Three major errors/misdeeds were committed by Ben-Gurion
and the other founding fathers of the State of Israel, upon its emergence
in 1948.
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The adoption of the British inherited system
of government whose legal framework is not a constitution, but judicial
precedents, tradition and the acceptance of non-written norms. Israel’s
immigrant population, arising from a multitude of mainly non-democratic
countries and cultures is the antithesis of the stolid Briton who has
been born into the system. It is like a right shoe on the left foot.
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The adoption of the "pure" proportional electoral
system for parliamentary elections in a society torn by strong
centrifugal forces, which created a situation not unlike that of the
Third and Fourth ill-fated French Republics that collapsed for want of a
cohesive government.
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The unwarranted abstention from drawing up a
constitution, which is an illegal departure from the writ of Israel’s
Declaration of Independence, that led to a steadily weakened political
"establishment" and a steadily strengthened formation of, mainly but not
only, ultra-religious "opposition" parties which, unconcerned with
Zionist objectives, "rent" their Knesset votes to the highest
establishment party bidder. Thus enriched, these parties usurp the power
of the Zionist parties.
Following is the statement made by the Declaration of
Independence, which has been sidetracked for ephemeral political
expediency:
We hereby declare that as from the termination of the
Mandate at midnight, this night of the 14th and 15th May, 1948, and until
the setting up of the duly elected bodies of the State in accordance
with a Constitution, to be drawn up by a Constituent Assembly not later
than the first day of October 1948… (Emphasis by this writer.)
The result of the Constituent Assembly’s "hijacking"
of the Parliament by declaring itself "The First Knesset" and foregoing
the drawing up of the Constitution, was a steadily increasing malfunction
of the Knesset, hence of government, as proven by the diagrams in this
article.
The Law commonly known as the "Law for Direct
Election of the Prime Minister" first proposed in the Knesset by this
writer, is not the cause for the Knesset’s malfunction. It is, rather, the
effect, since it was proposed a decade after the collapse of the
"establishment" parties began in earnest.
The remedy: The formation of a "Government for
Constitutional Unity" whose base should be both the establishment parties
(Labor and Likud) allied with the Zionist parties.
