“I’m in the East, but My Law Is from the West”: The East-West Dilemma in the Israeli Mixed Legal System

Israel is counted among the “classical mixed jurisdictions” that suits F.P. Walton’s definition from the beginning of the twentieth century: “Mixed jurisdictions are legal systems in which the Romano-Germanic tradition has become suffused to some degree by Anglo-American law” (Walton [1907] 1980: 1, as cited in Tetley 1999; see also Walton 1899: 291; Palmer 2001: 7-10, 17ff.). Yet the civil law-common law mixture is only one element in the broader puzzle of Israel’s legal identity. Put simply, what makes Israeli law “Israeli”? Even before independence, the Zionists were obsessed with the question of how to fashion the legal order and the law in the future Jewish state, and these concerns continue to bewilder Israelis. This ongoing debate on the “Israeliness” of Israeli law is marked by the tension between East and West. This East-West dilemma does not correspond directly to the Jewish-Arab conflict, nor to the Jewish internal quarrel between Ashkenazi and Sephardi (or Mizrahi) Jews.1 Instead, it indicates the tension between the universal-Westernlike-character of Israeli law and the wish of many Israelis to express in their laws the identity and culture of the Jewish state located in the Middle East.