Due to a request from the Freedom of Information Movement, the IDF provided data segmented by city regarding the number of reserve days served. I noticed that different media outlets have published biased and sometimes false analyses, therefore I found it necessary to publish the data here without bias.
The intention here is not to harm any city, settlement, or demographic, but only to present the data as they are to serve as a basis for an honest discussion about the different demographics' contributions to the state, and to give due credit to the reservists and their supportive families.
The data provided by the IDF include total reserve duty days segmented by city for the year 2023. Of course, to examine each city's contribution, it's necessary to normalize this by the number of residents. As Saar Hess and Yaron Drukman noted in their article on Ynet, the correct way to normalize is by the number of residents between the ages of 19-45. These are the individuals whose data appear on the Population Authority's website, the closest fit for the age of reservists. Doing so gives the number of reserve days per person in that settlement.
I compiled this list for all cities with over 15,000 reserve days. This arbitrary round number represents where I got tired of copying numbers. The complete list is presented at the end of the document.
The top ten places:
Ramot Magshimim with 53.94 average reserve days per resident, Beit Hagai with 51.33, Rehelim with 51.16, Susya with 50.11, Shima with 46.2, Otniel with 42.12, Nov with 41.89, Yakir with 41.83, Elon Moreh with 41.23, and Hosheya with 40.51.
It appears there is something common among these towns, all of them are prominent religious Zionist towns. Why aren't these valuable towns appearing in any publication? The answer is relatively simple here. They considered the largest cities. On Ynet, for example, they presented the 50 largest cities, and in Haaretz, the 30 largest. Indeed, it is true that the law of large numbers says the average approaches the expected value as the number of samples approaches infinity. Or in other words, this is good statistical work with large numbers, but here the aim is to check the connection between the population and contribution, and in most cases, the smaller cities and towns have a more distinct population profile.
However, when the numbers are very small, marginal factors can take place, so balance must be found. Since our sample is the number of reserve days, it's reasonable to filter by that number and leave only large numbers. Perhaps the number we set – 15,000 is sufficient, but let's say we follow the number set by Ynet and take into account the 50 places that contributed the most reserve days, here are the top ten places:
Efrat in first place with 23.75 average reserve days per resident, Shoham with 16.57, Modi'in with 15.03, Ariel with 14.57, Gadera with 13.37, Givat Shmuel with 13.28, Kiryat Shmona with 12.89, Yokneam Illit with 11.67, Givatayim with 11.49, and Nes Ziona with 11.16 average reserve days per resident.
Efrat gives a very impressive performance here, and there are other cities and councils that weren't mentioned anywhere. Also, the answer to this is not very hard; news channels decided to take the largest cities. Let's flow with this and calculate for the 50 largest cities.
Modi'in contributes impressively, but you noticed correctly, our list includes periphery cities that contributed in an inspiring way. What happened to them? Well, it depends on how the large cities are calculated. I naively thought the most correct and simple way is to take the cities where the number of residents aged 19-45 is the largest. Correct, because this is the data we use to normalize, and simple, because if you already copied the details from the Population Authority why look for another total resident number data that give you nothing. Nonetheless, this is what they decided to do, hence Dimona and Sderot, ranked 52 and 58 by total residents, were excluded from the list.
But what about Be'er Sheva? It's a good question that I still haven't found an answer to. Be'er Sheva is a large city by all accounts; it's hard to exclude it from the list, and its score is better than Tel Aviv's. If someone has an answer to this puzzle, I'd love to hear it.
So what is the conclusion: 1. Do not believe anything written in the media; biased publications can be skewed even when they bring seemingly reliable data. 2. True, the number of reserve days in the haredi and Arab public is very low, but we knew that. 3. The public in cities contributes a large number of reserve days; there's no significant visible difference between cities from the periphery or the center, right-leaning or left-leaning. 4. The religious Zionism demographic contributes a very high number of reserve days compared to the rest of the population.