The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy

Friends, welcome to our site. You can find here many of the unique writings of Professor Paul Eidelberg, other members of the FCD, and guest contributors. We hope you’ll be as inspired by these as we are. You can also join the free email list—and please consider a supporting annual membership or helping out with a contribution if you appreciate what is being communicated.

And don’t forget to bookmark our site, send a link to an associate, and come back again—the content is updated often.

Chazak!
The FCD Site Editors

On behalf of the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy, we extend to all our members and supporters, indeed, to all lovers of Israel, greetings and best wishes for a Healthy and Happy New Year. We have reason to believe that the New Year will witness the beginning of serious structural changes in Israel’s System of Governance for which our Foundation has worked so long and so hard. Indeed, we are collaborating with certain politically influential professors in designing, for Israel, a unique presidential system of government, one that should appeal to various party leaders. So, on this positive and promising note, we want to thank all our members and supporters for making the Foundation’s progress possible.

Shana Tova!

For thirty years—ever since the September 1978 Camp David Accords—not a day passes that warnings are not issued or published by Zionist-oriented individuals in Israel and in America that a Palestinian state would doom Israel to oblivion.

The present writer personally warned Defense Minister Shimon Peres of this danger in September 1976, the month after making aliya. Indeed, I warned Prime Minister Menachem Begin the day before he left for Camp David of Anwar Sadat’s peace-and war-strategy. In vain.

Consider, therefore, the enormous time and energy, the millions of dollars, the countless demonstrations, the newspaper ads and articles, the policy papers, the books, the public lectures, the videos, that have been devoted to stopping the government’s policy of retreating from Jewish land, the policy of returning to Israel’s indefensible 1949 armistice lines or Auschwitz borders.

Thirty and more years of warnings issued by prominent individuals and organizations, and yet Israel is closer than ever to the abyss. The use of all these material and human resources by so many individuals and groups have had no discernible influence on Israeli governments regardless of which party of party leader has headed these governments.

I therefore ask: Suppose these individuals and groups had devoted a significant amount of the time and energy and resources mentioned above to an organized effort to change Israel’s system of governance. (more…)

The well-known Israeli Attorney Elyakim Haetzni belatedly writes in The Jewish Press: “Today, like the air we breathe, we need an organized Jewish political force in the United States that, together with our non-Jewish friends in America and the Jewish nationalist camp in Israel, can breach the siege that is closing us off.” [“Where Is American Jewry?”, March 26, 2008].

For more than a decade I have been calling for the establishment of Jewish political force, i.e., an organization, in the United States with a parallel organization in Israel, to prevent Israel’s demise—this in the same Jewish Press for which I have written more than 1,000 articles since 1988. I have given said organization various names such as a “shadow government” and even “Israel’s Future Government-USA” (IFG-USA).” (more…)

What perpetuates the dysfunctional and treacherous government of Israel is its reputation as a democracy in the United States. The myth of Israeli democracy endows the government with legitimacy and its ruling elites—politicians, judges, academics, journalists—with respectability. Expose this myth in the U.S. and it will be immediately felt in Israel, especially among the elites. This is the most expeditious way of initiating basic institutional reform and regime change in Israel. For this, a well-financed and professional organization is needed in America, either in New York (perhaps better in Washington, D.C.) as well as a parallel organization in Israel.

Professor Eidelberg gave this thunderous speech to a large San Diego, California crowd on the recent FCD US Tour. A must listen. Other audios may be pending—be sure to check back.

Click to listen…

U.S. Tour 2008—San Diego, March 22

• Introduction
• Lecture
• Q & A Session

Visit the audios page for PE’s 2007 San Diego lecture—and others too.

Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. Professor Yehezkel Dror, a member of the Winograd Committee as well as a world-renowned Israel Prize Laureate in public policy, announced, at the prestigious Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center, that Israel must replace its parliamentary system to improve decision-making, which failed so miserably during the Second Lebanon War.

Professor Dror thereby affirmed what the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy, founded by the present writer and Dr. Mark Rozen of blessed memory, have advocated in books, policy papers, public lectures, radio and television programs, and countless articles since 1995.

