Dean Acheson frankly reconfirmed the right of self-preservation, when he asserted, “…law simply does not deal with … questions of ultimate power—power that comes close to the sources of sovereignty…. No law can destroy the state creating the law. The survival of states is not a matter of law”. It is beyond the law.

Given the existence of man's elementary loyalty to autonomous states, the necessity for using force springs from the need of states to depend fundamentally on self-help in order to guarantee their survival and welfare. This search for security in a system of politics without government, forces the state to be dependent upon military self-help.

I found the slogan used as the title of this paper one sunny and cold Sunday morning in winter, 1985, on a vertical steel bar in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, above the East River, written with that ugly black ink that has replaced the bright colours of earlier years of graffiti in New York. Still, in contrast to the meaningless scribblings or markings of warrior names usually found in Manhattan these days, the message is nearly a joyful one: there is no point in expecting or demanding a “just society” from a state or other authorities — we will have to look after that ourselves and we can do it. By implication the writer also tells us what popular demands for “justice” really mean: an end to injustice. They are not “positive” demands, but in fact criticisms of some state of affairs or measures taken (or not taken) by the authorities: we know very well what is not just, even though we may not know what a “just” society should look like, and may even be sceptical whether we would like to live in one.

This article analyses the relationship between the scope of security needs that are cited as justification for restricting humanitarian assistance in situations of occupation and the scope of the occupant's obligation to facilitate and/or proactively provide humanitarian relief. It argues that, compared with a non-occupant, an occupying power may consider broader security goals as reasons to restrict humanitarian assistance, but that doing so imposes a greater responsibility on the occupying power to provide alternatives to the humanitarian assistance being restricted. In addition, as a normative matter, as increasingly long-term security goals are included in the ‘military necessity’ cited as a reason for restricting humanitarian assistance, the ambit of what is included in humanitarian assistance should be expanded to include the economic development and investment in infrastructure needed to provide for humanitarian needs in the long term. This kind of regime would enhance the self-regulation of warring powers by requiring those with the ability to engage in long-term security planning to use that ability also to provide for the long-term humanitarian needs of the civilian population. The article examines restrictions on humanitarian assistance in Gaza as an example of how this normative arrangement might work in practice.

This article asserts there has been a lack of attention to the impact of cultural diversity within the field of international humanitarian law. Discussions surrounding culture in international humanitarian law have nearly always avoided the central issue of cultural particularism. This has been so in relation to the debate surrounding the emblem, in general surveys of humanitarian law, and in discussions of the laws of war in distinct legal and cultural traditions. The emblems debate, in particular, signals the elusiveness of rigid universality within international humanitarian law. Five elements are suggested to explain the resistance of humanitarian law to contagion by the cultural relativism debate in human rights: the nature of human rights, the distinct normative frameworks of human rights and humanitarian law, the unified conventional basis of humanitarian law, the very broad participation in the humanitarian regime, and the unique role of the International Committee of the Red Cross. While these reasons might explain the fact that the relativism debate in human rights did not readily transfer to humanitarian law, they offer no substantive basis for immunity for humanitarian law to the challenges posed by cultural diversity. Ultimately, the article proposes a legal pluralist approach that recognizes the role of actors in the cultural process of norm-creation. Given the continued violation of the laws of war, the author suggests a need to open the door to cultural diversity in order to generate greater compliance. Without cultural legitimacy, there is a danger that humanitarian law aspires to self-defeating universalism.

The right of citizens to demonstrate has been in the news of late. Recent events have led many citizens in Israel to take to the streets as a means of expressing their opposition to, and in some cases support of, government policies, actions or leaders. Following a pattern which is not unusual in Israel, some aspects of this issue have found their way into the courts and on to the table of the Attorney General. Thus, the refusal of the Jerusalem police to grant a permit for a demonstration through the main streets of the city, exactly one month after the tragic murder of Emil Grunzweig during a Peace Now demonstration, led the disappointed applicants, with the active support of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), to petition the Supreme Court. The Court overruled the police decision and ordered the police to grant the licence. On the 1st April, 1983, following repeated requests by the ACRI, the Attorney General issued directives reaffirming the right of citizens to demonstrate and clarifying the powers of the police to disallow or interfere with demonstrations. That one of the two dailies with the largest circulations in Israel saw fit to publish the full text of these directives in its holiday edition is an indication of the interest which the public has in the issue.

