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Legal Liminalities: Conflicting Jurisdictional Claims in the Transition from British Mandate Palestine to the State of Israel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2020

Rephael G. Stern
Rephael G. Stern*
Affiliation:
History Department, Law School, Harvard University
*
rstern01@g.harvard.edu
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Abstract

This article explores the legal and temporal dimensions of the transition from British Mandate Palestine to the State of Israel on 15 May 1948. I examine the paradoxical character of Israeli jurisdictional claims during this period and argue that it reveals the Israeli state's uncertainty as to whether the Mandate had truly passed into the past. On one hand, Israel recognized the validity of the Mandate administration's jurisdiction until 15 May; I employ the Israeli trial of the British citizen Frederick William Sylvester to demonstrate how Israel even predicated its own jurisdictional claims on their being continuous with those of its predecessor. In this case, the Mandate administration was cast as having entered the realm of the past. Conversely, the Israeli state contested Mandate laws and legal decisions made prior to 15 May to assert its own jurisdictional claims. In the process, Israeli officials belied their efforts to bury their predecessors in the past and implicitly questioned whether the past was in fact behind them. By simultaneously relying upon and disavowing past British legal decisions, the Israeli state staked a claim on being a “completely different political creature” from its British predecessor while retaining its colonial legal structures as the “ultimate standards of reference.” Israel's complex attitude toward its Mandate past directs our attention to how it was created against the backdrop of the receding British Empire and underscores the importance of studying Israel alongside other post-imperial states that emerged from the First World War and the mid-century decolonizing world.

Keywords

IsraelBritish Mandate Palestinepost-imperial lawjurisdictionprecedentex post facto law
Type
At the Edge of the State
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 359 - 388
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2020

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43 Even though the Supreme Court heard appeals following the Sylvester case, it still did not serve as the Court of High Justice and it did not hear administrative and constitutional law cases in the first instance during this period. Instead, the Tel Aviv District Court heard these cases, a fact that further accentuated the liminal nature of the transition period. I thank a CSSH reviewer for pointing this out.

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48 ISA P-12/940, Trial Proceedings of CrimC (Jer) 2/48 Attorney General v. Sylvester and Hawkins, 84–85. The court cited HC 67/36, Shawa v. Assistant District Commissioner, Southern District, Gaza, 3 PLR 146 (1936).

49 The defense seems to have conflated the principle against ex post facto law—that is, the promulgation and application of a law retroactively—with its claim against retroactive Israeli utilization of inherited British law, a law that was already on the books.

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83 ISA G-26/115, 18 May 1948, Hannah to Sharef.

84 Divre Ha-Keneset, Meeting 70, 24 Aug. 1949, 1365.

85 Law and Administration Ordinance, 5709-1948, 1 LSI 1 (1948). Not all provisions of the 1941 Immigration Ordinance were revoked. I thank a CSSH reviewer for pointing this out.

86 Joseph Weitz, Hitnahalutena Bi-Tekufat Ha-Saʻar, Nisan 696-Nisan 707 [Our settlement activities in a period of storm and stress, 1936–1947] (Merhavyah: Sifriyat poʻalim, 1947), 15.

87 Law and Administration Ordinance, 5709-1948 §13.

88 Administrative Appeal (AdmA) 1/49, Zur Shipping Company Ltd. v. Attorney General, 4 PD 288 (1950).

89 For the full text of the Mandate for Palestine, see “The Palestine Mandate,” Avalon Project, Yale Law School, 2008, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/palmanda.asp (last accessed 25 Dec. 2019).

90 HCJ 55/25, Husseini v. Government of Palestine, 1 PLR 50 (1925).

91 HCJ 19/47, Rosenblatt v. The Registrar of Lands, 5 ALR 499 (1947).

92 HCJ 5/48, Leon v. Acting District Commissioner of Tel Aviv, 1 PD 58 (1948).

93 Paul Weis, Nationality and Statelessness in International Law (Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands; Germantown, Md.: Sijthoff & Noordhoff, 1979), 146.

