Twenty years ago I felt I did something very meaningful for the State of Israel. Flying as a navigator in a C-130 Hercules, as part of Operation Moses, I helped bring 100 Ethiopian Jews from an airstrip in the desert of Sudan straight to Ben Gurion Airport. I had flown in wars and in numerous operational missions, but nothing moved me and gave me such satisfaction and pride as watching my fellow Jewish brothers and sisters kissing the ground of Eretz Yisrael. At that time I believed I would never be able to perform a greater service for my country.
I was wrong. Bringing the Ethiopian Jews home was phenomenal, but soon it occurred to me that fixing that home was no less important. I learned it the hard way. Between 1992 and 1995, as the director of the Government Press Office under the late Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, I was a witness to significant processes the government initiated under Rabin’s leadership for three large segments of the public: the religious, the Arabs, and the settlers. I learned that, in the absence of an embracing super-framework, some set of rules of the game approved by all, Israeli society might fall apart.
At the beginning of Rabin’s premiership, then-minister Shimon Shetreet initiated a process of reform in the Religious Councils. The reform was necessary and intended to correct an insufferable situation: the waste of public funds and corruption that hastened the aversion to religion by large secular sectors of the public.
Quickly, however, the process was portrayed as an attempt by a “secular” government to harm the religious communities, and it turned into a focus for political struggle. If there had been an a priori agreement regarding the proper balance between state and religion (a Constitution), it would have been possible to lessen the alienation that developed as a result of the governmental process.
The Rabin government also turned its attention to the Arab sector, in a way no government had. Yet, this change of attitude only emphasized the depth of the inequality experienced by Israeli Arabs over the years. I thought then that if the rights of this important minority would have been recognized in an organized manner, and not given to the whims of random politicians, this minority would have felt a greater sense of belonging to the Israeli society.
And finally, with the Oslo process, a great rift was created between the Rabin government and the large public of settlers and their supporters. In an atmosphere of unprecedented incitement, Israeli society was torn and dragged to violence, which culminated with the assassination of the prime minister. Not only in hindsight, but even during those very days, I hoped for any type of framework through which we could “agree on how to disagree.”
When I joined the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) in 1996, I realized that this was the place not only to think about the problem, but also to do something about it. In the last five years, fellows of the institute, under the leadership of former president of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Meir Shamgar, have taken upon themselves the awesome task of drafting a constitution for Israel. Today, we have a draft constitution, and I’m very proud of it.
First, because of the process itself. We, fellows at IDI, started to examine and study each and every article and chapter of the proposed constitution. Our experts scrutinized for us every constitution in the free world, to ensure that we learn from the experience of others and avoid their mistakes. Then we debated it until we reached an agreement, which usually was a compromise. We called the whole endeavor a “Constitution by Consensus,” because we didn’t believe we should enforce it on unwilling people.
But reaching a consensus within IDI wasn’t enough. Therefore, we created a Public Council of 100 members, comprised of the best people we could h