Outrage After Democratic Party Candidate Blames Religious Zionists for Their War Deaths

Naor Narkis, a candidate on the Democrats party list for the Knesset, sparked a backlash in an interview on i24NEWS with Niv Dromi on “Mifgash Katzavot” after calling the religious Zionist public “the most draft dodging sector,” apart from ultra-Orthodox Jews. He also linked the length of hesder yeshiva service to the high number of deaths among members of that community, saying, “The religious are not so national when they are the most draft dodging sector there is besides the ultra-Orthodox, we simply did not notice it.”

When Dromi pressed him on the number of religious Zionists killed in combat relative to their share of the population, Narkis did not retract the claim. Instead he said that if they had done full military service like secular Israelis, “maybe they would not have fallen so much,” and added, “Now I will explain to you why.” Dromi responded that she could not believe what she was hearing and challenged him: “So they fall more because they do not enlist?” She then said, “So the blood is on their hands, their own.”

Narkis tried to defend the comparison by likening it to medical experience, arguing that a doctor with three years of experience is more seasoned than one with a year and a half, just as a soldier who served 18 months in what he called the “hesder workaround” is less experienced. The article says his remarks were insensitive to bereaved families and contradicted data.

A study by Dr. Roi Naon and Prof. Uzi Ben-Shalom of Ariel University examined IDF fatalities from the start of the war through October 2025 and found that 257 of the dead, 34% of those studied, were religious, even though religious Zionists make up less than 10% of the population. The researchers said this was nearly four times their population share. They also found that religious Israelis accounted for about 45% of reservist fatalities, about 29% of regular-service fatalities, and more than a third of the dead in the infantry, armor, and engineering units that bore much of the ground fighting. The researchers described the findings as “an exceptional burden of security risk borne by religious Zionism.” Narkis, founder of the “Hozrim Be’Tvuna” movement, which promotes secularization in Israeli society, presents himself as the secular voice in the Democrats party and has previously appeared at party events as a candidate for its Knesset slate.