Sheftel, Yoram, The Demjanjuk Affair: The Rise and Fall of a Show-Trial, [Translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman, hc, Victor Gollancz, 1994]) 978-0575057951 – Expanded American edition: Sheftel, Yoram. Defending “Ivan the Terrible”: The Conspiracy to Convict John Demjanjuk. [hc, Regnery Publishing, 1996] 978-0895264589 [- an intensely personal legal memoir. Sheftel was Demjanjuk's Israeli defense attorney, and the narrative recounts his own participation in one of Israel's most sensational criminal trials.]
Section 5.7
Publications by Israeli Lawyers and Judges
Relevant Publications by Israeli Lawyers and Judges:
Langer, Felicia, (With My Own Eyes: Israel and the Occupied Territories, 1967-1973 [pb, Ithaca Press, 1975]) 978-0903729116 [[Langer (1930–2018) was an Israeli lawyer who became particularly prominent for representing Palestinians in Israeli military courts. This is really autobiographical scholarly literature built around Langer's experiences as counsel beginning in 1968. It gives a defense lawyer's first-person view of the Israeli military-justice and security system,
Lahav, Pnina, (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century. [hc, University of California Press, 1997] 978-0520205956 [Simon Agranat (1906-1992) was the third chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court and a founding father of Israeli law. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Chicago, Agranat brought U.S. progressivism and constitutionalism to Israeli legal soil. Agranat laid the foundation for Israel's bill of rights and took part in nearly every important Israeli legal and political issue of this century. Pnina Lahav's rewarding study of Simon Agranat portrays Israeli history through the lens of judicial opinions. It is based on her extensive interviews with the justice before his death and a close examination of his papers. A major theme in her book is the relationship between Agranat's world view and landmark Israeli Supreme Court opinions, and she tells the compelling story of a visionary jurist and an American pursuing his Zionist dream in Palestine. Here, too, is an illuminating view of Israeli history and legal culture that includes the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Holocaust, the symbiosis between religion and the Jewish state, and the tensions within Zionism itself. Lahav also details the thinking behind Agranat's 1962 decision to convict Adolph Eichmann and the justice's dissent in the "Who Is a Jew?" case in 1970 – Amazon]
Cohn, Haim H., (Mevo Ishi: Otobiografyah [A Personal Introduction: Autobiography] – Hebrew, not translated [pb, Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, Dvir, 2005, unfinished manuscript supplemented by Justice Cohn’s widow, Michal Zamora-Cohn and by his fellow Supreme Court Justice , Yitzhak Zamir. An unusually reflective autobiography by one of Israel's foundational jurists, tracing Cohn's journey from Orthodox German-Jewish youth to secular Zionist, Attorney General and Supreme Court justice, with particularly valuable reflections on prosecutorial independence, the Kastner affair, Jewish law, state security and the development of his increasingly liberal conception of individual rights. It is one of the relatively rare genuinely autobiographical accounts by a senior Israeli figure who actually participated in criminal prosecution and the construction of Israel's law-enforcement system, rather than merely adjudicating cases later.- ChatGPT]
Barak, Aharon, “Foreword: A Judge on Judging: The Role of a Supreme Court in a Democracy,” Harvard Law Review 116, no. 1 (November 2002): 16/19–162/165. [This is not an autobiography, but it is highly personal professional reflection: after 24 years on the Israeli Supreme Court, Barak asks what makes someone a “good judge” and discusses his own judicial experience and philosophy. Much of The Judge in a Democracy grew from this material.]
Barak, Aharon, “The Role of a Supreme Court in a Democracy,” Hastings Law Journal 53, no. 5 (2002): 1205–1216. [This originated as his 2001 Justice Matthew O. Tobriner Memorial Lecture and contains first-person reflections on judicial lawmaking, balancing values and judicial fallibility. ]
Barak, Aharon, “The Role of a Supreme Court in a Democracy and the Fight Against Terrorism,” University of Miami Law Review 58 (2003): 125–146. [Barak here discusses, from a judge's perspective, the Israeli Court's encounters with terrorism and governmental security measures.]
Barak, Aharon, “Human Rights in Times of Terror—A Judicial Point of View,” Legal Studies 28, no. 4 (December 2008): 493–505. DOI 10.1111/j.1748-121X.2008.00096.x. [Particularly useful - he explains what it was like for the Israeli Supreme Court to review interrogation, detention and other counterterrorism measures while terrorism was actually occurring.]
