Constitutionalism, Nationalism & the Dismantling of Democracy, Part Four: Maintaining the Racial Hierarchy.
The cause of democracy & the pursuit of equality are often used as political cover by ruthless Western governments as they implement anti-democratic policies against both their own people and those of other, poorer nations, that seek to maintain and sustain an unequal balance that keeps power in the hands of elites.
‘More than a century and a half before the American Revolution, a human hierarchy had evolved on the contested soil of what would become the United States, a concept of birthright, the temptation of entitled expansion that would set in motion the world’s first democracy and, with it, a ranking of human value and usage…/…they took pre-existing notions of their own centrality, reinforced by their self-interested interpretation of the Bible, and created a hierarchy of who could do what, who could own what, who was on top and who was on the bottom, and who was in between. There emerged a ladder of humanity, global in nature, as the upper-rung people would descend from Europe with rungs inside that designation, the English protestants at the very top with their guns and resources would ultimately prevail in the bloody fight over North America. Everyone else would rank in descending order on the basis of their proximity to those deemed most superior. The ranking would continue down ward until one arrived at the very bottom — African captives transported to build the New World and to serve the victors for all their days, one generation after the next, for twelve generations.’
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson (1).
The maintenance of hierarchy using democratic constitutionalism
The new state of Israel was unique, David Ben-Gurion said in a recently translated speech he had made back in 1949, and as such, Israel should not feel beholden to do the ‘traditional’ thing, and just have a written constitution because it was the expected thing.
Ben-Gurion points out that one of the things against having a constitution was that they tend to bind future generations to the laws and practices of the past, an observation I have made frequently on social media with respect to the U.S. constitution, a point rammed home in 2022 when Roe vs Wade was overturned, and the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) gave states the opportunity to turn the clock back to the days of the founders; in this case perpetuating a system of patriarchy, thereby maintaining the systems control over the reproductive lives, decisions and futures of the female half of the American population (but see Appendix A. in the adjacent post for more).
For Ben-Gurion this observation may not have been directly related to the perpetuation of a hierarchical system of humanity, but the point he makes remains pertinent nonetheless; past values and traditions from the nineteenth century were being used in the U.S. to control the trajectory and reproductive lives of a large proportion of twenty-first century Americans.
In his decision following the overturning of Roe, Judge Clarence Thomas; concurring (see Appendix B. for more on this opinion), said rights and privileges not specifically ‘enumerated’ in the Fourteenth Amendment (1866), like abortion rights, would now also be under consideration as to whether they could still reasonably be protected under the constitution, and in so doing he opened the way up for further legal challenges to rulings that underpin many modern social rights in the U.S., such as the use of contraception, same sex marriage and same sex relationships.
And this decision, taken by an unelected panel of judges, with at the moment a distinct right-wing flavour, many having been appointed for their political views by President Trump when he was in power, is indicative of the reasons Ben-Gurion rejected the notion of a constitution for Israel.
Trump, may have won the 2016 election by virtue of having won the required majority of 270 votes in the old American, and highly anti-democratic oddity called the Electoral College (see Figure 1. above), despite having comfortably lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, and with his appointment of, what have proven to be, highly politicised Supreme Court justices, he was exercising what might rightly be called ‘tyranny of the minority’ over the people whom he was supposed to be leading
That said, the election of a democratically elected President who won a minority of the peoples votes is a rarity, even in the U.S.. Trump’s 2016 win was only the second time this century, and the fourth time in American electoral history, and as such, must be considered a democratic anomaly, a surprising outcome based not on who won the most votes, but a constitutional electoral invention hungover from the founding era of slavery.
Jack Balkin, a constitutional scholar, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the the First Amendment at Harvard Law School, and a constitutional originalist like, but not the same as Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas, put it thus,‘…the Republican Party has managed to maintain and even increase a conservative Supreme Court majority while losing its status as the majority party in the United States. The Republican Party has benefitted from the Senate’s malapportionment, which allows less populated states that tend to vote Republican to have disproportionate influence in the Senate, and hence disproportionate influence over judicial appointments. In addition, since 2000, the Republican Party has won the presidency twice without winning the national popular vote. In fact, from 1992 onwards, the Republican Party has won the popular vote in a Presidential election only once, in 2004.’
