Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the riot and said law enforcement must apply the full force of the law against the rioters. Justice Minister Yariv Levin, Defense Minister Israel Katz, the Judiciary, the national judges’ representative body, and political figures from across the spectrum also condemned the attack.
The words are important. But they are not enough.
Leadership must now choose where it stands: in a law-abiding country, where court rulings are binding and criminal acts carry criminal consequences; or in a country where every sector, faction, and political camp decides for itself which laws it recognizes and which public officials it is permitted to threaten.
The days of speaking gently about lawbreaking have to end. If draft orders are ignored, they must be enforced. If protesters attack police officers, soldiers, judges, or their families, they must be arrested, prosecuted, and punished. If organized groups send buses of young men to a judge’s home, the organizers must be found.
If elected officials condemn violence in one sentence and then spend the next explaining why the rioters felt persecuted, they should not be allowed to pretend that they are defending the rule of law.
That is precisely what made the statement from Shas and Degel HaTorah, issued shortly after midnight, so disturbing. The factions did condemn violence, but their statement opened by saying they were “pained and shocked by the ongoing persecution and trampling of Torah students by Supreme Court justices,” and warned that such steps would lead to radicalization and anarchy.
The law is not the law; it is a campaign against Torah
This is the problem in one paragraph. The violence is condemned, but the story remains one of persecution. The judge whose home was attacked becomes part of the machinery of oppression. The yeshiva students are the victims, the court the aggressor, and the law is not the law; it is a campaign against Torah.
But Sohlberg is not an enemy of Torah. He is an observant, learned, deeply serious man who has given his life to the service of the state and the law. Rabbi Yaakov Medan, one of the heads of Yeshivat Har Etzion and a close friend of Sohlberg, described him as “a good and honest man who delivers justice that is righteous and true.”
Rabbi Moshe Taragin, a neighbor and teacher at the yeshiva, called the attack a desecration of Torah.
And that is the deeper wound here: This was never really about Torah. It was about power, exemption, and the refusal to accept that the law of the state applies even when it is politically inconvenient and religiously contested.
The people most harmed by this narrative are first the victims: Sohlberg, his wife, his family, his neighbors, and every judge who now has to wonder whether the next ruling will bring protesters to their door.
Torn by war, grief, exhaustion, and a draft burden impossible to defend morally
But the damage does not stop there. It also harms the attackers, young men who have somehow been brought to a point where they could justify smashing the windows of a Jewish home in the name of Torah. And it harms Israeli society as a whole, already torn by war, grief, exhaustion, and a draft burden that has become impossible to defend morally or practically.
A country cannot send soldiers and reservists to fight month after month while telling an entire sector that their noncompliance is a political bargaining chip. It cannot demand sacrifice from some families while allowing others to treat enforcement as persecution.
It cannot ask judges to uphold the law and then fail to protect them when the law becomes inconvenient.
Amit warned this week that fake news prepares the ground, incitement sows the seeds, and violence grows wild. The writing was on the wall. On Wednesday night, it was written in broken glass.