On the near horizon of the constitutional crisis, two significant arenas are visible: the High Court of Justice and possible compromise negotiations.
These are arenas for two opposite paths, one destructive and the other healing. Both the High Court of Justice, which is about to hear two amendments to Basic Laws, and a coalition majority decision on the grounds of reasonableness, for example, expresses a politics of decision. The High Court of Justice, which has become a clear political actor, to our dismay, may try to decide the crisis without legitimacy – not legitimacy in law, because the High Court is not authorized to discuss the validity of Basic Laws, nor legitimacy in elections, of course, since the citizens of Israel did not authorize the High Court to enact or amend a constitution.
Such an illegitimate decision would be, in the eyes of government supporters, an unlawful abuse of power. Therefore, it is liable to greatly exacerbate the constitutional crisis here, God forbid. It is precisely judges, who are supposed to be in charge of order and ensuring that no one in the government exceeds their authority, who signal to us that they will undermine their own authority, thereby undermining us to a dangerous degree.
This adds to the sabotage that their envoys inflicted on negotiations sponsored by the president of the country (mainly by their forceful insistence on their veto power in their own choice, but not only in it). Worryingly, judges are the most extreme factor in the crisis.
But even a majority decision in the Knesset, like the one that occurred in the constitutional reduction of the grounds of reasonableness, does not heal the fracture in the public. Although it has legitimacy in the elections, and indeed it was necessary, in order to make it clear that the government will not give in to extortion or to ultimate uncompromising demands in negotiations and forceful abandonment of the negotiations, this is not the best way to resolve the crisis.
A majority decision in the Knesset cannot allay the opposition's grave fear of eroding the liberal character of the State of Israel, a genuine fear that is not rigged or merely lobbied for the overthrow of the government. Beyond the issue of democratic legitimacy, which the High Court of Justice does not have, but the Knesset does, a unilateral decision in one of these two institutions is simply not good for healing the rift that threatens us. Therefore, we must find within ourselves the strength to abandon the path of decisive politics. It is dangerous now, and could literally destroy the country because it is incapable of creating an agreed-upon constitutional framework.
This is the nature of constitutional disputes: more than other disputes, they require the way of negotiation, the way of compromise based on seeing the common denominator underlying the polarized positions of both sides.
We are at a fateful juncture – between a politics of decisiveness, that is, surrender, which could plunge us into disaster, God forbid, and a politics of agreement that strives for a possible compromise, not pure, not logically derived from assumptions to conclusions, but anchored in life itself, and protects life itself from the destructive sword of the uncompromising "righteous."
It is no coincidence that we have reached this juncture between decision-submission and agreement-compromise. After all, from the outset, it was the abandonment of the path of compromise and the choice of forceful decision that led to the constitutional crisis, which began relatively quietly in the 80s and intensified until the current crisis. Into the politics of Zionist-Israeli consensus, the politicization of the trial, in Aharon Barak's coup like an elephant in a china shop, instilled the foundation of a decision politics devoid of democratic legitimacy – a moral decision in court, not in the Knesset, without elections, without referendums, without the approval of our elected representatives.
The end of the crisis was in its infancy. The source of our illness is clear: an aggressive and ongoing attempt, at first covert but later more and more overt, to impose on the public a constitutional framework that it did not approve, did not even discuss, and whose representatives did not shape it at all.
From this we learn the essential remedy: honest negotiations on a compromise, modest and not pretentious-inclusive, that will be enacted by the Knesset with the consent of the three main parties in Israel – the Likud and its allies, the state camp and Yesh Atid.
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