Constitutional design principles — non-operative
Constitutional Design Principles
Public consultation version — non-operative design guidance.
The Children of One People constitutional project is founded on the conviction that a constitutional state can protect the equal dignity, liberty, security, and belonging of every citizen without requiring the disappearance, assimilation, or constitutional subordination of the enduring peoples who share it.
These principles explain the design commitments used to evaluate the proposed Constitution of the Land of Natufian Reunification. They are not themselves constitutional law, and publication does not make any constitutional provision final. They provide a public standard against which the draft may be questioned, criticized, and improved.
The project distinguishes three related documents:
- the Declaration of Principles, which states the project's moral and reconciliatory commitments;
- these Constitutional Design Principles, which translate those commitments into standards for institutional design; and
- the Draft Constitution, which proposes legal rules and institutions.
Design philosophy
Constitutional citizenship and peoplehood are different things
A constitution can create and regulate civic relationships to a state. It can define citizenship, offices, rights, duties, institutions, and legal authority. It cannot create, abolish, confer, revoke, redefine, or extinguish the peoplehood of Jews, Palestinians, Samaritans, or other enduring communities.
Equal citizenship therefore does not require cultural or national assimilation. Distinct peoples may share one constitutional state without one people acquiring a superior civic rank over another.
Peace through institutions
The constitutional order should not depend on Israelis, Palestinians, minorities, officials, or institutions trusting one another in advance.
Trust may grow from peace. Peace should not have to wait for trust.
Institutions should therefore remain rights-protecting and governable even when political trust is low. Power-sharing, independent review, enforceable rights, public reasons, and anti-capture safeguards are designed to make peaceful cooperation possible before deep social trust exists.
Deliberation over speed — without paralysis
The higher the stakes, irreversibility, domination risk, or capture risk of a decision, the stronger the case for cross-community deliberation, independent review, and heightened approval.
That principle does not mean every decision should be slow or require unanimity. Routine government must remain governable. Emergencies sometimes require speed. Constitutional design should distinguish ordinary administration from decisions capable of permanently altering rights, institutions, territory, war, or the balance of public power.
A closed set of principles
The numbered principles below are intentionally treated as a closed design framework. When a new problem appears, the first question should be whether it can be understood through an existing principle. A new principle should be added only when a genuinely distinct constitutional commitment cannot fit within the existing framework.
This discipline is intended to prevent the philosophy from becoming an ever-growing list in which every desirable policy preference is elevated into a foundational constitutional principle.
1. Human Dignity
Every person possesses inherent dignity that does not depend on citizenship, nationality, religion, ethnicity, usefulness to the State, political loyalty, or membership in a favored community.
Public institutions should be judged in part by whether they protect people as persons rather than treating them as instruments, demographic problems, security abstractions, or representatives of collective guilt. Security, justice, administration, and transition must be pursued without denying the humanity of the people affected by them.
2. Constitutional Citizenship and Peoplehood
Constitutional citizenship is the legal relationship between a person and the State. Peoplehood is not.
The Constitution may define equal citizenship and the civic institutions shared by everyone. It should neither require people to surrender enduring Jewish, Palestinian, Samaritan, or other communal identities nor convert those identities into different grades of citizenship.
This distinction is central to the project's concept of a shared state with a diverse national identity.
3. Equal Citizenship
Every citizen must possess equal civic status before the Constitution and the law.
No constitutional office, right, legal protection, vote, public service, or basic civic entitlement should depend on one citizen belonging to a constitutionally superior people. Community-protection mechanisms may protect participation and continuity, but they must not create ranked citizenship.
4. Non-Domination
No person or community should live subject to the unchecked or arbitrary power of another person, community, faction, military institution, political majority, or state organ.
Constitutional design should therefore do more than prohibit discrimination after it occurs. It should distribute public authority, preserve meaningful participation, prevent capture, and make domination structurally difficult.
5. Peoplehood and National Continuity
Equal citizenship need not erase the historical, cultural, linguistic, religious, or national continuity of the peoples and communities of the land.
The constitutional order should permit communities to preserve memory, language, culture, worship, association, and legitimate institutions across generations. These protections preserve continuity; they do not give any people superior civic ownership of the State.
6. Rule of Law
Public power must be exercised under law rather than personal command, factional privilege, or claimed necessity alone.
Officials and institutions remain bound by the Constitution, including during emergencies, war, transition, and institutional crisis. Law must be public, reviewable, sufficiently knowable, and capable of being enforced against those who exercise state authority.
7. Democratic Legitimacy
Public authority ultimately requires democratic legitimacy.
Elections, representative institutions, public participation, and constitutional consent should provide the ordinary basis for governing power. Temporary, expert, judicial, security, or transition institutions may perform constitutionally assigned functions, but they should not become substitute sovereigns.
8. Accountability
Public authority must remain answerable for how it is used.
Rights require remedies; oversight requires access to relevant facts; and unlawful conduct requires investigation and appropriate institutional or individual responsibility. Accountability should be directed toward responsible persons and institutions rather than converted into collective blame against an entire people or community.
9. Anti-Capture
A constitutional system designed for low trust should not make the capture of one office equivalent to the capture of the State.
Where concentration of functions creates a serious risk of abuse, authority should be distributed among institutions with independent appointment, review, enforcement, or oversight capacity. Anti-capture design accepts some institutional complexity when that complexity prevents a single faction from controlling the mechanisms meant to restrain it.
