My story is full of holes. The first hole, or rather, ditch, was dug in 1930 by the municipality of Haifa. An Arab, Dr. Caesar Khoury, fell into the ditch and fractured his shoulder-blade.

Could Dr. Khoury recover? The law of torts of mandatory Palestine was found in the Mejelle — an Ottoman code of Moslem civil law. Did the Mejelle provide a remedy in the case of personal injury? “Unfortunately,” said Judge Francis Baker, who delivered the opinion of the Supreme Court of Palestine, “the Mejelle dealt with liability for damages caused by animals to property, but it was ‘silent’ with regards to injuries caused to persons”. Therefore, Dr. Khoury could not recover.

The second hole in my story belongs to a Jew, Feivel Danovitz. In 1939, Danovitz was run down by a truck in Tel Aviv. He sued the driver and the owner of the truck. The lower courts of Tel Aviv decided that if the Mejelle did not deal with liability for personal injury, that meant that there was a hole in the tort law of Palestine. Such a hole could be filled by recourse to the English common law in accordance with the provisions of Article 46 of the Palestine Order-in-Council, 1922. Since the English common law recognized liability for personal injury, Danovitz could recover.

Two questions are central in the law of contracts: first, what are the conditions necessary to the formation of a contract; second, what is the scope of the contractual obligation. The first question deals with the two basic requirements for the formation of a contract — offer and acceptance, whose substantive components are the intention to form a legal obligation and definiteness. It also deals with the substantive requirement of writing, in those classes of contracts in which it is required, and the requirement of consideration, in those legal systems in which it exists. The second question deals with those rules which determine the remedies for breach of contract such as specific performance, damages and restitution. In this article I shall try to identify and evaluate recent trends in Israeli law concerning these questions, as demonstrated by decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court, and to evaluate these trends by measuring their consistency with one another.

The Charter of the United Nations proclaims the equality of nations large and small. Nowhere is this principle violated more than in the case of Israel. And nowhere is the inequity more malevolent than in the U.N. human rights system. Reasonable and equitable treatment of a multiplicity of human rights claims throughout the world ought to be one of the hallmarks of United Nations actions. It is not. Instead, for Israel's foes human rights is the rhetorical weapon of choice. And the stage for their campaign is the United Nations. Neither the medium, nor the strategy has changed since the signing of the Oslo Declaration of Principles or the subsequent agreements on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

To well-meaning human rights advocates around the world the United Nations provides a source of hope, a channel for their energies, a vehicle for their causes. Their very presence invests the U.N. human rights fora with an air of legitimacy and an aura of power. The environment is beguiling both to observers and political participants. But looking beyond the hundreds of resolutions, the thousands of pages of paper in six languages, it is possible to expose the malignant nature of the United Nations human rights system.

This paper will deal with the reinstatement of wrongfully dismissed employees in the Israeli law of collective bargaining. According to the current state of Israeli labor law, this question is connected with many other issues, such as the difference between individual and collective disputes (a problem most exhaustively developed in the law of strikes), the ability of an individual employee to enforce rights deriving from a collective agreement and the application of the regular contracts remedies law to collective agreements. We begin with the collective agreement and its administration.

Israel's Collective Agreements Law of 1957 exhibits an intriguing amalgam of American and continental influences. From America the act borrowed the concept of an exclusive bargaining representative. It was contemplated that in a special collective agreement between a labor organization and a single employer or in a general collective agreement between a labor organization and an employers' association, one labor organization only would be entitled to enter into the collective agreement — the labor organization with the largest union membership. An agreement made by such a representative labor organization would directly bind all employees in the plant or trade covered by the agreement, whether members of the representative labor organization or not.

The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (“the Interim Agreement”) represents another stage in the implementation of the framework established in the Declaration of Principles signed between the Government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (the “PLO”), commonly known as the “Oslo process”. In essence, the Interim Agreement provides for the establishment of self-government arrangements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as envisaged in the Declaration of Principles, while explicitly superseding the arrangements which applied in the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area since May 1994. In addition, the Interim Agreement provides for “direct, free and general political elections” to be held in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The aim of this section is to acquaint lawyers with the general framework of the Agreement, and the primary legal and political issues dealt with by the Interim Agreement, rather than to describe the specifics of each of its many provisions. Where required, reference will be made to the Declaration of Principles and to previous Agreements concluded between the Parties. At times, reference will also be made to the Camp David Framework of 1978.