The Socio-Political Origins of the Israeli Second Constitutional Revolution

Abstract In recent years, Israel has joined countries that are experiencing democratic backsliding, which has reached its peak in the government presenting its ‘2023 legal reform’, mobilizing a frontal constitutional change, and the constitutional crisis that followed. This event symbolizes the culmination of the Israeli Counter-Revolution, one that developed in the decades before 2023, and which aspires to replace the constitutional order established since the mid-1990s, known as the (first) Constitutional Revolution. To date, scholarship has so far failed to account for the underlying socio-political origins of this counter-revolution. This article will focus of the Israeli ‘2023 legal reform’ in order to present five positive socio-political explanations to this Israeli Second Constitutional Revolution. According to the first explanation, Israel is going through a Constitutional Moment, a public rising to an unusual reformative republican moment, in which the public takes part in raising an unusual civil voice for constitutional change. According to the second explanation, the government’s move should be explained as a deception and a mistake. The ‘2023 legal reform’ was a radical and anti-democratic departure only as a deception move. Its initiators did not anticipate the public and political backlash. According to the third explanation, the changes we see should be explained as elite cooperation, a compromise (and not a struggle) between elites in Israel. According to the fourth explanation, the ‘2023 legal reform’ is a smoke-screen for a deeper administrative change and has characteristics of Autocratic Legalism. Informal constitutional change is actually deeper; and in some realms of the Israeli administrative state – a deeper anti-democratic change is already taking place. The fifth explanation sees the ‘2023 legal reform’ as a preventive insurance counter-move of political and ideological distress of its conservative perpetrators and as a ‘hegemonic preservation’ effort. The government’s steps should be explained as a ’preventive insurance move’ whose purpose is to prevent a deeper progressive constitutional change from the opposite political side.