The principal significance of the Landau Commission Report lies in its conclusion that, under the provisions of the necessity defence, the exertion of a moderate measure of physical pressure is both justifiable and permissible in the interrogation of persons suspected of hostile terrorist activity (HTA). This conclusion extends both forward to the future and backward to the past. For the future, it licenses the employment of physical pressure in such investigations; as to the past, it lends significant support to another of the Commission's conclusions, that no proceedings be instituted against persons who were found by the Commission to bear prima facie responsibility for serious criminal offences (i.e., perjury at the very least). In my opinion, the Commission's central conclusion and its implications are unjustified. It is based upon factual findings and evaluative judgments which are, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, problematic.

Before embarking, however, I should like to sketch a synoptic view of the Report for the reader, which will then enable me to expand upon the connection between the Commission's factual and evaluative findings and its normative conclusions. Regarding the facts, the Commission determined that: 1) GSS interrogators had systematically employed physical pressure on HTA suspects; and 2) interrogators had lied about this fact to the courts. The Commission's normative conclusions were that it is permissible to employ physical pressure in HTA interrogations, but forbidden to lie to the court.

This is a preliminary inquiry into the application to occupation law of the distinction between jus in bello (or IHL) and jus ad bellum. Under current doctrine, the two are mutually exclusive: the former applies irrespective of the “nature or origin of the armed conflict or the causes espoused by the Parties.” I argue that occupation law, although generally considered part of IHL, is intrinsically less susceptible to a strict application of the distinction.

Exploring its pedigree, meaning, and rationale, the paper notes the distinction's scant, soft Conventional expression and brief history, but also its fundamental character and the broad scope attributed to it under contemporary IHL. Although the distinction sometimes fulfill important humanitarian functions in occupied territories, occupation law—in regulating governance of territory—differs from ordinary IHL norms; this and other differences render the strict application of the distinction to occupation law, whose key norms often depend on jus ad bellum references to the “nature, origin and causes” of armed conflict, impossible.

The last part of the Paper calls for a more nuanced approach to the application of the distinction to occupation law and identifies some of its contours. Such an approach can enhance the efficacy of occupation law and facilitate fulfillment of the two different functions of occupation law: protection of individuals and the maintenance of international peace and security. The Paper concludes with preliminary observations on the roles and powers, under both jus ad bellum and jus in bello, of the Security Council with regard to occupied territories.

The status and place of religion in the law of Israel has been the subject of public controversy, leading to highly emotional outbursts and fervent debate. It is not surprising, therefore, that lawyers and serious writers have shunned this stormy field and have preferred calmer subjects. But this is not the only reason for avoiding a legal discussion of religion in Israel. The subject is strewn with difficulties, legal and extra-legal. The absence of a constitution and the almost unlimited power of the Knesset have resulted in a patchwork of laws which make generalization almost impossible. The provisions of law relating to religion in Israel are not governed by any general scheme. History, political expediency, party politics and, even more, chance are responsible for an amorphous body of laws which baffles outsiders as well as some Israelis dissatisfied with the present state of the law in this field. The present writer belongs to those who resent the use of secular laws to curb religious freedom and to enforce religious practices on non-religious persons. Nevertheless, it is hoped that the present account and analysis of the state of the law is not tainted by personal bias and that in this article a wall separating, if not State and church, at least opinion and fact, is established.

The individual human being is manifestly the object of every legal system on this planet, and consequently also of international law. The ordinary subject of international law is the international corporate entity: first and foremost (though not exclusively) the State. Yet, the corporate entity is not a tangible res that exists in reality, but an abstract notion, moulded through legal manipulation by and within the ambit of a superior legal system. When the veil is pierced, one can see that behind the legal personality of the State (or any other international corporate entity) there are natural persons: flesh-and-blood human beings. In the final analysis, Westlake was indubitably right when he stated:

That is to say, in actuality, the international rights and duties of States devolve on human beings, albeit indirectly and collectively. In other words, the individual human being is not merely the object of international law, but indirectly also its subject, notwithstanding the fact that, ostensibly, the subject is the international corporate entity.