This article explores the significance of the reference, in proportionality analyses, to proper purpose and legitimate ends, given the traditional aversion of international humanitarian law (IHL) to questions of (political) legitimacy. It demonstrates the centrality of that aversion in doctrinal assertions concerning the goals, characteristics and operational strategy of IHL yet argues that, at its historical and conceptual foundations, the law draws on a construction of war that presupposes legitimacy of the political type. That construction remains embedded, though implicit, in contemporary proportionality analyses.

Thus, the instrumental understanding of war by Carl von Clausewitz poses several challenges to entrenched contemporary doctrinal claims about the law, how it operates and the effects it produces. This provides an impetus for critical reassessment of the aversion to politics and the interaction between the humanitarian, military and political spheres in the operation of IHL norms. Such critique helps to identify novel strategies of humanitarian protection in war outside the confines demarcated by orthodox doctrine.

The assumption of this article is that when a state is involved in an international armed conflict it may employ lethal force against combatants of the enemy unless they are hors de combat. Hence, even when it would be feasible to do so, it has no duty to apprehend enemy combatants rather than use force against them. Does this same norm apply in non-international armed conflicts occurring in the territory of a single state (internal conflicts)? The writers argue that the answer is in the negative. Despite the attempt in recent years to narrow the differences between the norms that apply in non-international armed conflicts (NIACs) and international armed conflicts (IACs), there are still significant differences between the two types of armed conflict, which justify the application of different norms in this context. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions refers only to humanitarian norms and does not imply that the norms relating to the conduct of hostilities in IACs apply also in NIACs. While customary international law may allow states to use lethal force in a NIAC in the actual conduct of hostilities, there is no basis for assuming that the norm that ostensibly applies in IACs relating to use of such force outside the context of hostilities applies in NIACs too. The jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which is the main source for the arguments on closing the gap between IACs and NIACs, relates only to humanitarian norms and has never addressed extending the permissive IAC norms of the law of armed conflict (LOAC) to NIACs. Finally, in an internal armed conflict the state has a dual capacity: it must respect and ensure the human rights of all persons subject to its jurisdiction, and it is a party in an armed conflict with some of those persons. In such a situation, the only context in which the state may deviate from regular norms of law enforcement is the actual context of hostilities, in which application of such norms is not feasible. In other contexts, its human rights obligations prevail.

Offering a current reflection on Raphael Walden's 1977 article, ‘The Subjective Element in the Formation of Customary International Law’, this contribution seeks to illustrate that considerable clarity has been achieved over the decades with regard to several long-standing questions associated with customary international law, not least those surrounding opinio juris. Accumulated practice and constructive scholarship have supplied insights into, and indeed answers to several of the controversies that have bedevilled the theory of this central source of international law. While it may inherently defy exact formulations, and some theoretical questions remain, customary international law is thus today not only as present in the international legal system as it has always been but is also better understood.

Article 4 of the Nation State Law (NSL), entitled ‘Languages’, stipulates that Hebrew is the language of the state (Article 4(a)); the Arabic language has a special status in the state and regulating the use of Arabic in or by state institutions will be set in law (Article 4(b)); and this clause does not harm the status given to the Arabic language before the law came into effect (Article 4(c), the ‘validity of laws’ clause). The question is whether, how, and to what extent these provisions hinder the present legal status of the Arabic language in Israel. The legal status of Arabic had never been determined decisively before enactment of the NSL. The High Court of Israel has always been divided on this matter, particularly between judges who perceived Arabic as an official language and judges who deemed it solely as having been granted its acknowledged ‘special legal status’. Furthermore, the judges who perceived Arabic as an official language of the state were also in dispute among themselves as to the meaning, the scope and the consequences of such recognition. Considering these circumstances, my view is that the NSL perpetuates the legal status of Arabic as prescribed in the laws and case law that already existed, and that the validity of laws clause, coupled with the special status granted to Arabic in a basic law, suggests that the door is still open for the Court to further endorse the legal status of Arabic in Israel.

