Yaakov Wieder, a member of the Likud presidium who chairs the party’s hareidi-religious task force, warned that if police and the Israel Security Agency (ISA) do not take responsibility for harsh incitement against hareidi soldiers, the result could be murders.

Wieder stressed: “There is a phenomenon of extremists raising their heads and stirring the streets against these hareidi soldiers.”

“For over a year there has been incitement in hareidi communities. Hareidi soldiers are presented as forbidden animals, wild animals and bacteria. We are also witnessing acts of violence, yet to this day police have not taken care of it. 

According to Wieder, if the incitement was against Arabs, ISA would have already entered the picture, “We’re talking about a campaign sponsored by the Ministry of Publication – if it said anything against Arabs, the entire country would be in an uproar.”

“Here you see, every Shabbat, new hideous drawings on bulletin boards portraying soldiers as pigs and bacteria,” Wieder lamented. 

“Some hareidi communities’ incitement leads directly to violence against the soldiers. Soldiers are afraid to return home [in uniform], but unfortunately nobody has done anything [to address this problem].”

Despite hareidi IDF recruitment being on the rise in 2014 – or perhaps because of it, a renewed and intense public campaign has been launched in hareidi neighborhoods against recruitment into the Israeli army.

The campaign is accompanied by posters with various slogans, some of them quite blatantly violent.

Recently, Arutz Sheva exposed a particularly shocking campaign in which hareidi soldiers were literally portrayed as pigs – just a month or so after dozens gave their lives in Operation Protective Edge. The offensive cartoon was even gleefully shared by Hamas.