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99 ISA GL-35/17097, 1 Jan. 1949, Palmon to Porat.

100 Regarding the Israeli transplantation of Pakistani evacuee property law, see Kedar, “Expanding Legal Geographies.” See also my article, “Uncertain Comparisons: Zionist and Israeli Links to India and Pakistan in the Age of Partition and Decolonization” (currently under review).

101 See “Questions of the Hour,” ha-Praklit 5 (Mar.–Apr. 1948): n.p.

102 Golani, End of the British Mandate, 104.

103 See Palestine Post, 22 Jan. 1948, “Court Can't Consider Plea of Insecurity.”

104 See “Questions of the Hour,” ha-Praklit 5 (Jan. 1948): n.p.

105 Gavriel Strasman, ʻOte ha-gelimah: toldot ʻarikhat ha-din be-Erets Yisra'el [Wearing the robes: a history of lawyering in Eretz Israel] (Tel Aviv: Lishkat ʻorkhe ha-din be-Yisra'el; Sifriyat Maʻariv, 1984), 216–17. It is not entirely clear to what extent the Mandatory courts succeeded in completing their cases. See Palestine Post, 23 Jan. 1948, “60 Trials Postponed.”

106 In the files of the Yishuv's emergency committee is a draft of a law that mandated the continuation of criminal proceedings that had begun prior to 15 May. That law was never put into effect. See ISA G-38/110, 16 Feb. 1948, Cohen to Goitein, and attached Criminal Proceedings (Transfer of Proceedings) Order 1948.

107 Strasman, ʻOte ha-gelimah, 231.

108 The following information is based on the Supreme Court's verdict in the appeal.

109 HCJ 3/48, Katz-Cohen v. Attorney General, 2 PD 681, 691.

110 Ibid., 693.

111 CA 37/48, Bank Ha-Po'alim v. Karvzov, 2 PD 143 (1949).

112 CrimA 65/49, Wahib Saleh Kalil, 4 PD 75 (1950).

113 CrimA 5/48, Schreiber v. Attorney General, 2 PD 148, 152 (1949).

114 Lahav, Judgment in Jerusalem, 83.

115 Palestine Post, 23 Jan. 1947, “Death Sentence for Tiberias Man.” See also CA 8/47, Aziz Abraham Mizrahi v. Attorney General, 14 PLR 47 (1947).

116 ISA G-21/5396, 23 Sept. 1948, Chizik to Ben-Gurion.

117 ISA G-21/5396, 31 Aug. 1948, Rosen to the Government and Sharef; ISA G-21/5396, 9 Sept. 1948, Rosen to Sharef; ISA G-21/5396, 28 Oct. 1948, Rosen [?] to Sharef.

118 Tirshomet Yeshivot ha-Memshalah ha-Zemanit [Provisional government session protocol] (Jerusalem: Government Printer, 1948–1949), 6 Feb. 1949, 52.

119 Ibid.

120 Yifrah, Shlomo, “The 1949 General Pardon Ordinance and Its Effect on Previous Charges,” HaPraklit 6 (1949): 217–19Google Scholar.

121 Tirshomet Yeshivot, 6 Feb., 53.

122 See CA 376/46, Rosenboim v. Rosenboim, 2 PD 235 (1949).

123 The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem, vol. 5 (Jerusalem: Trust for the Publication of the Proceedings of the Eichmann Trial, in co-operation with the Israel State Archives and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, 1992), 2100.

124 ISA G-5691/15, 11 Nov. 1956, Rosenne Legal Opinion 43/56, “Regarding the Legal Status of the New Territories that Were Recently Conquered by the IDF,” 2–3.

125 Blum, Yehuda Z., “The Missing Reversioner: Reflections on the Status of Judea and Samaria,” Israel Law Review 3, 2 (1968): 295 n60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.