Israel Ponders Constitution With Head Throbbing

Stunned, a group of senior Israeli academics and political figures who have been working to lay the groundwork for a constitution were propelled into furious debate about whether they should take advantage of this sudden interest from an Israeli leader.

But having spent two years in seminar rooms dissecting every delicate issue -- the separation of religion and state, the rights of minorities, women's rights, among others -- most mocked the idea of an instant constitution as a prescription for failure. The issues are simply too loaded, Israeli society too polarized and its democracy too fragile, they said.

''It's like somebody who offers to marry you on the first date,'' said Yaron Ezrahi, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. ''Given the complexity of the issue and the significance for this country, a leader doesn't generate a constitution in a month to save his political career.''

The constitutional experts' skepticism about Mr. Barak's initiative reflects the way the public at large has received his ''civil-social agenda,'' dubbed the Secular Revolution by the news media. His proposals are widely seen as a transparent political ploy to rescue his faltering government or provide a platform for his next campaign.

In addition to creating a constitution, Mr. Barak has proposed a laundry list of changes, most of which have been blocked by the religious establishment for years. These include civil marriage for those ''hundreds of thousands of Israelis'' who are not Jews or not recognized as Jews by the rabbinate, eliminating the ''nationality'' listing on identification cards that distinguishes between Jews and non-Jews and the operation of El Al Airline and public buses on the Sabbath.

Some, like Yossi Beilin, the justice minister, suggest that Mr. Barak's motives be disregarded and that this rare moment -- when no religious parties are in the government -- be seized. The religious parties and a small Russian immigrant party defected before Mr. Barak traveled to the Camp David summit meeting in July, leaving him with an unstable minority government.

In a strategy session this week, Mr. Beilin urged the constitutional committee at the Israel Democracy Institute to act quickly.

''I'm a great believer in windows of opportunity,'' he said. ''Now Barak wants a constitution. He asks, 'Where's a constitution?' We should say, 'Here's a constitution,' and hand him a document.''

Avraham Ravitz, a strictly Orthodox member of Parliament, said he had no objection to a constitution, ''so long as it includes one paragraph that says constitutional law cannot be above religious law, that's all.'' In other words, he does object to a constitution -- which he described as ''the strange need of secular people in Israel to import something from Canada or Sweden rather than use what belongs to them.''

Israel's Declaration of Independence stipulated that a constitution would be established no later than Oct. 1, 1948. Its first Parliament, in fact, was elected to serve as a constitutional convention.

But from the beginning the secular-religious divide was wide, and as far as religious Israelis were concerned, they already had their constitution: the Bible. Rather than rip apart a young nation that needed to focus on pragmatic matters, the country's first leaders decided that a constitution should be assembled piecemeal, through a series of basic laws.

It took eight years for Parliament to pass the first basic law, the one that establishes the existence of Parliament. The next seven laws mostly set up the institutions of the state, including the role of the president, the army and the courts. It was not until 1992 that the subject of human rights was touched -- and then incompletely because of the controversy sparked by even the fundamental idea of making man, and not God, central.