Judge Ilana Reuveni (ret.) is a former justice of the Israeli Supreme Court who served as chair of the Ramat Gan Constitutional Convention (2042–2043), the body that drafted the Basic Law: The State and Its Peoples — Israel’s constitutional transformation from unitary state to confederal arrangement recognizing two sovereign entities. Her closing remarks characterized the document as “not a surrender and not a victory. It is an accounting.”
She presided over a convention of 120 delegates — Knesset parties, unaffiliated civil society, and, for the first time in Israeli constitutional history, Palestinian Authority observers with speaking but not voting status — convened under emergency provisions following the collapse of the fourth Netanyahu-successor coalition. She candidly acknowledged the economic pressure that had shaped the convention’s urgency: three years without American resupply, a defense budget at 14% of GDP, and a credit downgrade in 2041.
After the referendum passed in October 2043 (52–45 with 3% invalid), she called the result “a majority, not a mandate, which is the only kind of majority a document like this was ever going to get.”