Basic Laws of Israel

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The Basic Laws of Israel are a key component of Israel's "uncodified constitution".

The State of Israel has no formal constitution. Though its declaration of independence promised the constitution would be completed no later than October 1, 1948, the gap between religious and secular proved too difficult to bridge, and a full, unifying document was never produced. (Then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion discouraged the convention from completing their work on the constitution, saying Israel should wait until the bulk of Jews from around the world had moved to their homeland. Some historians claim, however, that Ben Gurion simply preferred to postpone any unnecessary checks on his power.)

Many religious Jews at the time opposed the idea of their nation having a document which the government would regard as nominally "higher" in authority than religious texts such as the Torah, Tanakh, Talmud, and Shulkhan Arukh. Indeed, as late as the early 1990's, Shas leader Aryeh Deri famously declared that even if the Ten Commandments were presented to him as Israel's draft constitution, he would refuse to sign his name to them.

In 1949, the first Knesset came to what was called the Harari Decision. Rather than draft a full constitution immediately, they would postpone the work, charging the Knesset's Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee with drafting the document piecemeal. Each chapter would be called a Basic Law, and when all had been written they would be compiled into a complete constitution.

Thus, Israel has what is called an "unwritten constitution", in the form of the Basic Laws of Israel. The basic laws are various pieces of legislation from the Knesset that outline the nation's political structure.

Between 1958 and 1988 the Knesset passed nine Basic Laws, all of which pertained to the institutions of state. In 1992 it passed the first two Basic Laws which related to rights; an incomplete Bill of Rights, to be sure, but the basis of the Supreme Court's recently declared powers of Judicial Review. These are the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, and Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation. These were passed by votes of 32-21 and 23-0, respectively.

In recent years, the Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee has returned to the task of drafting a full constitution. It completed a set of proposals and presented them to the Knesset on February 13, 2006, thus completing the circle and, potentially, bringing an end to the "Harari Decision" approach and the era of the Basic Laws. The leaders of Israel's three largest parties (Prime Minister-elect Ehud Olmert from Kadima, Amir Peretz from Labor, and Benjamin Netanyahu from Likud) endorsed the work and called upon the 17th Knesset to bring a full draft of a constitution to a first reading in the plenum.

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