Looking to the Future
Israel needs a constitution; the sooner the better
Nobody I know likes rules. OK, maybe that’s because I teach grades 1 - 11 various things. However, rules are necessary for how we conduct ourselves in day-to-day activities. If there were truly no rules we would have The Purge happening daily. In fact, within Judaism, we are also given rules for how to conduct ourselves. These are the commandments we are given and they range from something simple and understandable like not murdering to something we don’t understand like not wearing garments that have both wool and linen together in the garment (laws like this are for another discussion at another time).
The point here is that we need rules for there to be order. That brings me to Israel circa September 2023. Before the horrific events of October 7th, the country was going through a bit of an existential crisis. Having had four elections in two years and then the newly elected government call for judicial reform, protests were everywhere. I don’t want to get into the right and wrong of the protests. As I think I mentioned on the podcast, I have enough problems with American politics, I don’t want to get involved in a different country’s politics. What did occur to me while these protests were going on is that for the country to survive, they need a set of rules for the government of the country, a constitution if you will. What’s interesting is that Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wanted to have a constitution set up but it was pushed off because they had too much going on with surviving as a young country. They do however have what are called the “Basic Laws of Israel”.
Now, I’m not a fancy city political scientist so I won’t go too far into the weeds about how this should look. I want to hit some highlights to get the ball rolling. Admittedly this is very heavily “borrowed” from the Constitution of the United States of America. I figure, why mess with perfection? The Basic Laws of Israel can potentially be folded into the official constitution. (If you have any ideas feel free to add them to the comments.)
A multi-branch government - The government should have a legislative, judicial, and executive branch. All being equal. The big thing is that the Knesset would have to become just the legislative branch and probably be unicameral. How would the head of the executive branch be chosen? that’s a good question. I don’t know. This change to having an executive branch would also mean the role of the current President would be changed or eliminated.
Checks and Balances - This is a big one. One of the main complaints the judicial reform side has is how the Supreme Court is selected. I think the best way to do this is to have the Supreme Court (or Executive branch) nominate someone and then let the legislative branch approve or reject the nomination.
Electoral Districts - Keep the Knesset at 120 members but create electoral districts and the members need to run in those districts. Keep an electoral threshold (currently at 3.25%) but raise it to remove the extremist parties.
Let the current unity government do this; in the name of unity. Let’s use this time of unity in the country to make sure the country doesn’t fall back into the same fights as before.
There would still be big issues needing to be ironed out, like the military service and the exemptions for it; if there should be any exemptions, or should there be just a voluntary military service?
On the Next Podcast…
Per usual, I’ll be recording at 3:00 pm EST on Sunday the 17th. In the upcoming episode, I’ll talk about an interesting article I found talking about a topic I’ve spoken about in two previous episodes. That will be in the news section along with an article that is what I would consider adjacent to last week’s main topic. For the episode’s main topic, we’ll talk about… something. I promise.
Until next time.