Thus, a minority President took power, appointed three, conservative Supreme Court justices, thereby giving the Court a conservative majority, which then had the power to restrict the modern rights and freedoms of many women based on a constitution that was written more than 200 years ago when such concerns were, likely not foreseen.
As Ben-Gurion stated, “…in general, parliament involves itself in the making of laws for the needs of the time and the hour. Law is the fruit of its time; there is no eternity in law.”
And in an incendiary statement that could have come right out the mouth of one of today’s right-wing critics of SCOTUS, Ben-Gurion said, “I don’t think it’s possible to delegate authority to the court to decide whether the laws are kosher or not.”
Plainly Ben-Gurion didn’t have a crystal ball, but such a controversial comment is perhaps indicative not only of the thought he had given to this matter in respect of Israel, but also, on a much wider scale, of the potential for the subversion of power that could perhaps lurk hidden in between the lines of any written constitution.
“A constitution is what the nation wants after free debate and judgement and after a vote,” he said, and should not be subject to the whims and fancies of reactionary judges who, given the kind of authority SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) has, can hold the vast democratic majority to decisions that cannot be seen any other way than as a tyranny of the very smallest of minority’s.
And this point jumps out at me as being wholly relevant to the constitutional situation and arguments vis-a-vis the conservative majority of non-elected, politically appointed judges in SCOTUS.
And whilst SCOTUS is rightly being criticised for what many, myself included, view as a politically biased, retrospective, post-modernist interpretation of the constitution, the fallback, the democratic safety net if you will, for most Americans remains the constitution itself which remains revered as the keystone of the national myth and the protector of the American democracy, and is worshipped with a blind, almost religious zeal that Aziz Rana calls ‘creedal constitutionalism (2)’
Ben-Gurion himself saw the ‘reactionary’ role SCOTUS might play when they acted to restrain FDR’s freedom of action as he sought to implement the New Deal as well as during WWII itself.
‘America is a big and rich nation, with big capabilities. It doesn’t matter to it what absurdities are in it,’ he asserted, whereas Israel, as small nation, could not afford such absurdities.
These constitutional absurdities, as Ben-Gurion calls them, Rana (2) sees as the ‘endless veto points’ that ensure that the rich and the political elites can use these absurdities of power to their advantage, while keeping the poor under hoof, mesmerised by the dangling narrative of the unattainable prize of true democracy.
‘Americans view their Constitution as a source of of important values, including justice, equality, democracy, and human rights. They view the Constitution’s guarantees as objects of aspiration; the Constitution either offers or refers to a standard that stands above basic law, criticizes it, restrains it, and holds it to account. Fidelity to the Constitution requires that we aspire to something better and more just than the political, social and legal arrangements we currently maintain. Hence, the Constitution trumps ordinary law, supervises quotidian acts of governmental power, and holds both law and power to account. Thus, we say that the Constitution is not merely basic law, it is also higher law; that is, it is a source of inspiration and aspiration, a repository of values and principles.’
Living Originalism, Jack Balkin, 2011 (3).
Fidelity to the Constitution
The quote above from the first few pages of Jack Balkin’s book, Living Originalism (3), puts some flesh on the bones of why American’s hold their constitution so dear. And I don’t doubt Balkin’s integrity, motivation, emotions or depth of feeling in writing those uplifting words. And maybe it is all those things to Balkin himself, and to many more Americans; maybe it is a source of high moralistic values, an inspiration and repository of values and principles.
But, if it is all those uplifting things, then why do those words leave me feeling that America and Americans have somehow fallen short of those high ideals. And if the constitution truly does inspire and create aspirations in their citizens, then why don’t we see more evidence of these higher ideals? Why is it that African-Americans still struggle to fight their way free from beneath the clinging, lingering human hierarchy established all those decades before the constitution was ever conceived (1)?
For me, and not wishing to demean Balkin’s fine ideals, the almighty dollar is far more of an inspiration for most Americans than the constitution or its high ideals will ever be, and maybe that is part of the problem? Maybe dollar worship is the downside to the constitution’s upside?
Economic inequality itself is profoundly undemocratic and has long been known to create social and political divisions. Walter Rauschenbusch, a German-born, New York based Baptist, wrote in Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), that ‘Western civilisation (wa)s passing through a social revolution unparalleled in history for scope and power…/…this social crisis is the overshadowing problem of our generation (4).’
