The Long Brief: The Unfinished State
A field brief on Israel’s constitutional vacuum, the judicial fight it produced, and the choices the country now faces after October 7.
Shalom, friends.
Picture three Israelis in the same living room shouting the same word — “democracy” — and having absolutely nothing in common. One means “the Court saves us from these lunatics.” One means “61 seats means I get to govern, not the Bar Association.” One means “I sat in a cockpit over Rafah while you blocked highways in Kaplan, you don’t get to lecture me about the rule of law.” Now add October 7, an ongoing war on multiple fronts, a shattered sense of trust, and a judicial system that wrote itself into the role of final guardian without anyone ever signing at the bottom.
We’ve spent years screaming about “coup,” “dictatorship,” “reform,” and “resistance,” while the real story sat in plain sight: Israel has run for nearly eight decades without a completed constitutional order. The High Court filled the vacuum by turning Basic Laws into a de facto constitution. The political class outsourced its hardest fights to that court and then woke up furious that it actually used the power they handed it.
This brief lays out the architecture, the fault lines, and the choices that now demand decisions instead of slogans.
The Unfinished State
How Israel’s Half-Built Constitutional Order Collided With Judicial Activism, Political Power, and the Aftershocks of October 7
Israel runs a modern state with only a partial operating manual. There’s no formal constitution. No second legislative chamber. No presidential veto. No federal structure. No entrenched, enumerated bill of rights. Power concentrates in one place: a Knesset majority that controls the government. That majority is checked by a single institution—the High Court—whose authority grew not from a founding pact nor Knesset bill, but from layering judicial decisions onto other judicial decisions time and again.
Into that vacuum the Court turned itself into the guardian of “democratic norms.” It stepped into every gap the founders left open. It interpreted Basic Laws as constitutional chapters, reviewed legislation and appointments, and treated almost any government act as fair game for judicial scrutiny. No popular referendum ever approved that role. No Basic Law spelled it out. The Court claimed the authority on its own. Governments lived with it because they preferred to avoid hard fights.
The reform clash that exploded months before October 7 sits on that architecture. It didn’t appear out of nowhere. It is what happens when a single-chamber parliamentary system, with no written constitution and no entrenched limits, collides with a Court that has taken on the job of final arbiter over almost everything. Every actor can wrap itself in “democracy.” The government says it has the votes. The Court says it protects rights and the system’s basic conditions. Protesters point to majoritarian excess. Coalition supporters point to unelected elites blocking the will of the people. All of them use the same word and mean different things.
So now we have a half-built constitutional order that has met a government determined to reset the balance in favor of the elected branches, and a Court determined not to surrender the powers it accumulated.
There is no agreed rulebook to settle the fight. That is the heart of the crisis.