An Israeli Senate Would Defend the Establishment from the People

Israel has been experiencing a chronic, subterranean constitutional crisis since the 1990s, one that erupted forcefully onto the surface in 2023, shortly after Benjamin Netanyahu’s current coalition was sworn in and introduced a plan to reform the judiciary. The plan, announced by Justice Minister Yariv Levin on January 4, 2023, encountered massive resistance from Israel’s leftist elite and its supporters, and was finally defeated after the anti-reform movement resorted to a political nuclear option: a threat by hundreds of reservists to walk out of their posts in the army.

Amiad Cohen and Sagi Barmak propose a different kind of reform to address the constitutional crisis, one which they hope would be less controversial. By installing a senate that would function as an upper house alongside the Knesset, they would transform the current unicameral parliament into a bicameral legislature. The senate, partly elected and partly appointed, would function as a kind of constitutional court and a check on all the lower house’s legislation.

This suggestion is predicated on a diagnosis of what ails our democracy that Cohen and Barmak share with Israel’s leftist elite: that the danger we face is too much democracy. But, as we shall argue, since the diagnosis is flawed, the remedy is misguided. It will not only fail to cure what ails us, it will likely exacerbate the problems Israel’s democracy faces.