In 2012 the Knesset approved a new sentencing law. Israel thus became the latest jurisdiction to introduce statutory directions for courts to follow in sentencing. The approach of the United States to structuring judicial discretion often entails the use of a sentencing grid with presumptive sentencing ranges. In contrast, the Sentencing Act of Israel reflects a less prescriptive method: it provides guidance by words rather than numbers. Retributivism is clearly identified as the penal philosophy underpinning the new law, which takes a novel approach to promoting more proportionate sentencing. Courts are directed to construct an individualised proportionate sentencing range appropriate to the case in hand. Once this is established, the court then follows additional directions regarding factors and principles related to sentencing. Although other jurisdictions have placed the purposes and principles of sentencing on a statutory footing, this is the first such legislative declaration in Israel. The statute also contains a methodology to implement a proportional approach to sentencing as well as detailed guidance on sentencing factors. This article describes and explores the new Sentencing Act, making limited comparisons to sentencing reforms in other jurisdictions – principally England and Wales, New Zealand and the United States. In concluding, we speculate on the likely consequences of the law: will it achieve the goals of promoting more consistent and principled sentencing?

This article presents the case for a progressive interpretation of the notion of military objectives in international humanitarian law (IHL), bringing computer data within the scope of this concept. The advent of cyber military operations has presented a dilemma as to the proper understanding of data in IHL. The emerging orthodoxy, represented by the 2013 Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, advances the argument that the intangible nature of data renders it ineligible to be an object for the purposes of the rules on targeting in IHL. This article, on the contrary, argues that because of its susceptibility to alteration and destruction, the better view is that data is an object within the meaning of this term under IHL and thus it may qualify as a military objective. The article supports this conclusion by means of a textual, systematic and teleological interpretation of the definition of military objectives found in treaty and customary law. The upshot of the analysis presented here is that data that does not meet the criteria for qualification as a military objective must be considered a civilian object, with profound implications for the protection of civilian datasets in times of armed conflict.

An army attacks a neighborhood where the enemy is hiding among civilians. To what extent is the army required to expose its combatants to life-threatening risks in order to spare enemy civilians? This Article seeks to interpret the pertinent standards and rules of international law from the perspective of the principle of human dignity. The human dignity principle informs the interpretation of the law on the conduct of hostilities and provides a built-in mechanism for improving armies' treatment of enemy civilians. It inspires additional remedial and institutional norms that could overcome armies' distrust of each other during the height of battle. The principle of human dignity recognizes a general duty to strive to reduce harm to enemy civilians as well as specific rules against using them as human shields, hostages, or objects for retaliation. This Article concludes that in general there is no requirement to risk combatants to reduce the risk to enemy civilians, although a number of the specific rules do entail the assumption of such risks.

Do the protections provided by the core international human rights treaties apply extraterritorially, outside the government-governed relationship, during periods of armed conflict and military occupation? The traditional view has been that human rights are essentially applicable in peacetime while humanitarian law (i.e. the law of war) governs situations of armed conflict and military occupation. More recently, a conflicting school of thought, reflected in decisions of the ICJ and the UN treaty bodies, has concluded that the law of war no longer automatically excludes the law of peace. But, while these views are entitled to respect, the international human rights instruments (unlike the regional human rights instruments) do not grant the treaty bodies or any other entity the authority to issue legally binding views on the nature of state obligations under the treaties. Applying the standard rules for treaty interpretation leads to the conclusion that the international human rights treaties apply in the context of armed conflict only with respect to acts of a state's armed forces executed within its own territory.

The Torah contains two groupings of cyclical legislation, the Jubilee laws, based on a fifty-year cycle, and the Sabbatical laws, based on a seven-year cycle. Our enquiry is concerned with the former, the Jubilee legislation, but it is clear that an important part of the discussion will be the relationship between it and the Sabbatical legislation. The laws of these two groupings, which overlap considerably, consist of three main elements, fallow laws, release laws, and redemption laws. The latter are not cyclical laws, but are linked to the cyclical legislation in the text and are important for its understanding.