Firmly laying the blame for societies ills on the corrosive social and moral consequences of extreme economic inequality, Rauschenbusch was clear about the threat that divisive political struggle and growing economic division posed for a democratic society.
‘The vastness and free sweep of our concentrated wealth on the one side, the independence, moral vigor, and political power of the common people on the other side, promise a long drawn grapple of contesting forces (4).’
Just like Alexis de Tocqueville (5) had noted a hundred years earlier, the threat inequality posed was present even in the early days of America, when he observed that, ‘The master and the workmen have then here no similarity, and their differences increase every day,’ before cautioning that, should the economic differential continue to increase, democracy itself would be at risk, and America may well slide into aristocracy, the gaping gateway through which this tyranny would drive being the industrially grounded, social and economic inequality that was on the rise everywhere.
Indeed, many today express such fears with respect to Trump, who exploits political divisions and social inequalities to further his own ends with the aim of starting a new ‘elite’ American aristocracy.
The Christian evangelists and nationalists who have thrown their weight behind Trump, peddling profoundly un-Christian attitudes, using tropes and messages that are far from removed from traditional Christian values in their intent and meaning, look to push a distinct ‘us’ and ‘them’ configuration of society that maintains the social hierarchy, promotes division, and drives racial and religious inequality based on the spurious ‘facts’ found in conspiracies such as the great replacement theory.
The high religious ideals that began the American project in March 1630 on the quay at Southampton with the lay sermon, ‘A Model of Christian Charity,’ given by the Puritan John Winthrop just before he set sail in the Arbella, have long been drowned, lost and forgotten by the greed, avariciousness and self-interest of men like Trump and Elon Musk.
“‘No man is made more honorable than another or more wealthy” said Winthrop, “…out of any particular and singular respect to himself, but for the glory of the creator and the common good of the creature, man.” Material well being, like salvation, was a gift from God. And that gift stemmed purely from God’s gracious act, not recognition of any merit in the individual recipient (4).’
These high ideals have been trampled in the stampede for land, tobacco, cotton, gold and the various trappings of wealth that led to the gross, moral imposition of slavery, and a racial hierarchy that lingers on to this very day (1), and has been given credence and legality to a document that, for all its fine words and sentiments, for me, remains as the beating heart of the great lie that is America today.
‘What the liberal theologian has retained after abandoning to the enemy one Christian doctrine after another is not Christianity at all, but a religion which is so entirely different from Christianity as to belong in a distinct category.’
Christianity and Liberalism (1923), J. Gresham Machen; expressing his disgust at liberal fundamentalist views of modernist Christianity (4).
The great American project
Aziz Rana insists, ‘The U.S. Constitution is profoundly undemocratic, as generations of abolitionists, socialists, labor activists, and Black radicals have loudly proclaimed. Just as it did a hundred years ago, the document creates an infrastructure for minority rule — a specific and very American brand of white authoritarianism. This is because the Constitution organizes representation around states rather than the principle of one person, one vote. And it fragments and undermines popular authority through endless veto points. The consequences today are numerous: presidents elected who lose the popular vote; a Senate that gives vastly more power to voters in Wyoming than in California; an impassible route for constitutional amendments; a tiny, lifetime-appointed Supreme Court that repudiates popular policies, including the right to abortion, and elevates the president above the law — abetting a culture of impunity (2).’
Rana (2) urges Americans to reject blind faith in the constitution, and to bin, in part, or in whole, the constitution itself, largely because the ideas of freedom, liberty and democracy that Americans believe the constitution invests in the nation and its people, are nothing but an historical political project aimed at putting the document at the centre of American civic culture, and far from protecting liberty and democracy, Rana asserts the constitution has in fact ‘abetted authoritarian and repressive agendas as much as it has upheld civil libertarian or democratic ones.’
Indeed, the Civil War highlighted the failures of the founding myths, while industrialisation and an emerging class structure built around wealth, or the lack of it, saw Europeans, accustomed to centuries of class struggle and racial hierarchy to see what Americans could not, or would not see; that the constitution was no more than “a class instrument directed against the democracy,” as the progressive era historian Vernon Parrington called it (2).
