CLARITY WOULD BE CATASTROPHIC:

From the beginning this movement was patriotic--self-consciously so. Draped in Israeli flags, adorned with army paraphernalia, the demonstrators chanted, "Democracy." Some even called for "equality." What did they mean?

It has been far from clear. Part of what has fueled the largely secular reservists' protest is anger toward the Orthodox, who they believe shirk their national responsibilities, and the fear that the religious parties, empowered in the current coalition, seek to turn Israel into a halachic state, or Jewish theocracy. It was the scale of the reservists' protest this spring, which broke a central cultural taboo in mainstream Israeli society, that prompted Gallant to speak out. He was concerned both that Israel risked compromising its military preparedness and that army service would no longer seem sacrosanct, beyond partisan political divisions. Now, by demonstrating against what they see as the prospect of a right-wing religious dictatorship, these reservists have shown that they exert the ultimate leverage. But until last January they showed no qualms about serving within the apparatus of Israel's apartheid regime in the West Bank. Presumably, if the judicial overhaul is scrapped, they will return to doing so.

Indeed, the protest movement's concept of democracy has often been rather meager. At the Saturday night rallies, powerful former generals and politicians warned the crowds that the dismantling of the judiciary could expose Israeli soldiers to prosecution at the International Criminal Court for human rights abuses by making Israel appear unable to adjudicate such cases satisfactorily. For the most part, Palestinian citizens of Israel have abstained from joining the movement, which has overlooked them almost entirely. The protesters, it can seem, want to protect civil liberties for Jews--freedom of expression, LGBT rights, and gender equality--while preserving the existing infrastructure of Jewish supremacy and maintaining Israel's occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza. They appear oblivious to the fact that a state that legally privileges one ethno-religious group over all others can never be a genuine democracy.

Within the movement, a new demand has emerged since Netanyahu put the legislation on pause: not just to stop the judicial overhaul but to write a formal constitution. Although Israel has a series of what are called Basic Laws that serve a pseudoconstitutional function, it has never had a comprehensive written constitution. Yet the movement's nationalism and its blindness to the occupation--the features that have allowed it to grow large enough to obstruct Netanyahu--all but guarantee that a new constitution will prove impossible to ratify. For no attempt will be able to resolve the fundamental conflict that has bedeviled Israel since its establishment in 1948, a central reason it lacks a constitution in the first place: the irreconcilable contradiction between the country's Jewish-supremacist character and its liberal-democratic aspirations.

Under the terms of the 1947 United Nations resolution that partitioned British Mandatory Palestine and authorized Israel's creation, the new Jewish state was supposed to write such a founding document. Israel's first leaders failed to do so, but not because they didn't try. The drafting fell to the Frankfurt-born, Heidelberg-educated jurist Leo Kohn, then an adviser in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Kohn had gained scholarly renown for his work on the 1922 constitution of the Irish Free State, another former British colony. He was also a religious Zionist--an Orthodox Jew and a nationalist. This was another reason for assigning him the task: he was meant to bridge the gap between the demands of the secular Zionist parties and their Orthodox counterparts. That gap had nearly undermined the drafting of Israel's Declaration of Independence, which was signed only at the last minute, before the British Mandate expired in May 1948.

Between 1947 and 1948 Kohn wrote three draft constitutions intended for the nascent state's provisional government. Already in those early years, the tensions that would make ratification impossible were evident. "WE, THE JEWISH PEOPLE," began one of the draft preambles. The document pledged to "rebuild our Commonwealth in accordance with the ideals of Peace and Justice of the Prophets of Israel." But its only recognition that the state would include a significant population of non-Jewish Arabs is in a slight nod to "the rights of the stranger within our gates."

Kohn understood that there was no possibility that the Palestinians, against whom Zionist forces were fighting a war of expulsion, would agree to any constitution and therefore felt it unnecessary to accommodate them. His preamble also reflected the prevailing Zionist sense that non-Jews could never be part of "the people" to whom the state belonged. The problem, then, was how to draft a constitution that reflected this exclusionary conception of national belonging but also, in a decolonizing world, appeared to make the country a procedural democracy.

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