A techie’s guide to Israel’s monumental constitutional crisis
If the Netanyahu government pushes through it's contentious judicial reforms, Startup Nation's Operating System will be run on code written 4,000-6,000 years ago. It will be Default Dark Mode.
FOR THE PAST 75 years, Israel has defined itself as a Jewish and Democratic state, with the oddity that it does not have a constitution that formalizes this balancing act of an arrangement.
Its Declaration of Independence, first installed in 1948, outlined how the system should function: THE STATE OF ISRAEL will…be based on freedom, justice and peace…will ensure complete equality of social and political rights irrespective of religion, race or sex…guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.”
Here’s what it looks like:
Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset -- in computer speak, the Motherboard where the communication between the various government units take place --curiously never got round to creating a constitution.
It seems there was no consensus by the Product Managers on the constitution’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Much of this had to do with the remnants of a Cloud-Based Legacy System first coded between 4,000-6,000 years ago. This code finds it hard to reconcile with more modern code —and this was precisely the point of the initial designers. It’s almost impervious to version updates. If you thought the C++ software was tough, ancient Hebrew and Amharic is more hardcore.
In lieu of a constitution, the country’s Seed Stage co-founders in 1950 set up a system of Basic Laws -- “firmware" that cannot be easily changed and can only be amended through a large majority in the Motherboard.
As a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), these Basic Laws together form Israel’s Operating System, also called Jewish&Democratic State, or j&dOS. Just like the Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android Operating Systems that manage the underlying hardware and software of our devices, j&dOS serves as the User Interface for the operation of Israel's democracy.
[[Note: There is another operating system that Israel doesn’t like talking about, but which it operates “outside” of the country’s “borders” in the Palestinian Territories. This operating system, let’s call it j&sOS for Judea&SamariaOS, has huge influence on j&dOS—but let’s save that for another post.]]
In j&dOS, each branch of government (legislative, executive, and judicial) has certain powers, but no one branch becomes too powerful and the government operates fairly and in balance.
In this OS, democracy is a feature, it’s built into the system, as opposed to a bug, an error that needs to be fixed and removed.
It’s this operating system that has allowed Israel to grow into a modern hi-tech powerhouse where global investors feel confident enough in the independence of the country’s courts to pour in billions of dollars a year into the local startup scene.
A key feature of this modern Network Architecture is that the Judicial Branch has been installed directly onto the Kernel, or core of the system, in a protected memory space. Defined as the Israeli High Court of Justice presiding as the Supreme Court, the Kernel oversees the entire process of dispute resolution and maintains the integrity of the whole system, like a rockstar Quality Assurance (QA) manager.
In particular, Israel’s j&dOS runs the program Kernel > Knesset if Knesset ≠ QA, meaning the Supreme Court can overrule “unconstitutional” legislation coded on the Motherboard. This is like having your code rejected.
For example, under the current OS, convicted criminals are barred from serving as cabinet ministers, where they will have access to secret source code and restricted servers, and from where they can exercise power over other branches of government, putting them in a conflict of interests. Likewise, prime ministers indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, cannot oversee radical overhauls to the justice system which is hearing their cases.
Like adversarial AI algorithms, these State-Sponsored Persistent Threat Actors will do anything to prevail over the system’s Kernel, to stay out of jail and in power, even if it means corrupting the entire system itself, with no backup Virtual Machine. This would be like a Halt and Catch Fire (HCF) command that would cause the computer to cease operations. The state would become ungovernable, anarchy would reign, quarterly targets will not be met.
And this is what Netanyahu’s government, which sees democracy as a bug not a feature, is trying to do with a Brute Force Jira Ticket to Hard Reset the Kernel. If successful, it would essentially “re-architect” the balance of power between the country’s executive, legislative, and judicial functions, giving the Executive and Legislative Branches controlling power on the board, a Dual Class share structure with Super-Voting Preferred Shares over the common stock they have now (Knesset >∞ Kernel).
After this CTRL-ALT-DEL, a new operating system will be installed, one based on strict observance to Orthodox Rabbinic law, mixed with hard-right nationalism. This new shasOS, named after the second-largest coalition partner, the ultra-religious Shas party, will be quite different from J&DSaaS. Under shasOS, previously corrupted files that were safely ejected from the system, like party leader Aryeh Deri, can be reinstituted, and even granted administrator privileges. Prime Ministers under investigation can nominate the judges that will hear their cases.
The new operating system’s user interface will feel entirely different, especially to women, who will find that their access to many popular products and services ranging from health and family planning to property rights and divorce, are suddenly restricted, with no opt-out option. Notifications will be automatically turned on by default --except from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday --and will include updates on the laws of family purity, providing guidance on the appropriate behavior during a woman's menstrual period (the app requires two-factor verification by a male guardian). Much like talibanOS, women will disappear from the Motherboard, girls will disappear from STEM, and female faces will be blurred or deleted from Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Welcome to Israel’s by default Dark Mode operating system. Terms and Conditions are covered in full in the Torah. LGBTQIA+ is under strict NDA and deemed NSFW. Reviews can be submitted in Yiddish and Amharic and can be posted on the walls.