And at the bottom of the heap in the U.S.; the African-American slaves who, more than a century and a half before the Revolution that gave birth to the United States, were already deeply entrenched in a Caste system on the contested land ‘destined’ to be come America. Their lowly status determined by an accident of birth, and the presence or absence of an ‘inadvertent birthmark …over their entire bodies that should have been nothing more than a neutral variation in human appearance (1).’
Unable to enslave the original inhabitants of the land that came to be ‘colonised’ under a mythological pretext that came to be known as ‘Manifest Destiny,’ the colonists began a systematic process of mass slaughter and/or enforced exile for the native inhabitants that today we would call a genocide. It saw the natives dispossessed, evicted, then killed or exiled from their own land, before being exiled again from the developing Caste system (1), leaving African-Americans alone at the very bottom of the pile, and white, Christian males very much at the top.
In her Pullitzer Prize winning book, Caste (1), Isabel Wilkerson writes, ‘…by the late 1600’s Africans were not merely slaves; they were hostages subject to unspeakable tortures that their captors documented without remorse.’
She continues, ‘Americans are loath to talk about enslavement in part because what little we know goes against our perception of our country as a just and enlightened nation, a beacon of democracy for the world.’ It’s almost as if, she insists, that by not acknowledging or openly discussing the issue it somehow puts distance between the terrible events of slavery and the guilt and shame that any discussion would inevitably bring for the nation, arguably built on the back of not one one, but two brutal genocides that often ran concurrently, and remain wholly unacknowledged and unaccounted for largely because of the heroic myths and legends that made America have obscured the murderous undertaking that was, and still is, the American project.
Wilkerson says, quite rightly in my opinion (even if she does include the destruction of the natives in her assessment), ‘the country cannot become whole until it confronts what was not a chapter in its history, but the basis of its economic and social order. For a quarter of a millennium slavery was the country,’ and this was true even in those states that sat outside of the birthplace of the Caste system.
Anecdotally, Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his landmark text, ‘Democracy in America (5),’ ‘…the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.’
Well, I never…
Hannah Arendt, writing a controversial opinion piece in Dissent (1959) following the ‘Little Rock Nine’ incident, also referred the reader to de Toqueville’s text when she pointed out his prescient observation that ‘equality of opportunity and condition, as well as equality of rights, constituted the basic “law” of American democracy,’ and that the principle of equality enshrined in the American constitution, with its’ inherent ‘dilemmas and perplexities,’ it was set to become perhaps the most dangerous of all challenges to the American way of life.
This absurdity, as Ben-Gurion might call it, that Arendt draws us to, and the perplexity of the system itself she identifies, for which she was, at the time, so heavily criticised (6), was that the ‘color problem’ may well become further magnified by the very achievement of the enshrined constitutional rights of social, economic and political equality for all.
What scared her, she wrote, was not the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) that legally brought segregation to an end, or the rather predictable high majorities of southerners who opposed that decision, but the 92% of individuals who preferred ‘mob rule’ over ‘law abiding citizenship.’
In Edward County, Virginia, following the Supreme Court decision, the white run school board wanted to delay integration as long as possible. So, in a far-reaching, but radical decision it shut down the school system, not for one week, or for one semester; but for five long years. It then diverted all educational funding into the private educational sector, but to white only academies alone, leaving the black children once again, out in the educational cold (1).
This is just one example of many such local decisions that sought to stymie a decision taken at the federal level. The maintenance of segregation and the caste system was always about protecting the beneficiaries; those at the top of the hierarchy were willing to risk all legal challenges from the highest authority in the land in order to perpetuate what they saw as their rightful privileges.
The fact of social segregation was not illegal per se — Arendt points out that we all segregate ourselves as a matter of course in our social relations and interactions, and not always along racial lines, thus, in some way we all discriminate — it was the legalised enforcement of the segregation and hence, the discrimination in the political realm, that was illegal.
Furthermore, the denial of some ‘inalienable’ constitutional rights, such as the right of all Americans to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ through legal means, such as with the anti-miscegenation laws that existed all across the southern states, in many cases until very recently, compared to which ‘the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one’s skin or color or race’ would appear to be ‘minor’ indeed.
Thus, the fundamental ability or right to choose who one spends one’s private life with, who one might wish to marry or choose as a life partner, was removed by such laws and brought discrimination into the private sphere where, in a free society, the government should not have power.
Yet, the Supreme Court still puzzlingly put its energies into legalising the ‘minor’ while leaving the ‘major’ concerns untouched, eliciting merely the appearance of equality which in reality, remained a long way short of the political ideal represented in the constitution.
