Israel S National Security Law

This book analyses both the substance of Israel's National security law and the dynamics of its historical development. It examines the normative principles upon which Israel's national security law is based, institutional arrangements for the formulation and protection of national security law, and the style in which Israeli national security law is formulated.

Here, David Scharia explains how the Supreme Court of Israel developed unconventional judicial review tools and practices that allowed it to provide judicial guidance to the Executive in real-time. In this book, he argues that courts could play a much more dominant role in reviewing national security, and demonstrates the importance of intensive real-time inter-branch dialogue with the Executive, as a tool used by the Israeli Court to provide such review.

This work deals with the different ways in which the law and national security considerations intersect with democracy in the state of Israel. Particular factors covered include emergency arrangements, civil and political rights, secret agencies and the matter of the occupied territories.

The author argues that Israel stands on the frontlines of a new struggle over the international laws of war and exposes abuses of law that have been promulgated by international human rights lawyers, UN bodies, and intellectuals to illegitimately circumscribe the right of liberal democracies to defend themselves against transnational terrorists. The Goldstone Report, which was published by the United Nations in September 2009, and the Gaza flotilla controversy, which erupted at the end of May 2010, are examples of those abuses. This book criticizes the flawed assumptions and defective claims arising from both the Goldstone Report and the Gaza flotilla controversy, showing how the legal principles and conclusions advanced by many of Israel's critics threaten not only Israel's national security interests but the United States' as well.

National security has been at the forefront of the Israeli experience for seven decades, with threats ranging from terrorism, to vast rocket and missile arsenals, and even existential nuclear dangers. Yet, despite its overwhelming preoccupation with foreign and defense affairs, Israel does not have a formal national security strategy. In Israeli National Security, Chuck Freilich presents an authoritative analysis of the military, diplomatic, demographic, and societal challenges Israel faces today, to propose a comprehensive and long-term Israeli national security strategy. The heart of the new strategy places greater emphasis on restraint, defense, and diplomacy as means of addressing the challenges Israel faces, along with the military capacity to deter and, if necessary, defeat Israel's adversaries, while also maintaining the resolve of its society. By bringing Israel's most critical debates about the Palestinians, demography, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, US relations and nuclear strategy into sharp focus, the strategy Freilich proposes addresses the primary challenges Israel must address in order to chart its national course. The most comprehensive study of Israel's national security to date, this book presents the first public proposal for a comprehensive Israeli national security strategy and prescribes an actionable course forward.

The Routledge Handbook on Israeli Security provides an authoritative survey of both the historical roots of Israel’s national security concerns and their principal contemporary expressions. Following an introduction setting out its central themes, the Handbook comprises 27 independent chapters, all written by experts in their fields, several of whom possess first-hand diplomatic and/or military experience at senior levels. An especially noteworthy feature of this volume is the space allotted to analyses of the impact of security challenges not just on Israel’s diplomatic and military postures (nuclear as well as conventional) but also on its cultural life and societal behavior. Specifically, it aims to fulfill three principal needs. The first is to illustrate the dynamic nature of Israel's security concerns and the ways in which they have evolved in response to changes in the country's diplomatic and geo-strategic environment, changes that have been further fueled by technological, economic and demographic transformations; Second, the book aims to examine how the evolving character of Israel's security challenges has generated multiple – and sometimes conflicting – interpretations of the very concept of "security", resulting in a series of dialogues both within Israeli society and between Israelis and their friends and allies abroad; Finally, it also discusses how areas of private and public life elsewhere considered inherently "civilian" and unrelated to security, such as artistic and cultural institutions, nevertheless do mirror the broader legal, economic and cultural consequences of this Israeli preoccupation with national security. This comprehensive and up-to-date collection of studies provides an authoritative and interdisciplinary guide to both the dynamism of Israel’s security dilemmas and to their multiple impacts on Israeli society. In addition to its insights and appeal for all people and countries forced to address the security issue in today’s world, this Handbook is a valuable resource for upper-level undergraduates and researchers with an interest in the Middle East and Israeli politics, international relations and security studies.

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