How to become an authentic Jewish Republic

Prof Paul Eidelberg makes the point that Israel needs A Distinctively Judaic National Goal. Then he lays out what Israel should do to achieve it.

He writes “Israel needs an entirely new system of governance, one that will:”

1. (1) Enact a law that affirms Israel’s raison d’être as a Jewish Republic, one that rejects multicultural moral relativism.
   (2) Enact, as a legal qualification for voting in Israeli elections, an oath of loyalty to Israel as a Jewish Republic.
   
   (3) Enforce the 1952 Citizenship Law which empowers the Minister of Interior “to revoke the citizenship of any Israel national that commits an act of disloyalty to the State.” (The term “act” should be defined in such a way as to safeguard freedom of speech and press.)
   (4) Enforce Basic Law: The Knesset, which prohibits any party that rejects Israel as a Jewish Republic.
   (5) Consistent with the example of Japan, which restricts citizenship to children born of Japanese parents, amend the “grandfather clause” of the Law of Return to curtail the flow of immigrants into Israel whose parents are not Jewish if they have not converted. (The money saved should be used to strengthen the bond between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens already in Israel.)
   (6) Require all public-supported schools, including those attended by non–Jews, to include Jewish studies in their curricula.
   (7) Revise the parliamentary electoral laws to make Members of the Knesset individually accountable to the voters in geographic/constituency elections, and, in the process, replace the inept and corrupting system of multiparty cabinet government with a unitary Executive or Presidential system accompanied by candidate vetting including political experience, education, military service, and financial holdings.
   (8) Change Basic Law: The Judiciary, by empowering the President, advised by a council learned in Jewish and secular law, to nominate Supreme Court judges, subject to confirmation by the Knesset in open public inquiry.
   (9) Require the Supreme Court to abide by the Foundations of Law Act 1981, which was intended by the Knesset to make Jewish law “first among equals” vis-à-vis the various systems of jurisprudence used by the court. 

The effect of which will advance our national goal.

1. If these measures are carried out, the people of Israel would actually see their country making yearly progress toward the goal of an authentic Jewish Republic. A Constitution would follow as the culmination of a Judaic National Goal.
   Notice that the achievement of this goal, unlike the pursuit of peace, does not depend on the vainly sought benevolence of other nations. In her quest for peace, Israel has been pursuing a mirage. Her political and intellectual leaders do not understand that it is not within the power of any nation or group of nations to give Israel peace. Israel must take its future into her own hands.
   In the final analysis, to achieve genuine and abiding peace, Israel will have to recognize the purpose for which it was created some 3,300 years ago, and that is to sanctify the Name of the Creator. That is precisely what the Hebraic Republic of antiquity did, and that is why Christian Hebraists deemed the laws and institutions of this Republic as superior even to those recommended by Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero with whom these learned Hebraists were quite familiar. They extolled Jewish Exceptionalism.

Paul Eidelberg heads the Israel-America Renaissance Institute. He is a recognized expert on the American constitution.