Barak, Aharon, “Human Rights in Israel,” Israel Law Review Vol. 39 (2006). [This is another retrospective treatment of Israel's constitutional revolution, human rights in the occupied territories and judicial responses to terrorism.]
Rubinstein, Elyakim, “The Attorney General in Israel: A Delicate Balance of Powers and Responsibilities in a Jewish and Democratic State,” Israel Affairs 11, no. 2 (2005): 417–433. DOI 10.1080/1353712042000326533. [Rubinstein writes out of his own experience as Attorney General and describes the office's four functions: chief criminal prosecutor, representative of the government in litigation, legal adviser to government, and protector of the public interest. He discusses actual governmental decision-making and the tensions between law enforcement, security, civil rights and politics.]
Rubinstein, Elyakim, “From the Heart,” Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, April 2, 2025. [This is explicitly autobiographical in passages: Rubinstein looks back over nearly half a century of public service, including roughly fifteen years around the cabinet table and fifteen years as a judge, and connects that experience to his concerns about Israeli democracy.]
5.7.1 Yitzhak Zamir, “The Bus 300 Affair”
Zamir, Yitzhak, (Parashat ha-Otobus be-Kav 300 [The Bus 300 Affair) Edited by Yuval Gilad. [Kinneret Zmora Dvir, 2026.] 978-9655851489. [Hebrew.] [Zamir, Israel's Attorney General from 1978 to 1986 and later a Supreme Court justice, gives his first-person reconstruction of one of the gravest scandals in Israeli law enforcement and national security. Importantly, the book rests on an account Zamir wrote contemporaneously during the affair, subsequently misplaced among his papers and rediscovered decades later. He has supplemented and rewritten that record in light of later evidence and the present Israeli political-legal situation.
The story begins with the April 12, 1984 hijacking of Egged bus 300 by four Palestinian terrorists. Israeli forces stormed the bus. Two hijackers were killed during the rescue, but the other two were captured alive and subsequently killed while in Shin Bet custody. The scandal that followed concerned not only the killings but an elaborate effort by senior Shin Bet personnel to conceal what had happened, coordinate false testimony and divert responsibility.
For Zamir, the heart of the story is therefore not the hijacking itself but the struggle over whether the security services are subject to ordinary law. As Attorney General, he became increasingly convinced that allegations against the Shin Bet required a proper criminal investigation. He found himself confronting Shin Bet director Avraham Shalom, the government, and ultimately both Prime Ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres, who preferred to contain or terminate the affair rather than risk the damage that a full investigation might cause the security service.
The book has something of a detective-story structure. Zamir gradually pieces together what occurred while facing conflicting accounts, censorship, investigative commissions and institutional resistance. He also incorporates other participants' later testimony—including that of the three Shin Bet officials who exposed the cover-up—so that the book is not merely his recollection but a multi-perspective reconstruction of the affair.
The table of contents is revealing. Zamir first explains the three institutions whose collision produced the crisis—the government, Shin Bet and Attorney General—then examines Shin Bet discipline and interrogation practices before turning to the hijacking, the Shin Bet investigation, military censorship, the Zorea Commission and the subsequent cover-up.
The larger theme is the rule of law versus raison d'état. Zamir argues, in effect, that security institutions may sincerely believe that they are protecting the country while coming to identify their own institutional interests with the national interest. The danger becomes acute when government itself is willing to shield the security service from legal accountability. Zamir sees Bus 300 as a warning about what happens when institutions place their own prestige or perceived security needs above legal restraints.
This also makes the book more than a historical memoir. Zamir explicitly regards the affair as relevant to the current tension between Israel's political/security institutions and its legal system. It is therefore both retrospective testimony and a defense of the institutional independence of the Attorney General and the principle that national-security agencies remain subject to law. – ChatGPT]
Cohn, Haim, “Twenty-Five Years of Criminal Procedure in Israel,” Israel Law Review 10 (1975): 225–241 — excellent historical/professional perspective.
Cohn, Haim, “The Immorality of Punishment,” Israel Law Review 25 (1991): 28 ff. — particularly pertinent to crime and punishment.
Note: The leading justices of Israel’s judicial system have been brilliantly prolific in their writing and this list could go on infinitely, including publications of Meir Shamgar, Menachem Elon, Yitzhak Kahan, Moshe Landau, Moshe Silberg, Edna Arbel, Miriam Ben-Porat, Jacob Turkel, Dalia Dorner, Moshe Bejski and many others, going far beyond the mandate of this bibliography. Future researchers will navigate this massive body of knowledge and opinion for a wider public. As for me, I rest my case here.