To be clear, whilst Arendt may have uncharacteristically muddled some facts, especially in relation to the early paragraphs of this piece (6), which she agonised over publishing for more than 2 years, acknowledging her errors retrospectively, the points she makes in respect of governmental interference on basic rights and freedoms, undoubtedly coloured as they were by her years in an increasingly fascist pre-war Germany, remain salient and relevant.
To have or to have not…
Even as Ben-Gurion’s absurd, constitutional absurdities may get washed over to some extent in the U.S. simply by virtue of the nations federalist construction, its’ sheer size and magnitude, the absence of a constitution in Israel does no more to guarantee the absence of absurdities than does a legally enforceable constitution.
The exception to the constitutional rule that Ben-Gurion insisted should be applied to Israel in its’ unique position in 1948, and the associated moral exceptionalism that Israel’s leaders and most of its people have claimed as their right since independence has been steadily eroded over the decades, and more especially since 1967 and the onset of the, now legally accepted, illegality of their continued occupation and settlement of Palestinian lands.
That moral erosion has gathered pace since October 7, and is perhaps personified in the words of Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who declared on August 5 that starving 2 million Palestinians in Gaza ‘to death’ might be the ‘right and moral’ thing to do until Israeli hostages held in Gaza are released, but, then added with evident displeasure, that the ‘world won’t let us.’
And even though the U.S. State Department said Biden’s government was ‘appalled by these comments and reiterates that this rhetoric is harmful and disturbing,’ the comments drew disappointingly little reaction globally.
As Michael Young wrote in Carnegie’s Diwan blog, that such a mute, weak, impotent sanction should be given to calls from a government minister for the forced starvation of an entire population as being nothing more than ‘harmful and disturbing,’ is indicative of the moral abdication of the U.S. led West in response to Israel’s ongoing genocide. Condemnations of the continuing slaughter from Western politicians and media merely act as cover for their complete lack of any action, and merely add to what Jack Khoury calls a morally ‘hollow routine.’
The simultaneous moral abdication of the West, and the abject complicity of the U.S. in Israel’s genocide, remain important though because it provides a totally immoral, yet conversely moralising justification from Western leaders for the money-making supply of Western weapons — while, incidentally, and unsurprisingly, helping to line the pockets of a huge number of American law-makers — delivered to Netanyahu’s criminal regime, but also provides a faux moral underpinning for Western democracies, whose running narrative since 1945 has been the protection of so-called ‘universal human rights,’ as enshrined in the UN Charter, which remain universal but only for those in the cosy closet of the Western nations club.
The inconvenient fact that the legal arm of the UN, the ICJ, has declared Israel’s occupation and settlements illegal, saying the de facto annexation of the West Bank is enacted through ‘systematic discrimination, segregation and apartheid,’ in merely supplying just another reason for the West to dig its moralistically verbose heels in, and, along with Israel, resort to the time-honoured, and vastly overused insult of antisemitism against the court. Citing Israel’s impunity as virtuous because, as Pankaj Mishra so eloquently pointed out in the LRB, both the guilty West and the U.S. more especially, see Israel as free from ‘any moral restrictions, since one who is in danger of annihilation sees himself exempted from any moral considerations which might restrict his efforts to save himself.’
The irony that more than 17,000 dead Palestinian children pose such a threat to more than 6 million well fed Israelis is not lost, except on those who remain interred in Gaza’s gathering ruins.
As Michael Young rightly points put, again referencing Mishra’s piece: ‘By engaging in vast crimes in Gaza, “Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945.” That is why “(t)he profound rupture we feel today between the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945 — the history in which the Shoah has been for many years the central event and universal reference.” In light of this, “it seems that only those jolted into consciousness by the calamity of Gaza can rescue the Shoah from Netanyahu, (President Joe) Biden, (Olaf) Scholz and (former British prime minister Rishi) Sunak and re-universalise its moral significance.”’
Furthermore, the set of basic laws and norms that stands in for a constitution in Israel and supposedly gives it credibility in the West a democratic nation, has been trampled into dust by Netanyahu’s latest coalition. Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition have consistently refused to honour High Court rulings leading to what many believe is a constitutional crisis. Time after time, they have ignored the rulings and legal interpretations of the Attorney General Gali Baharav-Mira.
