The Military Government was established during the war and operated within the army, but it promoted political and ideological objectives. In July 1948, David Ben Gurion established it as body intended to govern the Palestinians who remained in Israel. Its main objectives were threefold: to facilitate the transfer of Palestinian land into Jewish hands; to exclude Palestinians from the labor market and prevent them from organizing on a national basis. The Military Government promoted these objectives through a bureaucratic mechanism that prevented the Palestinians citizens of Israel from leaving their place of residence without the governor's approval. The supporters of the Military Government were well aware of the fact that its existence makes Israel a non-democratic state. They supported its existence because they believed it was necessary to maintain Israel's Jewish character. The Military Government was controversial in the political system in Israel, but the intensity of the opposition to its existence was sometimes contingent on the partisan and ideological interests of the opponents, both from the left and the right. The book describes the factors that shaped the political system's relationship with the Military Government and traces the changing strength of the debate surrounding it. The book seeks, among other things, to answer the question of whether Prime Minister Levi Eshkol's decision to abolish the Military Government in December 1966 was due to the struggle of the opponents or rather from the recognition that the Military Government had fulfilled its objectives.

Since its creation, the Babylonian Talmud has stood at the center of the Jewish intellectual canon and the heart of Torah study. Despite its wide circulation and enduring significance, it remains an elusive work to define. It is a religious text, yet contains little theology; it is deeply legal, yet it is hardly concerned with practical rulings; it is framed as a commentary on the Mishnah, yet frequently departs into independent expansive discussions. What, then, is this composition? How was it constructed? How did it come to occupy such a central place in Jewish tradition? And how has it been interpreted over the centuries? The first part of The Talmud: A History of Learning is devoted to analyzing the Talmud itself—dissecting its constituent parts and exploring their formation, purpose, and historical context. The second part turns to the reception of the Talmud: the ways in which it has been read, studied, and reinterpreted from its redaction through the present day. The title of the book reflects this dual focus: it addresses both the internal processes of learning that gave rise to the Talmudic text, and the external history of its study and the discourses it has generated from late antiquity to the present.

Sovereignty in Miniature examines the formative period of Israel’s relations with the United Nation through the lens of Jerusalem’s history. According to the UN resolution, Jerusalem was to become a demilitarized international city. Yet following the results of the war, the city was divided de facto between Israel and Jordan. An exception was the exclave of Mount Scopus, which remained demilitarized under UN control. Drawing on documents from four continents, this study investigates Israel’s actions vis-à-vis Jordan, the UN and other international actors to assert its claim to sovereignty over its share of the exclave. The book uses the vantage point of the absolute exceptional – a demilitarized zone under UN control – to expose the Israeli understanding of sovereignty. Telling a largely forgotten story, Sovereignty in Miniature demonstrates how, once Israel recognized the potential significance of the Jewish institutions on Mount Scopus – the Hebrew University, National Library and Hadassah Hospital – it leveraged their ownership to consolidate its grip on the exclave. For similar reasons, Israel attempted with varying degrees of success to claim direct or indirect control over sites beyond its immediate possession, including the British military cemetery, the German Augusta Victoria compound and the Palestinian village of Issawiya.

In The Taste of Hidden Things Sara Sviri weaves a tapestry in which Sufi motifs and images are highlighted: the perfume of Attar's and Rumi's poetry, the boldness of Ibn al-Arabi's mystical speculation, the ecstatic experiences and dreams of old and modern seekers, and the richness of the Naqshbandi masters, past and present. A special place is given to al-Hakim at-Tirmidhi, a ninth century mystic from Central Asia. Many passages from his work, including his wife’s teaching dreams, are published here for the first time in Hebrew.

Against the backdrop of war and the political crisis in Israel, volume 73 of Iyyun turns a philosophical spotlight on the concept of law, which has become acute in contemporary Israeli discourse. The articles in this volume deal with a variety of systems of laws, which stress the fundamental difference between theoretical and normative laws, and the understanding that the validity of the law and its compulsory nature are heterogenic by nature.

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka’s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s work, rescuing his legacy from both obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership: the Jewish state, where Kafka dreamed of living, or Germany, where Kafka’s three sisters perished in the Holocaust? Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts—brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political—that determined the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts.

Israel's recent constitutional political crisis marks the moment when civil duty becomes an existential question: are civilians obliged to obey an administration chosen in a democratic process, even if it means harm to justice, decency or elementary democratic values? The main claim made in this essay is that two types of civil disobedience are to be categorized: disobedience of law or policy, and disobedience of legality.

When is a state authorized to demand of its civilians to sacrifice their lives in war? When is it authorized to demand of its soldiers to kill soldiers of an opposing army in war? According to politico-liberal theory, a state is authorized to oblige its civilians to participate only in a defensive war. However, some groups in Israel believe that a state is authorized to demand of its civilians to participate in a war of necessity, such as a war rooted in religious elements.

This volume is the first attempt at broad and deep research from a gender perspective into the halakhic attitude towards abortion. With the argument that halakhah reflects the male outlook and the consequent gender biases taken as its starting point, it examines the influence of gender concepts on contemporary halakhic rulings about abortion, in light of bio-ethical, conservative, liberal, and feminist theories, as well as the ideas of feminist legal theory and the feminist critique of the reigning epistemology. The book analyzes the gender implications of the stringent halakhic rulings of the twentieth century and the way they construct women. It asserts that the halakhic stance that takes the ban on abortion as a Torah-based prohibition constricts the idea of the sanctity of life to biological terms only and thereby highlights the reduction of women to mainly an entity for reproduction. The research raises a number of questions that have never been asked before: How do the decision makers see the female essence in general, and specifically in the context of abortion? Where do the woman’s needs rank on the scale of the decision makers' considerations? Are women perceived as subjects with their own interests and will—or are these deemed irrelevant and appropriated for the benefit of the collective (the family, the Jewish people)? These questions serve as the foundation for the discussion in the present volume. Even though it deals mainly with abortion, I suggest that it be seen as demonstrating the masculine identity of the halakhic discourse in general.

Nietzsche is not ordinarily considered a philosopher of law, and despite the voluminous literature on almost every other aspect of his thought, little has been written about his reflections on the role of law in the social, intellectual, and personal spheres. Yet careful reading of his works reveals a significant body of critical reflection on socio-jurisprudential questions regarding the nature of law, obedience to the law, the criminal mindset, punishment, and more. The book presents for the first time, a comprehensive collection of aphorisms gathered from the entire Nietzschean corpus that explicitly or implicitly addresses the subject of law, arranged thematically, along with contextualization, annotation, and commentary. The book contains six chapters - The Self in the Presence of Law, The Criminal: A Profile, Causation, Action, Free Will, Punishment, Rights and Obligations, Religion and State. It thus provides a panoramic view of Nietzsche’s critical discourse on law and legal culture.

This book's aim is to assist school counselors with ethical and professional dilemmas in various complex situations. It is structured as a series of case studies written in collaboration with professionals and students, presenting versatile solutions based on the seven steps model detailed in this book. This pioneering book is designated for school counselors, school principals, teachers and parents.