Building A Jewish Democracy

A Constitution For Israel

The first Knesset was elected in 1949 as a Constituent Assembly meant to draft a constitution for Israel. Within a matter of months, due to irreconcilable differences between various political groupings with sharply differing agendas, the attempt to draft a constitution was abandoned. Instead, in the “Harari decision” (named after its in initiator), the Knesset decided to empower its Constitution and Law Committee to draft a constitution for Israel when the time was ripe. There the matter lay, more or less, for about half a century.

In 2003, under the leadership of its chairman, MK Michael Eitan (Likud), the Constitution and Law Committee picked the venerable commission off its table and began to fulfill it. Eitan was motivated by his perception that, in practice, Israel’s Supreme Court was drafting a de-facto constitution for Israel with its decisions on social and political matters, and moreover that the emerging constitution-by-legal-fiat both endangered Israel’s welfare and alienated a large proportion of the population. Eitan felt it was high time the Knesset took the constitutional project into its own hands. Since 2003 the Committee has held hundreds of hours of hearings and amassed a great volume of material, none of which, however has coalesced into a constitutional text. Full drafts of a constitution for Israel have come from private policy institutes, and represent sharp differences in the pride of place given to different sets of values — and the power given to the courts, as opposed to the elected branches of government, to enforce them.

Below are links to various constitutional projects:

DRAFT CONSTITUTION OF THE INSTITUTE FOR ZIONIST POLICIES

Dr. Klein and Prof. Koppel of IPC participated in preparing this draft.

English             Hebrew

 

THE KNESSET CONSTITUTIONAL PROJECT   English    Hebrew

Containing a wealth of materials on a wide range of constitutional issues.

 

DRAFT CONSTITUTION OF THE ISRAEL DEMOCRACY INSTITUTE   Hebrew

As of this writing no official English text of this document exists.