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 proposed 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.
The draft was never ratified. The convention collapsed by mid-2043 without a ratifiable Basic Law and without the referendum it had scheduled for October, and the dissent of Knesset Member Doron Amsalem — “a basic law negotiated under fiscal duress is not a constitution. It is a ransom note we are writing to ourselves” — proved the accurate description of the proceedings. On 11 March 2045, Reuveni — the same jurist who had chaired the failed convention — signed the Instrument of Capitulation and Dissolution of the State of Israel for the Israeli side, with the Islamic Republic of Iran and the League of Arab States as receiving parties and the United Nations as depositary. Her convention remark is returned to in the final chapter of Almasi, The International Zionism (2050), which does not let it stand.