Let me explain Dror’s statement insofar it was reported by The Jerusalem Post on February 6, 2008. (more…)

Dear Friends:

I am going on a one-month cross-country lecture of the United States during March. Some venues have been settled, some are tentative. My primary topic is “What Can You Do to Save Israel?” Apart from travel expenses, I am not requesting any honorarium for any talk that I may give during this tour. (more…)

The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy

19 Tevet 5768

Dear Friends and Supporters:

As other activists continue the old tired ways, the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy has been the voice for regime change, receiving standing ovations at gatherings such as last month’s New Jewish Congress in Jerusalem. We don’t stage protests or write letters or circulate petitions; we are taking regime change to the People, and you are an essential partner. Every Jew has a voice in what happens to and in the Land of Israel notwithstanding the rejection of your voice by our prime minister when he appeared hat in hand before the nations in Annapolis. “Mind your own business” he said to Diaspora Jewry. But Israel is your business! The Land of Israel belongs to you, your children, and grandchildren, just as it belongs to the Jews already living there. (more…)

First published April 1996, Jerusalem Foundation Papers.

Overcoming Israel’s Fatal Flaw: Plan III—An International Jewish Parliament

“The majority of the people living in a Jewish State must be Jewish. We must prevent a situation of an insufficient Jewish majority and we dare not have a Jewish minority….There is room for a non-Jewish minority on condition that it accept the destiny of the State vis-à-vis the Jewish people, culture, tradition, and belief. The minority is entitled to equal rights as individuals with respect to their distinct religion and culture, but not more than that.”

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
Tel Aviv, May 6, 1976

Israel’s Fatal Flaw

The most neglected and most urgent issue confronting Israel—the issue implicit in the above headnote—is the Arab vote. It was the Arab vote that brought the Labor Party to power in the June 1992 Knesset elections. It was the Arab vote that led to the Oslo Accords and the shrinkage of Israel. Unless this issue is resolved, Israel will not see much of the 21st century.

Increasingly obvious in Israel is a fatal flaw. The flaw originated in the Proclamation of the Establishment of the State of 1948. (more…)

Announcement

The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy, an American-Israeli enterprise recognized by the IRS under Section 501(c)(3), proudly announces the appointment of Matthew S. (Moshe) Finberg as its Executive Vice-President. Moshe, who founded The Finberg Law Firm, P.C., www.finberglaw.com, in Boulder, Colorado in 1996, made aliya with his charming wife Shelly in July 2007. Residing in Israel will not prevent him from commuting periodically to Boulder as the active head of his law firm. But now, as Executive Vice-President of the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy, he will also devote time in the United States to promoting the vital goals of the Foundation. Thus, in addition to providing legal advice, policy ideas, and links to VIPs, Moshe will also facilitate the Foundation’s fund-raising and educative activities in America. We are delighted to have this congenial professional on the Foundation’s Board of Directors.

Prof. Paul Eidelberg, President
Jerusalem

On behalf of the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy, I wish all our friends and supporters a Happy, Healthy, and Prosperous New Year. May this New Year usher in a new Government in Israel, one that will put an end to the sufferings of our people, a Government that will overawe our enemies and restore Jewish national pride. May HaShem  bless Israel that it may exemplify a nation wherein freedom dwells with righteousness, equality with excellence, wealth with beauty, the here and now with love of the Eternal.

Paul Eidelberg

The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy was established in 1995. Its constitutional reform program was published in the United States as well as in Israel. I am repeatedly asked: “Why doesn’t the nationalist camp in Israel or any prominent Zionist organization in the United States more or less endorse the Foundation’s program?” What prevents them from saying something like this: “We support, with some reservations, the institutional reforms proposed by the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy.”

This puzzles me because some Zionist organizations in the United States have occasionally sponsored one or another of my lectures. (more…)

1. The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy is an independent, non-profit, educational institution. Its primary goal is to promote Constitutional Democracy in Israel. The Foundation has drafted a Constitution for this purpose.

2. The Foundation’s first practical objective is to empower the people by making legislators individually accountable to the voters in regional or multidistrict elections.

3. The Foundation’s constitutional method of analysis reveals how the flaws inherent in Israel’s political and judicial institutions render it virtually impossible to solve Israel’s domestic and international problems. (more…)

Dear Friends:

My telling the truth about Israel’s undemocratic and dysfunctional System of Government on the one hand, and yet Israel’s strategic and spiritual significance to the United States and mankind on the other—this, at Hillsdale College, Michigan, the University of Washington, Seattle, and at various venues in California—met with the most positive response I have ever had in an American lecture tour. (Audio-video recordings of some of these talks will soon be made available to the general public.) (more…)