10. Transparency
Public power should operate transparently by default.
Laws, reasons, procedures, budgets, standards, and official decisions should be accessible enough for the public and oversight institutions to understand what government is doing. Legitimate confidentiality may exist for privacy, security, investigation, diplomacy, or safety, but secrecy should be lawful, limited, reviewable, and incapable of eliminating accountability.
Where full public disclosure is legitimately impossible, meaningful independent or democratic oversight should remain.
11. Constitutional Supremacy
The Constitution should bind every public institution and every person exercising public authority.
Ordinary legislation, protected organic law, regulation, executive action, emergency authority, military authority, contracts, and administrative practice remain subordinate to constitutional rights and limits. No branch should be able to create an alternative source of unlimited public power.
12. Continuity of Government
Constitutional government must be capable of continuing through vacancy, incapacity, emergency, political disagreement, institutional failure, and transition.
Continuity mechanisms should preserve lawful government without turning continuity into a justification for bypassing constitutional safeguards. A system should be able to keep functioning while still respecting the thresholds, rights, and accountability rules that make its authority legitimate.
13. Limited and Enumerated Public Power
Public institutions should possess the authority the Constitution or lawful legislation gives them, not an undefined reservoir of inherent governmental power.
A legitimate objective does not itself create a power to pursue it by any means. Authority, purpose, procedure, and limits should be legally identifiable, and emergency or implied powers should not become routes around enumerated constraints.
14. Separation of Functions and Distributed Authority
Constitutional design should separate functions when combining them would create an unacceptable risk of self-review, coercion, capture, or conflicts of interest.
Legislation, execution, adjudication, investigation, enforcement, electoral administration, monetary authority, and oversight need not always be placed in conventional institutional boxes. The controlling question is whether the allocation of functions preserves independence, accountability, competence, and the ability of one institution to check another without becoming its master.
15. Rights and Responsibility Follow Public Power
Constitutional responsibility should follow the exercise of public power rather than stop at an organizational chart or territorial technicality.
Rights bind the State wherever it exercises the relevant authority, custody, or control, including through contractors, proxies, delegated actors, automated systems, or institutions acting on its behalf. Government should not be able to do indirectly what the Constitution forbids it to do directly.
16. Individual Rights and Collective Protections
Individual rights and collective protections serve different purposes and should not be collapsed into one another.
Every person retains constitutional rights in their own capacity. Communities may also require protections for language, religion, culture, sacred places, representation, continuity, or protection against domination. Collective safeguards should reinforce human dignity and equal citizenship rather than authorize violations of the rights of individuals within or outside the protected community.
17. Necessity, Proportionality, and Least Harm
When public authority may lawfully burden a right or interest, the burden should be necessary to a legitimate objective, proportionate to that objective, and no more harmful than reasonably effective alternatives require.
These principles are safeguards against convenience becoming coercion. They do not authorize balancing away rights or prohibitions that the Constitution makes absolute.
18. Material Conditions of Human Dignity
Human dignity is not meaningful if constitutional government is indifferent to the material conditions necessary for life, health, development, and participation.
The constitutional order should protect access to food, safe water, essential medical care, sanitation, shelter, education, and other basic conditions of a dignified life. Broader social rights may require progressive realization, but an immediately enforceable humanitarian minimum cannot be postponed by ordinary political disagreement.
19. Transitional Justice
A transition from conflict and competing systems of authority cannot become legitimate merely by declaring the past finished.
The constitutional project should create space for truth, accountability, repair, restitution or compensation where appropriate, institutional reform, and reconciliation while rejecting collective guilt and collective punishment. Historical claims and present-day rights must be addressed together rather than solving one injustice by mechanically transferring it to another person.
20. Intergenerational Stewardship
A constitutional generation governs institutions and resources that future generations will inherit.
The State should preserve environmental, cultural, institutional, democratic, and fiscal conditions that allow future people to exercise meaningful self-government. Constitutional safeguards should protect against foreseeable long-term destruction without pretending that the present generation can wisely freeze every institutional choice forever.
This principle supports both durable guarantees and constitutional humility: preserve the conditions of freedom, dignity, continuity, and non-domination while leaving future generations room to govern themselves.
How these principles are used
These principles are a design standard, not a substitute constitution.
When a provision is proposed, revised, or challenged, the project should ask:
- Which principle or principles is the provision trying to implement?
- What constitutional failure is the safeguard meant to prevent?
- Does the mechanism protect against that failure in practice?
- Does it unnecessarily burden another principle?
- Is the safeguard constitutional in nature, or can its machinery be left to law, regulation, professional standards, or administration?
- Can the same protection be achieved more simply?
- Does the rule remain workable when trust is low and when the people exercising power act in bad faith?
The principles may point in different directions in hard cases. Their purpose is not to make constitutional judgment automatic. Their purpose is to make the reasons for constitutional choices visible and open to criticism.
Consultation status
This is a public explanation of the current design philosophy of the Children of One People constitutional project. It is non-operative, unratified, and open to public and professional criticism.
The proposed Constitution remains a consultation draft. Where the Constitution and these principles appear to conflict, that tension should be identified and reviewed rather than silently resolved by treating this document as superior law.