The state of Israel is rapidly approaching its first post-October 7 election, and the campaigns are in full swing. National security, accountability, haredi enlistment, the cost of living—all are on the ballot.
And yet deeper questions about the future of Israeli democracy remain, questions that cut to the very heart how the Jewish state is governed. What is the proper relationship between the different branches of government? How can Israel's elected officials best be held accountable? How might elections be reformed and governments made more stable? Will the Jewish state ever adopt a written constitution?
In this special election reader from Tikvah Ideas, we gather some of our best pieces tracing these very questions from 1948 to the present, as Israelis once again return to the polls. We are looking past the politicking and headlines of the moment to explore topics like:
- Whether to reform the country’s legislature and create an Israeli senate
- How the Supreme Court’s “judicial revolution” remade Israeli democracy and what reform can and cannot fix
- Why Israel has one of the most extreme proportional electoral systems among major democracies and why every attempt to change it has failed
- How Labor, the party that founded the state and ruled it for three decades, collapsed into insignificance
- How Israel’s state commissions of inquiry came to be and why they matter
- Why the Declaration of Independence became Israel’s de facto constitution and the debate over Israeli constitutionalism
Featuring essays by Shany Mor, Martin Kramer, Neil Rogachevsky, Sagi Barmak, Amiad Cohen, Evelyn Gordon, Peter Berkowitz, Eugene Kontorovich, and a speech from David Ben-Gurion first translated in the pages of Mosaic.
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