Does Israel have a written constitution?
Israel is one of a tiny number of countries in the world – the others are the United Kingdom and New Zealand – that does not have a written constitution in the sense of a single, codified constitutional document.
On 14 May 1948, as the British mandate was about to expire, the Jewish People’s Council in Palestine promulgated a Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. The Declaration envisaged an elected Constituent Assembly that would prepare a constitution and elections were held in January 1949 specifically to chose the members of that body. But the Assembly could not reach agreement on fundamental issues such as whether Israel should be defined as a Jewish State, a democratic state, or both.
No constitution was ever adopted and the legal status of the Declaration remains disputed. Instead there are 11 Basic Laws. Between 2003 and 2006, there was a serious effort by a Committee of the Knesset to draft an official constitution based on the Basic Laws – but the project stalled and stopped.