Israel has never had a constitution in its sixty year history. A committee is hard at work trying to draft one. Some think that the first thing that has to change is Israel’s system of proportional representation, which assures that elected officials are responsible to their parties, not to the voters. Israeli society is so fractured that no government can be formed without a coalition of bigger parties and much smaller ones. Because of this, the smaller parties end up wielding influence far out of proportion to their actual numbers, thus opening the door to extreme views on such issues as accommodation with the Palestinians and pork-barrel projects that are not favored by the majority of Israelis. Amos Asa-El, who used to edit the Jerusalem Post , writes (in a piece quoted by The Economist, cited below):
“This system has been depleting Israel’s political energies for decades: it radicalized the territorial debate, debilitated the economy, obstructed long-term planning, derailed government action, distracted cabinets, diverted budgets, weakened prime ministers, destabilized governments, enabled anonymous and often incompetent people to achieve positions of great influence and responsibility and blurred the distinctions between the executive and legislative branches of government.”
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