Constitutional revolutions: Israel as a case-study

Abstract

From its foundation in 1948 and until the 1990s, the State of Israel lacked a formal Bill of Rights. Although the Declaration of Independence had promised a constitution, a series of obstacles prevented its adoption. In the intervening years, several attempts to anchor a Bill of Rights in a Basic Law met with failure.In 1992, the Knesset adopted two Basic Laws dealing with human rights. The Supreme Court used these laws as a platform for creating a full-fledged Bill of Rights, and Israeli scholars helped to expedite this process. And yet, despite extensive academic discussion of these developments, the dearth of legal literature remains conspicuous on one question: How did it happen? How is it that after forty-four years of failures and parliamentary paralysis, the Knesset suddenly voted in favour of anchoring a Bill of Rights in Basic Laws?In this article, I examine four possible explanations. The first attributes these developments to the successful exploitation of a constitutional moment that reflected a severe erosion of public trust in politics. The second pins success on the tactics adopted by the proponents of the law. Instead of insisting on the adoption of a complete Bill of Rights, they split it into small sections and worked to enact only the consensual ones. According to the third thesis, the adoption of these laws was enabled by their proponents’ failure to expose the full import of this move, thereby lulling their traditional opponents into a false sense of security. According to the fourth explanation, success resulted from two major shifts in Israeli politics. The first was the Labor Party’s loss of hegemony and the ensuing uncertainty regarding the identity of future coalitions, and the second was the strengthening of sectorial elements that threatened the dominance of the secular bourgeoisie. The first shift weakened the coalition’s inherent resistance to the constitutionalization of the political system, and the second neutralized the institutional interest of Knesset members representing the old elites against the constitutional project.Finally, my conclusion points out that these explanations are not mutually exclusive, and all the elements they consider joined together to bring about the ‘constitutional revolution’, as it came to be known.