Palestine: The Legal Background

• No of titles: 23
• No. of images: 118,000
• Type of material: military orders and regulations, laws, gazettes
• Languages: English, Arabic, Hebrew
• Source holder: Al-Haq, Law in the Service of Man, Ramallah
• Including item-level MARC21 catalog records

This collection offers source materials on the legal position of the Israeli-Occupied Territories until 1984, including military orders and regulations issued by the Israeli Government. Additional sources, such as the Ottoman laws and the Palestine Gazette, have been added to offer a wider historical context. A number of indexes, compilations and English translations makes this collection an indispensable instrument for historical and legal research.

The West Bank of the River Jordan and the Gaza Strip are areas occupied by Israel as a result of the June 1967 war. These territories have been subject to a number of different ruling authorities since then, and consequently the legal system is based on several different codes.

Centuries of Ottoman rule over Palestine came to an end in 1917, and in 1922 the British were given a Mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations. Article 46 of the Palestine Order-in-Council stated that: “The jurisdiction of the Civil Courts shall be exercised in conformity with the Ottoman Laws in force in Palestine on 1st November 1914, and such later Ottoman Laws as have been or may be declared to be in force by Public Notice, and such Orders in Council, Ordinances and Regulations as are in force in Palestine at the date of the commencement of this Order, or may hereafter be applied or enacted ...”. The British Mandate ended in 1948, and three years after the 1948 war, Jordan annexed the West Bank. The Jordanian Constitution states: “All laws, regulations and legislative acts in force in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan at the date of the commencement of this Constitution shall remain in force until such time as they be repealed or modified by legislation issued for that purpose” (art. 128). Over the years from 1951 to 1967 so many laws, amendments, and modifications were passed that both East and West Banks came in effect to be ruled by the one system of the Jordanian law, which retained clear evidence of Ottoman and Mandate influence.

Jordanian rule lasted until the June 1967 war, when Israeli forces occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip. On June 7, 1967, the Israeli Military Government, now in control of the West Bank, assumed all legislative executive and administrative powers in the area, as stated in Proclamation Two of the military orders: “All laws that were in force in the Area on June 7th, 1967, shall continue to be in force as long as they do not contradict this or any other Proclamation or Order made by the [the West Bank Area Commander], or conflict with the changes arising by virtue of the occupation by the Israeli Defence Forces of the Area”. Jordanian law in the West Bank was thus frozen in its 1967 state.

Since 1967, as the occupying power, the Israeli authorities in the West Bank have issued more than two thousand military orders and regulations adding to or amending the Jordanian legislation that existed in 1967. These military orders and the Jordanian law, which included such laws of Palestine and Ottoman systems as were not repealed or modified under the British or Jordanian authorities, form the basis of the legal system in the West Bank.

The Gaza Strip is in a different situation. From 1948 to 1967, the law there remained the same combination of Ottoman and British Mandate laws as amended by Egyptian administrative orders. No attempt was made to apply Egyptian Law directly to the Gaza Strip, and the law therefore remained essentially as it was under the British Mandate. Since the 1967 occupation, more than a thousand Military Orders have been issued for Gaza, bringing about changes similar to those brought about in the West Bank.

This collection was scanned from a microfiche edition first published in 1984. The titles included here are those which were available at the time. Since then, new orders have been issued, laws have been passed, and government documents have been declassified. There have also been important political developments, such as the Oslo Accords, in which a Palestinian Authority was established with control powers and an independent legislative system, and the changes that occurred in the normative framework of the Gaza Strip following the Hamas takeover in 2007. We intend to publish a supplement to the present collection to cover the more recent developments.