India’s ponderous, written Constitution came from debate over apparently unbridgeable differences. Israel doesn’t have a written constitution but is still committed to the writing of one. The First Knesset that convened in February 1949 was a constituent assembly. Every subsequent Knesset, including the outgoing Seventeenth, remains so. A formal, single-document Israeli constitution never came about because the religious groups would accept only the Torah and the Halakhah while the socialists opposed a constitution sans Marxism. Thus David Ben-Gurion proposed a “piecemeal” approach — enacting fundamental laws through consensus. Israel has since enacted 11 Basic Laws (impacting government, human dignity and occupational liberty, state lands, the status of Jerusalem, etc) which should, some day, form the constitution. Israel operates within this constitutional framework, with its Supreme Court increasingly taking upon itself judicial review of the constitution-making process and the Knesset’s legislation — again, like India’s liberal, activist Court.

Israel does not have constituencies; it has party lists with candidate names in an order deter-mined by the party or primaries. The more votes, the more Knesset seats for the party, with candidates at the top of the list making it first. But a party must obtain at least 2 per cent votes to get its first Knesset seat. This proportional representation system itself isn’t half as confusing as it sounds, and it might work for a small country. The real problem is the “low threshold” for Knesset entry. That, coupled with proportional representation, means almost every Israeli government is an unwieldy coalition, even Right-with-Left ones. It also allows smaller coalition partners power over government and legislation disproportionate to their Knesset strength — something that there, as here, can destabilise.

... contd.