In contrast with most other municipal courts in the world, the Israeli Supreme Court routinely decides cases based on international humanitarian law (IHL). Since the Six Day War in 1967, both the state and the Supreme Court have agreed that the Court has jurisdiction to decide humanitarian issues that come before it from territory held under belligerent occupation. The Court has indeed done so in issues ranging from land seizures to targeted killings, ruling on the basis of the relevant IHL. The Court has been criticised for its judgments, both from the right wing of the political spectrum, who see it as interfering with military matters, and from the left, who see it as granting legitimacy to occupation. In this article, I briefly describe the development, both historical and legal, of IHL in the Israeli Supreme Court, the criticism of the way the law is applied by the Court, and finally the importance of the fundamental concepts of human dignity and proportionality to IHL decisions.

This article compares the Hobbesian realist and Kantian idealist analyses of international law and organizations with respect to the UN General Assembly resolutions and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion on Israel's separation barrier. From the realist perspective, this case highlights the exploitation of moral claims in support of a particularist political agenda. In contrast, the idealist approach interprets the advisory opinion and resolutions as important normative expressions in the developing global system of governance based on universal human rights principles and treaty obligations.

The analysis begins with a detailed comparison of the ideological and intellectual foundations of these core approaches to international law and organizations, the evolution of this debate in the post Cold War international system, and the impact on protracted ethno-national conflicts. This provides the basis for examining the impact of both schools in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The specific case of the UN and ICJ's involvement in the question of Israel's separation barrier is then analyzed in detail from both the realist and idealist perspectives.

The implications of this debate are of major importance, not only with respect to the specific challenges posed by terrorism and the necessary responses, but also in the wider context of the crisis in the international system at the beginning of the 21st century. The analysis concludes by noting the degree to which this case illustrates a wider process in which international legal principles are manipulated in a manner that contributes to conflict and justification of violence, conforming to the realist interpretation. While still pursuing idealist objectives, wishful thinking cannot conceal the abuse ofuniversalist claims of morality in the pursuit of war by other means.

Utilitarianism is the view that the rightness of an action depends entirely on expected utility, that is on the sum of the utilities of its consequences weighted by their various probabilities. I shall distinguish two forms of utilitarianism: hedonistic utilitarianism and preference utilitarianism. In hedonistic utilitarianism it is just a matter of pleasure and its opposite, unpleasure. Often utilitarians have used ‘pain’ instead of ‘unpleasure’, but this has the disadvantage that ‘pain’ can suggest ‘a pain’, and ‘a pain’ is not the opposite of ‘a pleasure’. If I annoy you I give you the opposite of pleasure but I do not necessarily give you a pain. In preference utilitarianism we take value to be satisfaction of desires or preferences. It is a difficult theory to work out in so far as we have to take ‘preference’ here to be intrinsic preference, and so need a clear distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic preferences.

The term of redemption, ge'ula, is widely used in the Bible. It basically denotes the rightful getting back of a person or object that had once belonged to one or to one's family but had been lost. In the laws this takes the form of avenging a relative's murder (“redemption of blood”), of buying back a relative from slavery, or a relative's land from an outsider. The term is also used of the commuting to money payments of offerings for sacrifice. In narrative, and in particular, prophetic texts the term is given a wider meaning. It denotes the saving òf a person from the clutches of his enemies by a powerful relative, usually God. The enemies may be foreign nations, creditors or even such abstract forces as sin or death. The idea of payment, which exists in some of the laws, retreats into the background. We must be careful, therefore, in examining the sources, to remember that the term ge'ula had not only several legal meanings but also had fairly general currency in the literature of Ancient Israel.

