After decades of hand-wringing, deal making and court rulings, the question of what to do about the ultra-Orthodox — known as Haredim — and the army has now come to what Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University, described as “a boiling point, a moral crisis.”

Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in February that the draft exemption, known as the Tal Law, was unconstitutional. The new unity government formed early this month by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu named as its top priority rewriting it by Aug. 1, the deadline set by the court for the law to expire. A high-level commission is being formed to negotiate a compromise, set quotas and either guide a reluctant military into absorbing large numbers of soldiers with vastly different preparations and personal needs or create a vast (and expensive) new bureaucracy of civilian national service.

But the battle over the draft is really a proxy for a more fundamental fight over Israeli identity itself, a cleavage here that some see as a far greater threat to the future of the state than its external enemies.

Haredim currently make up about 9 percent of the population, but by some estimates collect as much as half of the welfare payments — yeshiva students get subsidies, and many depend also on public housing, as well as direct payments for the poor. Work force participation among Haredi men is about 35 percent, and their schools emphasize Torah study at the expense of math, English and science. Astronomical fertility makes the situation all the more dire: by 2030, one demographer recently estimated, this impoverished, ghettoized community will be close to a quarter of the Israeli population, something virtually everyone sees as unsustainable.

The resentment, even demonization, of Haredim is deep and growing, most profoundly among the strictly observant Jews known here as Modern Orthodox or National Religious. In Ramot, an elegant area of East Jerusalem, and in the exploding city of Beit Shemesh, many of these religious Jews — people whose children study in yeshivas before and after their army tours; people who find time to study Torah as an avocation alongside serious careers; in some cases men so religious they do not shake hands with women — talk about having to leave their beloved neighborhoods because the Haredim are taking over. What to think, as Zehava Alon, a leader of the universal-draft movement put it, of a state where “there is a law that says our kids’ blood is less valuable”?