Israeli constitutionalism has long interested comparative constitutional law scholars, whether due to its geopolitical status, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, its internal divisions, or its unique constitutional evolution. Unlike many other countries that have ratified constitutions after the Second World War, Israel was established as a parliamentary democracy, with an explicit intention to ratify a constitution at a later stage. This did not happen. Instead, it underwent a “constitutional revolution” announced by its Supreme Court. Fitting a revolution, much of comparative constitutional law scholarship has focused on this pivotal moment. The articles in this symposium depart from the scholarship focused on that moment. They seek to critically understand what has become of Israeli constitutionalism in the past decade. In this introduction, we highlight several transformations and features which we believe are essential if one is to understand the extant constitutional order in Israel. These should be understood as background conditions against which Israeli constitutionalism is operating. They include the strengthening of judicial review alongside rising political resistance to the Court’s power; populism in political discourse targeting rule of law institutions; the erosion of individual rights alongside the strengthening of nationalist elements; and increasing divisions inside Israeli society. These challenge the idea of a successful constitutional revolution in terms of its inherent promise to better protect individual rights and safeguard the rule of law. In describing these features, we seek to situate the Supreme Court, judicial review, and the legal-constitutional order generally, in the larger sphere of Israeli society and politics.
This article aims to expose the philosophical and cultural mechanisms, which allow some forms of western religion (in this case mainstream Christianity) to join hands with western capitalism in the oppression of women and of the needy. Focusing on the example of the USA, this article claims that both mainstream Christian religion and capitalism perpetuate and entrench discrimination against women and the oppression of the needy through the use of the cultural/philosophical dichotomy between love and justice and its corollary dichotomy between private and public. Against this background, the second part of the article examines several notions of love and justice, and offers a philosophical alternative to the dichotomous understanding of the two which is based on our claim that neither love nor justice is complete without the other and suggests a combined understanding of these concepts. Finally, the article examines the practical implications of such a theoretical alternative for the social and cultural structures of the capitalist state, religion and the family.
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The recent democratic backsliding and the decline of liberal hegemony have generated different explanations for the turn away from liberal democracy. This article offers an explanation based on the feminist critique of structural and theoretical flaws within liberalism and argues that these flaws are used effectively by right-wing populism to endanger liberal democracy. Using feminist critiques of political liberalism, including critiques of the public/private and political/non-political distinctions, the article claims that the liberal choice to allow the flourishing of bigotry and intolerance in the private sphere and to require respect for equality only in the public sphere has made liberalism vulnerable to the right-wing populist attack. Political liberalism has rejected the feminist call to recognize that the personal is political and has relied on political institutions and processes as barriers against illiberalism. Liberal states applying these principles are therefore ill equipped to fight right-wing populists who rally their supporters around the promise to do away with political institutions and to let the populist leaders turn their private prejudices into public policy. The article calls for a redrawing of the lines between the political and non-political, and between the public and the private, to meet the challenge of right-wing populism.
The emergence of multicultural theory and of claims of recognition by cultural, ethnic, and national minorities has brought to the forefront previously neglected aspects of the right to equality. However, when judged on their own, claims for recognition stand the risk of failing to fully capture, and even distorting, the meaning of equality. I suggest that in order to avoid this risk, multicultural claims need to be contextualized. Employing Nancy Frasers framework of two dimensions of justicerecognition and redistributionand adding a third dimensionpolitical participation, I suggest a framework for a contextualized assessment of multicultural claims that allows us to properly and fully assess their validity. I then go on to employ this framework on the claims of Israels two most significant cultural minoritiesthe Palestinian Arabs and the Ultra Orthodox Jews. I show how the use of the suggested framework helps to expose the considerable differences between these two cultural minorities, and consequently the notable difference in the merits of their claims, a difference that would have otherwise gone undetected.
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