This was an important award because it concerned the implementation of the Treaty of Peace of March 1979 between Israel and Egypt. Israel's obligation to withdraw “behind the international boundary” could not be implemented to the satisfaction of both parties so long as there existed a disagreement over the location of that boundary.

The Joint Commission established pursuant to Article IV of the Peace Treaty, a body of military personnel, finally identified some 14 boundary pillars the location of which remained disputed. And, since Article VII of the Peace Treaty required reference to conciliation or arbitration of disputes not resolved by negotiations, the dispute over the location of these boundary pillars was referred to arbitration by the Compromis of 11 September 1986.

A new section dealing with the practice of Israel in matters relating to International Law is being introduced herewith. This section will appear regularly in the Israel Law Review bringing to our readers significant cases as well as developments and trends in this important field of law in Israel. The following survey has been prepared by Ms. B. Cohen under the supervision of Prof. R. Lapidoth and Mr. M. Hirsch of the International Law Department of the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University. The responsibility for the content is the author's.

1. When touching upon the question of the nature of corporate personality most lawyers will at best make a link with some paragraphs from the introduction to their commercial law course. They will remember that during the nineteenth century fierce theoretical battles were fought on questions such as whether we should treat supra-individual and non-individual entities as “persons”, under what conditions we should recognize their personality and what should be the legal consequences of such recognition. But no matter how interesting this debate must have been, to revive it is tantamount to becoming a public menace. Already in 1953 H.L.A. Hart, certainly an authority on legal theory, declared that “the juristic controversy over the nature of corporate personality is dead”. In many respects this assessment is correct. Despite the numerous differences about the conditions of recognition, about the possible types of corporations and associations which are subject to corporate personality, about the solidity of the corporate veil, we can observe that nearly all legal systems in the world adopt the notion of corporate personality as such. We may assume the notion will become even more important in the former socialist world, as these countries try hard to reshape their economies along the lines of the market economies in the Western world.

Over the past two decades considerable interest has developed in the subject of the victims of crime. This interest reached a peak in the United States in 1982 with the establishment and report of the President's Task Force on Victims of Crime, which made numerous recommendations for legislative, executive, and other institutional action on both the Federal and State levels, including an amendment to the United States Constitution. The momentum, however, continued. Subsequent developments have included the establishment of an Office for Victims of Crime in the Office of Justice Programs, a flurry of legislative activity across the nation, and the declaration of National Victims' Rights Weeks with the participation of the U.S. President. The interests of victims have been taken up not only by special organizations established for the purpose, such as the National Organization of Victims' Assistance (NOVA), the Victims' Assistance Legal Organization in Virginia, and the National Victim Center (founded in honor of Sunny von Bulow) — as well as more narrowly focussed groups such as MADD (Mothers against Drunk Driving), but also by such mainstream professional bodies as the American Bar Association, the National Association of Attorneys General, the National Conference of the Judiciary, the American Psychological Association, and the National Institute for Mental Health.

This Article focuses on the approach of the European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg, concerning the relationship between secularism and freedom of religion and the application of the “margin of appreciation doctrine.” Through the investigation of the relevant jurisprudence of the Court dealing with religious freedom and the principle of secularism (the Şahin, Dahlab, and Lautsi cases), the Author demonstrates that Court jurisprudence is moving from the application of principles of “pluralist secularism” toward a “fundamentalist approach” to secularism. Having evaluated the modus operandi of the Court in the light of the competing interests at stake, the Author suggests that in deciding cases where secularism and freedom to manifest religion collide, the Court should follow a case-by-case approach primarily aimed at protecting individual liberties and has to consider the political and cultural background of each situation and the effective impact on the State's life of the individual behavior.