Justice & Institutions
A constitution
Israel should adopt a written constitution.
The Knesset was meant to write one in 1950 and gave up. Thirteen Basic Laws stand in for it, each amendable by simple majority.
What is at stake
The Knesset was meant to write a constitution in 1950 and gave up, unable to agree between secular and religious members on the place of Torah law. Thirteen Basic Laws accumulated instead, each amendable by simple majority. That is the root of the fight over the Supreme Court.
The case for
- A coalition of 61 can currently rewrite the rules it is judged by. A constitution ends that.
- The judicial overhaul crisis was a fight over rules nobody had written down. Writing them is the only lasting way out.
- Every comparable democracy has one. Israel, Britain and New Zealand are the exceptions, and the other two have centuries of convention.
The case against
- Writing a constitution means settling the religion-and-state question today. No majority exists for that.
- A constitution freezes choices for generations and moves the last word from parliament to the judges who read it.
- The Basic Laws have worked for seventy-five years. The problem is that the rules are not respected, not that they are missing.
Both sides get the same number of points at comparable length. That is a rule of this site, not a coincidence.
What the next Knesset could decide
The Knesset can pass the missing Basic Laws — legislation, social rights, the Court's status — and declare the set constitutional, by simple majority. No special threshold is required, which is precisely what the argument is about.