Not that such unlawful behaviour is anything new in Israel, because it is not, but it has reached new heights of illegality under Netanyahu’s latest governmental iteration. His self-evident narcissism is perhaps only matched by that of the man he would see installed as America’s next President; Donald Chump…sorry, Trump. And a finer, strutting pair of morally degraded peacocks we ever could hope to see!
Netanyahu’s all-consuming self-interest, and his callous disregard for anything positive for the nation he is supposed to be leading, is on full show almost every time he opens his mouth to speak. And in light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza (and the West Bank), that Netanyahu so grandly calls a war, many, many Israeli soldiers have been killed fighting the war he will not end. Exact numbers are unknown because the government will not give figures. Yet, the pressure on the Israeli population to provide a constant supply of fit, young men and women to be sacrificed at the alter of Netanyahu’s political aspirations is immense, and growing all the time. And yet, a large part of the population (an estimated 17% or c.1.3 million) has been exempt from this pressure.
However, in June this year, the High Court ordered the government to draft, previously exempt, Haredi men into the IDF. Ignoring the High Court’s ruling, and dismissing the Attorney General’s orders that, in light of the nation’s severe needs at the height of the war, Haredi men must be drafted immediately, the ruling has not been enforced, and just a small fraction of those ordered to be drafted have in fact joined up.
Other rulings, especially in respect of settler activities in the occupied territories of the West Bank, have long been ignored and disobeyed. This consistent, long standing lack of regard for the legal advisory system began in earnest following legal petitions that declared Netanyahu incapacitated and unfit for his duties as Prime Minister, and since then his disdain of the justice system and for the rule of law has got completely out of control.
‘Until the current government was formed, it was generally understood that the attorney general represented the prime minister, government ministers, and the government in petitions submitted against them. In the past, a situation in which the government was represented by a private attorney because the attorney general refused to defend it in court for thinking its position was contrary to the law, was exceptionally rare. Today, it’s become the norm.’
Dr. Roy Peled, a specialist on law at the College of Management Academic Studies in Israel, tells us that it would be hard to find any government in a properly-run country today behaving in ways resembling the government of Israel. “In the 19th century in the United States, there were presidents who ignored inconvenient court rulings, but this is a phenomenon that has pretty much vanished from the world,” he says. “When the Supreme Court in the United States handed down the famous ruling that it is necessary to enable Black students to attend White schools, this created a tremendous political problem for the president and threatened the unity of the country.”
Yet, “the president did not hesitate for a moment concerning his duty to enforce the ruling, nor did he try to interpret it narrowly and specifically. He understood the court’s message, did not try to outsmart it, and when the need arose, sent soldiers to the recalcitrant states to ensure that the ruling was enforced both in letter and spirit, even though he was not enthusiastic about it.” The fact that local authorities often circumvented the law as detailed above in Virginia, is neither her nor there in this respect. Israel is, as Ben-Gurion tells us, a small country and could not get away with the same absurdities as a far, far larger nation, like the U.S.. But it must be said, it is making a damn good fist of turning the absurd into government policy!
As DR Peled confirms, “It is very difficult to imagine today’s government of Israel investing any effort beyond the minimum forced upon it to implement what is obligated by a High Court ruling, never mind taking the spirit of the ruling to heart.”
Now the lack of a constitution hasn’t, of course, made all this possible. But given the profound ease of Netanyahu’s judicial coup, which is continuing apace even as the war goes on, and as the huge numbers of Palestinian dead mount, one has to play devil’s advocate here and ask: If the lack of Ben-Gurion’s ‘special laws,’ that would come as an integral part of a written constitution, and the power to sanction those who break the laws therein, has in large part aided and abetted not only the legalised coup, but also the ease with which the Palestinians and their basic rights have been pushed aside, would Israel not have been better off with a written constitution?
I digress…
Thanks for reading, and back soon with next part in this series.
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents; Isabel Wilkerson, 2020.
- The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them; Aziz Rana, 2024.
- Living Originalism; Jack M. Balkin, 2011.
- Religion and the Rise of Capitalism; Benjamin M. Friedman, 2021.
- Democracy in America; Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840. Translation by Henry Reeve, 1998.
- Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock;”
Roger Berkowitz, The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. 8/2020, 73–80.
