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PARTISAN REVIEW
acceptable to large sections of the population. So the constitution proposed
by
a group of law professors would not be very different from what we have
now, although it would have a constitutional status. Personally, I think we're
better offwithout a constitution than one that would legitimize this abnormal
situation.
The religious courts are basically antidemocratic. A democratic system
enables the formulation of new laws and the elimination ofold ones. But the
religious system, Jewish, Moslem, or Christian, is based on the idea of
sacredness of a tradition which
is
unchangeable in its essence. This means
that the democratically elected Knesset, supposed to represent the will of the
people, cannot fulfill its legislative function. There are some elementary
contradictions between the basic citizenship rights presumably accorded to
each Israeli citizen and the religious jurisdiction. Thus women cannot
be
judges in any of the religious courts. They can be and are members of the
Supreme Court, of the highest military court, but they cannot judge in cases
of divorce, or even appear as witnesses before a rabbinical court.
To solve the problem about democracy we must decide on what type
of representational system to adopt. We now have extreme proportional
representation: whoever has an idea can have a party, and go to elections.
Only Romania with eighty-four parties has more than we do. We had
twenty-four parties running for the Knesset, and in the Knesset there are
representatives of seventeen parties. That's a very good representation of
ideas, but it is not efficient. Two or three members of the Knesset can have
a strong disproportional weight. Neither of the great blocks can form a
government by itself, so these small parties can decide whether or not there
is going to be a government. And because these small parties are aware of
their power (much greater in the Knesset than among the population) they
try to exploit the situation. So, when Shamir forms a government, a party of
three people
will
have two ministers and one deputy minister. Three parties
here and three parties there, each of them with its own ideology, with its
own ideas on solving Israel's problems, cannot produce a clear-cut program.
Each program always will have to compromise with one little party or
another. We now have car stickers that say, "We are fed up with you,"
meaning the politicians as well as the current democratic system. This can
easily be turned into saying that people are fed up with democracy.
Nobody says that we should stop being a representative democracy.
But people are aware that the Knesset is unable to approve a change
because Labor and Likud don't get together to change the electoral makeup,
- from proportional representation to a different type of representation. or
by raising the minimum of votes necessary for representation. As it is, we
could have a hundred parties. It's probably far-fetched, but every one or two
people in the Knesset could form a party. And because the interests of the
small parties are against change, it is difficult to bring it about. Likud and
