When Lando describes their teaching as a distorted Torah, he is trying to close the door on emulating them,” Abu Rumman told Al Jazeera. “His words are aimed at his own audience as much as at his opponents.”

But Jabareen argued that the row exposes a rift more dangerous for Netanyahu than the familiar clash between secular and religious Israelis, because it runs through the right itself. Religious Zionists have paid a heavy human price in the war, while the ultra-Orthodox leadership still rejects conscription. Caught between those who pay the price of war and those who refuse to, Netanyahu needs both, and cannot satisfy them at once.

Whether the outrage over Lando’s comments translates into votes is less clear. Abu Rumman expects the remarks to “reinforce existing positions more than change voters’ choices”. The space where they could matter, he said, lies among right-wing voters who serve in the army and resent Netanyahu’s protection of ultra-Orthodox demands.

“If Netanyahu needs these parties to build a majority, that need will not disappear because of a rabbi’s remarks, however shocking,” Abu Rumman said. Netanyahu is also not the UTJ’s only suitor: Channel 12 reported that, frustrated by his failure to secure a law exempting ultra-Orthodox men from military service, the party would not rule out or oppose a government led by Eisenkot.

“The Israeli right has managed to bring under one political roof two currents with almost contradictory visions of the Jewish state,” Jabareen said. “One sanctifies the state and the expansion of its sovereignty. In the other, one of its most important rabbis can say it might have been better had the state never been founded.”