Israel is the counterpoint to France: the one country where circumcision is constitutive of national-religious identity. Brit milah — circumcision on the 8th day as the Abrahamic covenant (Genesis 17), by a mohel outside the medical system — is near-universal (~92%, Morris 2016) across even secular Jews and the Arab/Muslim minority. It is kept by Israelis who keep almost nothing else.
The documented harm is metzitzah b'peh (ultra-Orthodox oral suction of the wound), a verified route of neonatal HSV transmission: CDC surveillance found 11 NYC cases 2000–2011 (10 hospitalized, 2 deaths) + 6 more to 2015; Gesundheit 2004 found 8 cases, one with encephalitis/brain damage. HONEST caveats: the best data is NYC (not Israel-domestic); the practice is ultra-Orthodox, not universal.
Legally there is no statute mandating or banning brit milah — and when a 2013 Netanya rabbinical court fined a refusing mother (NIS 500/day), the High Court of Justice voided it (29 Jun 2014, Justice Naor: circumcision isn't a divorce matter). Israel is low-HIV; circumcision is identity-based, not an HIV intervention (the causal HIV-reduction claim was refuted).
Switch to the in-depth article for the full picture and sources (#199–206).
If France is the country that tolerates circumcision in spite of its secularism, Israel is its mirror image: the one country where circumcision is not merely permitted but constitutive of national and religious identity. Brit milah — the circumcision of a Jewish boy on the eighth day of his life — is the oldest and most widely observed Jewish ritual, kept even by Israelis who keep almost nothing else. The result is near-universal circumcision (~92%), performed not by surgeons in hospitals but by mohels in a covenant ceremony older than the state itself.
The sources here are numbered references (#199–206) in the references library and against the Israel country profile. This page is about male circumcision (brit milah); it does not invoke FGM, which is not relevant to the Israeli case. Two things are handled carefully below: the documented harm of metzitzah b'peh (whose best data comes from New York, not Israel), and the limits of the HIV argument.
The covenant on the eighth day
Brit milah is grounded in Genesis 17, where circumcision is the "outward sign" of the covenant between Abraham and God, commanded for every Jewish male. It is performed on the eighth day of life by a mohel — a specially trained ritual circumciser who, traditionally, need not be a physician — usually at home or in a synagogue rather than a hospital. For observant and secular Jews alike it marks the infant's entry into the covenant community. This is what makes Israel distinct: circumcision here is not a medical decision or even chiefly a religious-law obligation people weigh, but an identity practice so deep that opting out is rare even among the wholly secular.
Near-universal, across communities
About 92% of Israeli males are circumcised (Morris et al. 2016). The rate is near-universal among the Jewish majority and also among Israel's Arab/Muslim minority, for whom circumcision is likewise a religious norm. So Israel's figure is not a story of one community — it is the rare case where the country's two major populations, for different religious reasons, converge on the same near-total practice.
Metzitzah b'peh: the documented harm
The clearest harm associated with the practice comes from a specific ultra-Orthodox variant: metzitzah b'peh, in which the mohel places his mouth directly on the circumcision wound and sues blood away by oral suction. This is a verified route of neonatal herpes (HSV-1) transmission from circumciser to infant. The best-quantified data is from New York City, where the CDC documented 11 laboratory-confirmed neonatal HSV cases between 2000 and 2011 — 10 hospitalized and two fatal — with six further cases through 2015; the CDC estimated the risk at roughly 1 in 4,098, about 3.4 times higher than for infants unlikely to have had oral suction. A 2004 Pediatrics case series (Gesundheit et al.) documented eight infections, one of which caused HSV encephalitis and permanent brain damage.
Two honest caveats. First, the strongest surveillance is from New York, not Israel — we record it here because the practice and its harm mechanism are identical, not because these particular deaths occurred in Israel. Second, metzitzah b'peh is an ultra-Orthodox practice, not universal among circumcising Jews; most modern brit milah does not include oral suction (sterile alternatives exist). The harm is real and documented, and it is specific.
No law — and the case that proved it
Israel has no statute mandating or banning brit milah; it runs on religious custom. The limits of even religious compulsion were tested in a notable case. In 2013, in the middle of a divorce dispute, a Netanya rabbinical court ordered a mother who refused to circumcise her son to do so or pay a fine of NIS 500 (about $140) per day. The Supreme Rabbinical Court upheld it. But on 29 June 2014, Israel's High Court of Justice — a seven-justice bench led by Justice Miriam Naor — voided the order, ruling that the rabbinical court had exceeded its authority because "circumcision of a child is not a matter that arises because of the dissolution of marriage." The episode is revealing precisely because it failed: even in the country where circumcision is most deeply embedded, there is no legal power to compel it.
Not about HIV
Israel's circumcision has nothing to do with disease prevention. It is a low-HIV-prevalence country — heterosexual HIV diagnoses run around 0.46 per 100,000 per year, far below France or the Netherlands. Some Israeli authors have argued the country's near-universal circumcision helps explain its low rate, but that causal inference is not supported, and we do not assert it: Israeli circumcision is religious and identity-based, full stop. The WHO/UNAIDS circumcision-for-HIV strategy targets high-prevalence sub-Saharan epidemics, not Israel.
The honest bottom line
Israel is the counterpoint to every country where circumcision is debated as a medical or legal question. Here it is an answer to a different question — who belongs to the covenant, and to the nation. That makes it the hardest case for a bodily-autonomy lens: not a practice maintained by law or by health policy, but by identity itself, observed by the religious and secular alike, and compelled by no statute — as the 2014 High Court ruling, which struck down the one attempt to force it, made clear.
Compiled from a June 2026 deep-research pass: prevalence (Morris et al. 2016); brit milah practice (UNAIDS jc1360; My Jewish Learning); metzitzah b'peh harm (CDC MMWR 2012; Gesundheit et al., Pediatrics 2004; JPIDS 2015); the 2013→2014 rabbinical-court / High Court case (Haaretz; Library of Congress; Times of Israel; Ynet); and HIV context (Chemtob et al., IJHPR 2015; Mor et al., BMJ Open 2013). The ~92% figure is a modelled estimate. Metzitzah b'peh harm data is chiefly NYC surveillance of the same ritual practice, not Israel-domestic deaths, and the practice is ultra-Orthodox, not universal. The causal HIV-reduction inference was refuted and is not asserted. See references #199–206.
