The U.S. Constitution was drafted in the quiet deliberation of Philadelphia in 1787. A remarkable group of political thinkers—James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin among them—spent months arguing about how to construct a republic that could endure for generations.
They debated representation, executive authority and how to restrain political ambition through carefully designed institutions, producing a system of government that has endured for more than two centuries and is a leading global model for democratic governance.
Israel, on the other hand, created a government under very different conditions. David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of independence in May 1948 came after decades of escalating conflict between Jewish and Arab communities. Immediately after the U.N. partition vote in November 1947, Arab irregular forces—soon joined by surrounding Arab states—launched an open assault against the Jewish Yishuv, the pioneers who worked the land and called it home.
At the same time, the British decision to leave Mandatory Palestine was often executed in ways that limited Jewish defense and proved uneven in restraining Arab violence. The new state juggled the absorption of waves of refugees and building institutions almost overnight. Israel’s administrative framework was hammered together under fire in a wartime workshop—functional, ingenious and necessarily improvised. The consequences of those makeshift choices are now visible in the institutional strains shaping Israeli politics today.
The contrast between the U.S. and Israeli foundations helps explain the political tensions in Israel today.
The American constitutional structure has remained relatively stable for more than two centuries, while Israel continues to wrestle with unresolved questions about the balance of power within its government.
When the delegates gathered in Philadelphia in 1787, they had already spent more than a decade debating republican government in colonial assemblies. The result was a deliberately engineered system: two legislative chambers, an independent executive, a judiciary and a federal structure dividing authority between national and state governments. The founders were consciously attempting something rarely attempted in statecraft—designing a functional and durable political framework. The summer convention distilled those years of argument into a constitutional architecture meant to endure.
The political landscape confronting Israel’s founders was far more fractured than the one facing the delegates in Philadelphia. The American founders were negotiating among 13 colonies with broadly shared political traditions.
Israel’s leaders, by contrast, were trying to build a state that had to reconcile secular and religious visions of Jewish life, competing economic and political ideologies, immigrants from dozens of countries without a common language and the unresolved status of a significant Arab minority.
At the same time, the nascent state was absorbing the civilizational shock of the Holocaust—the destruction of one-third of the Jewish people—an event that reshaped Jewish political, religious and historical consciousness in ways that cannot be overstated.
Ben-Gurion facilitated the birthing of a state under extraordinary pressure. Brilliant, impatient and famously brusque, he dominated the politics of Israel’s early years. Yet even critics recognized the scale of his vision. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin is often credited with capturing Ben-Gurion’s sense of historical scope in a memorable line: “When ordinary men see the sun rise, they see a new day; when Ben-Gurion sees the sun rise, he sees the universe rotating.”
For him, the urgent task was not constitutional elegance but the uncertain survival of a state in its infancy.
Israel’s Declaration of Independence promised that a constitution would soon be adopted. The realities were more complicated. Religious parties feared that a secular constitution could undermine Jewish law, while the ruling Labor Party movement was deeply secular. Thus, when the issue came before the Knesset in 1950, the political reality proved too complicated. The constitutional can, already kicked down the road in 1948, was deferred again in 1950.
The Harari Resolution postponed a full constitution and instead initiated the adoption of “Basic Laws,” intended to become chapters of a future constitution. That constitution has never quite arrived—an outcome that aligned with Ben-Gurion’s preference for strong executive flexibility.
The Harari system worked remarkably well—until it didn’t. Israel survived multiple wars and constant terror while absorbing millions of immigrants. It built a dynamic economy, forged important international relationships and sustained a lively democracy. Such multitasking alone could be seen as miraculous.
Yet improvisation carries consequences. Without a settled institutional framework defining the boundaries of power, the relationship between Israel’s branches of government devolved gradually and sometimes ambiguously.
The Knesset holds broad legislative authority. Over time, the Supreme Court assumed increasing powers of judicial review. Yet the precise limits of those powers were never clearly settled in a founding document. The result is the institutional tension visible today, in which elected governments and the judiciary increasingly find themselves in direct conflict over where authority ultimately resides.
One structural feature of the American system that Israel never developed is meaningful representation of regional interests. In the United States, the Senate represents the states while the House represents the population, and federalism distributes authority across multiple layers of government. Israel, by contrast, remains one of the most centralized democracies in the world, with nearly all major political decisions concentrated in a single national arena.
That concentration intensifies institutional conflict, turning disputes between branches of government into existential struggles. Some Israeli constitutional scholars have suggested that the country might benefit from introducing a second legislative chamber representing regions or local governments. Such a body, even if not modeled directly on the U.S. Senate, could provide a stabilizing counterweight while strengthening local representation.
None of this diminishes the achievement of Israel’s founders. Their priorities were entirely rational given the circumstances they faced. A state fighting for survival could hardly afford months of constitutional debate.
Yet emergency solutions sometimes cast long shadows. Decisions made under the pressures of 1948 shaped the institutional framework Israelis still live with today.
Since its founding in 1948, Israel has lived with institutional arrangements forged in emergency conditions. Those arrangements proved resilient enough to build a thriving state. But the strains visible in recent years—from judicial reform battles to the shock of Oct. 7—indicate that the unfinished constitutional questions of Israel’s founding should no longer be postponed.
America designed its governing architecture after securing independence. Israel secured independence first. Kicking the constitutional question further down the road won’t end well.
