The EU's consistent policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been that Israel's presence in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip (prior to the 2005 disengagement) and the Golan Heights is subject to the laws of belligerent occupation, that any purported Israeli annexation is illegal and null and void, that Israel's settlements in the Territories are in breach of public international law and constitute a serious obstacle to peace, and that Israel and Palestine should settle their conflict on the basis of public international law and through the two-state solution. In recent years the EU attempted to concretize this policy through its trade and trade-related agreements with Israel, withholding the benefits of EU-Israeli co-operation from companies and research institutions based in the Territories or operating therein, as well as from products produced therein (the New Approach). Thus, from the EU perception, the New Approach towards the long-standing conflict and its reliance on international law may be seen as an instrument to reinforce internal and external legitimacy, buttress identity cohesiveness and as a manifestation of its more robust effectiveness. But this article seeks to conduct a more careful and balanced analysis of the New Approach and in doing so to reveal that the EU's (almost) exclusive focus on non-governmental entities, such as corporations situated in the Territories, and on Territories’ products, is misplaced in terms of public international law and effectiveness. The New Approach's deficiencies, in abstracto and in concreto, as evaluated in this article, are likely to prevent it from serving as a paradigm shift in EU-Israel relations.

The judiciary’s counter-majoritarian role in the realm of national security is of paramount importance. By and large the Israel Supreme Court has taken cognizance of this truism and has imposed significant procedural and substantive restrictions on the Israeli military authorities, relying more and more on public international law. Yet when faced with house demolition measures, it has adopted a different stance, preferring to conduct a judicial review which is devoid of any meaningful scrutiny of the measures according to international law. The article attempts to ascertain the reasons for the Court's different judicial position, by advancing, inter alia, legal, historical, socio-political, and personal reasons, reasons relating to the nature of the petitioners, as well as those pertaining to the intertwined concepts of status quo bias, omission bias, and loss aversion. The findings of the case study may be relevant to other courts, in other countries. When faced with deterrent measures that are employed at times of severe security threats and that are strongly supported by the political establishment and by the public, courts may find it difficult to perform a counter-majoritarian role and to abide by their own judicial doctrines and principles.

The practice of house demolition in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (‘the Territories’) pursued by Israel for the purpose of deterring potential terrorist activities (as opposed to planning or operational purposes) has attracted voluminous literature, most of which is critical. Scholarship postulates that the practice is immoral and ineffective, that it is contrary to Jewish morals and international law, and that it may amount to an international crime. Some of the critical writings focus on the practice of the Israel Defence Forces; others concentrate on the failure of the Israeli Parliament to curb the practice, while others examine the practice in its wider context, namely the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This article focuses on the regulation of the practice by the Israeli Supreme Court (‘the Court’). This theme has already been examined by numerous scholars including, in particular, Kretzmer and Simon, who found that the Court's jurisprudence is contrary to public international law and its reasoning is unpersuasive. This article aims to add to the existing scholarly corpus by using a different prism. It contrasts the Court's house demolition jurisprudence with its own jurisprudence in comparable areas in which it is called upon to resolve tensions between security and human rights in the Territories, postulating that in handling house demolition measures the Court is unfaithful to its own jurisprudence. Building upon these findings, the article distils the manifestations of that unfaithfulness and its negative repercussions in normative, coherence and legitimacy terms. It concludes with the call that when the issue of house demolition is brought back before the Court, it should apply the same approach, spirit, techniques and benchmarks that it has employed in analogous areas of law.

The rich literature on the problematic aspects of EU-Israel relations focuses on historical, structural, politico-economic, legal, institutional, geo-political and strategic causes. An attempt will be made in this article to contribute to the existing scholarship by focusing on a novel angle, namely the negative role of the lack of adequate and informed European-Israeli dialogue in constituting European-Israeli relations. Against the backdrop of the theoretical analysis of the role of dialogue in International Relations, this article examines the lack of adequate European-Israeli dialogue, analysing its causes and the negative role that it plays in constituting European-Israeli relations. The article demonstrates that such lack of dialogue is caused not only by mutual ignorance, prejudice, misinformation, mistrust and antagonism, but also causes these same factors to characterise European-Israeli relations.

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.

The european integration programme is a unique and ambitious attempt on the part of numerous nations, with a long history of armed conflicts and diverse cultural, linguistic, legal and economic traditions, to become integrated under a ‘new legal order’. Indeed, the European Union (‘EU’) can look back with much satisfaction on its record of transforming a large part of Europe, once afflicted by wars, nationalist divisions, Nazism and Fascism, into a region where peace, political moderation and protection of human rights prevail. Now, the EU wishes to externalise its success. As Robert Kagan has argued in Power and Weakness, ‘the transmission of the European miracle to the rest of the world has become Europe’s new mission civilisatrice. Just as Americans have always believed that they had discovered the secret to human happiness and wished to export it to the rest of the world, so the Europeans have a new mission born of their own discovery of perpetual peace’.

The interface between trade and competition has long been the focus of scholarship. Its international dimension has in recent years increasingly attracted the attention of commentators, international organisations in general and the European Community (EC) in particular, multilateral and regional judicial bodies, as well as nongovernmental organisations. This article analyses one dimension of this interface, namely the EC Anti-Dumping (AD) Policy directed at non-European dumped goods, and its relationship with the EC Competition Policy.