The material outlined above is found in three Pentateuchal codes; in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. In Exodus 23:10ff there is a fallow-law: an entire cessation of all field work (verb š m ṭ) is ordered to take place in every seventh year. This is said to be dictated by a regard for the poor and the beasts of the field. From the context it would appear that the fallow is intended to be universal (the following regulation concerns the Sabbath), but this is by no means a necessary conclusion. Secondly, there are release-laws, concerning slaves only. In 21:2–6 it is laid down that a Hebrew slave can be kept in bondage only for six years. After this period he was automatically emancipated.

Fiduciary obligations form a sub-set of those primary obligations the breach of which constitutes a civil wrong. Only by starting from the obligation of the express trustee can one establish a clear picture of their content. ‘Fiduciary’ is one vehicle for exporting incidents of the express trust by analogy. The trustee's obligation differs from other primary obligations in the degree of altruism which it requires. The trustee must not only take care of the interests of another but must do so disinterestedly. This is the third and highest degree of legally obligatory altruism. The question then arises whether the trustee's obligation mutates when imposed on non-trustees. The core obligation never changes. A sub-problem then emerges: Can negligence be a breach of any one of three different primary duties and hence three different wrongs: breach of contract, tort, and breach of fiduciary duty? The last section of the lecture looks for the best way to dispel that illusion.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the problem of drawing a line between law and politics, as it presented itself to courts in Israel. Any such discussion must take as its starting point the judgment of the late President of the Supreme Court of Israel, Dr. M. Smoira, in Jabotinsky v. Weizmann So far as I know, it was here that the term “justiciable” was first used in this context in Israel. This was a case concerning the formation of a new government. The former government, headed by Mr. Ben-Gurion, had received a vote of non-confidence and resigned. The President of the State, after consulting the parties, asked Mr. Ben-Gurion to form a new government and, upon his refusal, had let the matter rest. The petitioner's complaint was that the President should have called upon each and every one of all the 120 members of the Knesset until one was found who succeeded in forming a new government. He applied to the Supreme Court, sitting in its original jurisdiction as a High Court of Justice, for a writ of mandamus against the President ordering him to do so. Two points were submitted by the Attorney General in opposing the grant of an order nisi. His first submission was that the Court should assume no jurisdiction over the President of the State. In this submission he failed, but he succeeded on his second ground, which concerns us here, namely that the matter, being “political”, was not justiciable.

On December 29, 2009, the Israeli Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, delivered its judgment in Abu Safiya v. The Minister of Defense, annulling an order issued by an Israeli Military Commander, which completely barred Palestinians from travelling on Route 443, a major road in the West Bank. This note criticizes the Abu Safiya judgment as indicative, notwithstanding its specific outcome, of the Supreme Court's ongoing willingness to expand the ratione materiae and ratione personae of occupation law and to allow the military authorities to protect the interests of Israelis in the West Bank, even at the expense of the stronger rights conferred upon the local Palestinian population by the lex specialis—the laws of belligerent occupation.

Penology, or the science of punishment, has three different aspects: the technique of punishment, or the character of the various punitive measures and the means by which they are enforced and implemented; the psychology of punishment, probing into the function of punitive action, both in so far as the victim, that is the person punished, is affected, and in so far as such action is calculated to satisfy the needs or purposes of the punishing authority; and the sociology of punishment allocating to penal activity its place (as part of the legal institutional framework) in the social, economic and political life of the community. All these aspects are interconnected, and the view generally advocated (though hardly proven as yet) is that they are also interdependent: the psychological effect as well as the sociological impact of any given penalty depends, it is held, on the nature of the penalty concerned and the manner in which it is implemented. The fact cannot, however, sufficiently be stressed that any such interdependence is not, as a rule, preconceived or planned in advance. It is for the historian of penal law or penology to establish on the statistical or other data what has, in fact, been the effect or the impact of any particular punishment in any given period or community. But the penologist is not necessarily either historian or statistician. While, like the lawyer, he builds on institutions which have come down from the past, neither his theorization nor his planning is bound by precedent or past experience, and he may well dismiss the past as one great error which exists only to be rectified or eliminated. This being so, for a penology to develop it is not necessary that there should be any practical experience with the effect and impact of punishments actually imposed. It is true that in the absence of such practical experience, penology will remain an exercise in theorization and planning, not unlike the exercises in “utopian” and idealistic legislation which have occupied so many geniuses in the past; but that does not derogate from the validity of, and the scientific attention due to, the reasons and considerations underlying the theories propounded.

