Arab-Israelis are around 20% of the population and they're not required to enlist. Some religious groups, religious women specifically, are also not required to enlist.
There are exemptions for people with disabilities, health issues with risk factors, extreme poverty, problematic family situations, teen parents, etc, as you would expect there to be in any western democracy.
For any other healthy citizen that's not exempt by law - males in particular - military service is as compulsory as paying taxes.
> It is a choice
I'll never understand why people who aren't Israelis, don't live in Israel, can't read or speak Hebrew, and probably have never even bothered to talk to an Israeli, for some bizarre reason feel qualified to talk so authoritatively about a place half way around the globe that they've never been to.
EDIT Editing your post like this to hide how wrong you were after the fact is misleading, but by now we've seen that this is typical behavior for people in your ideological camp.
Removing all context from this quote and not including a source is misleading.
I was surprised at the quote so I looked up your source[1] and it describes the ways Israelis avoid conscription by using exceptions/deferrals such as being Palestinian, being ultra-Orthodox, having physical or psychological conditions. Others just choose to go to military prison.
Sounds pretty mandatory to me, at least how the word is commonly used.
> Although military service is often described as a national duty in Israel, conscription is in fact far from universal. As little as 50 percent of Israeli citizens actually enlist, according to left-leaning Mesarvot (Hebrew for “I Refuse”), a network of Israeli refusers to which Behar Tsalik belongs.
EDIT: You did update your comment with the full quote, but only after I posted this. That's disingenuous of you, and I'm out of this discussion.