The recent ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child by the Israeli Government is part of a welcome effort to ratify multilateral conventions dealing with human rights, some of which Israel had signed long ago. In addition to this Convention, the Israeli Government ratified, during the summer of 1991, the 1966 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the 1966 Covenant on Economic and Social Rights, the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, and the 1984 Convention Against Torture. On the occasion of the ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, this article discusses the legal implications of the ratification of human rights conventions to the Israeli legal system and to the legal systems in the occupied territories.

Since the establishment of the State and up to the present day, Israeli law has had to deal with a great number of various problems in the field of international law, e.g. whether the State of Israel is a successor to the obligations of the Mandatory government; the jurisdiction of the Israeli courts with regard to offences committed in demilitarized zones or beyond the State's boundaries (on the high seas or abroad); the immunity of foreign states and their representatives from the jurisdiction of Israeli courts and from measures of execution; the status of international organizations and of their employees; the effect and implications of official acts performed within the territory of a state which is at war with Israel; the effect of international treaties in Israel; the question whether the Eastern neighbourhoods of Jerusalem are part of Israel; various issues concerning extradition, and of course, many questions regarding the laws of war: the powers of the military governor, and in particular his power to expropriate land in the territories under Israeli control and to expel residents from the territories, the extent of his legislative powers, etc.

In order fully to understand and appreciate the place of the Religious Courts in modern Israel, we must go back to the time when Palestine was ruled by the Porte of Constantinople and Moslem law was the law of the country. Thereafter we have to consider the period of British Mandatory rule of Palestine and the changes then introduced in the legal system.

Cyber warfare and the advent of computer network operations have forced us to look again at the concept of the military objective. The definition set out in Article 52(2) of Additional Protocol I – that an object must by its nature, location, purpose or use, make an effective contribution to military action – is accepted as customary international law; its application in the cyber context, however, raises a number of issues which are examined in this article. First, the question of whether data may constitute a military objective is discussed. In particular, the issue of whether the requirement that the definition applies to ‘objects’ requires that the purported target must have tangible or material form. The article argues on the basis of both textual and contextual analysis that this is not required, but it contends that it may prove to be useful to differentiate between operational- and content-level data. The article then examines the qualifying contribution of military objectives such as their nature, location, purpose or use, and questions whether network location rather than geographical location may be used as a qualifying criterion in the cyber context. The final part of the article addresses the question of whether the particular ability of cyber operations to effect results at increasingly precise levels of specificity places an obligation on a party to an armed conflict to define military objectives at their smallest possible formulation – that is, a small piece of code or component rather than the computer or system itself. Such a requirement would have significant implications for the cyber context where much of the infrastructure is dual use, but the distinction between civilian objects and military objectives is a binary classification.

This Article considers the impact, or tremors, of paragraph 70 of the decision on interlocutory appeal on jurisdiction of the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in Prosecutor v. Tadić, which was delivered in October 1995. It establishes, and seeks to make clear, that the commitment of the Appeals Chamber in paragraph 70 of that decision was to provide definitions for both of the concepts of international and non-international armed conflicts, even though some impressions might be that the Appeals Chamber tended to run together these different concepts in order to provide a singular and overarching definition of “armed conflict.” In separate and successive turns, the Article explores the specific components of each concept as identified by the Appeals Chamber—first, for international armed conflicts, and, then, for non-international armed conflicts—before testing them against particular facts from practice as well as hypothetical examples, but the Article also makes use of a comparative investigation as to what the Appeals Chamber said for each form of armed conflict when contrasted with each other. We examine the extent to which these components have threaded themselves through subsequent practice—specifically the relationship of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court with the concept of non-international armed conflict—so as to chart the full progress of the jurisprudence of the Appeals Chamber in the afterlife of Tadić: hence the designation of the “tremors” of Tadić.