In May 1948 Israel’s Provisional Council of State passed an ordinance that gave the Council power to declare a state of emergency, which the Council did immediately. Since its very establishment, Israel has seen itself as facing conditions justifying the declaration of a state of emergency, although its rationale was formally acknowledged only in 1991:
Since its establishment, the State of Israel has been the victim of continuous threats and attacks on its very existence as well as on the life and property of its citizens.
These have taken the form of threats of war, of actual armed attacks, and campaigns of terrorism resulting in the murder of and injury to human beings […]
In view of the above, the State of Emergency which was proclaimed in May 1948 has remained in force ever since.⁴⁷
Due to the continuous state of emergency, Israel has been able to apply a set of extraordinary provisions, which were initially adopted for Mandatory Palestine by Great Britain. These emergency regulations have a long colonial history.
In the 19th century, the British had used a variety of legal and institutional approaches in Ireland, which refused to submit to British authority. Subsequently, these repressive measures were exported to other parts of the empire, including India, South Africa, and Nigeria. In each case, they served to reduce and displace the potential for more direct violence by the indigenous populations, but at the cost of legitimizing repressive practices.⁴⁸ In Palestine, the British Army had already deployed them with devastating effect in the suppression of the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, following its “long tradition of pacification.”⁴⁹
After World War II, the British used such emergency laws to suppress independence fighters in their colonies; this was portrayed as a struggle against communism during the early Cold War. Effectively, the repression was war. However, the term “emergency” was preferred since London’s insurers did not pay out in instances of civil war.⁵⁰
In Mandatory Palestine, the emergency laws permitted detention without trial along with deportation, curfew, and suppression of publications. First propagated in 1945, the British repealed the regulations before withdrawing from Palestine in 1948. Nonetheless, most were incorporated into Israel’s domestic legislation. The state of emergency was originally authorized under Section 9 of the 1948 Law and Administration Ordinance and has been in continuous effect since.
As amended, these regulations form a central part of the legal system in the West Bank, permitting military tribunals, prohibitions on books and newspapers, house demolitions, indefinite administrative detention, extensive powers of search and seizure, the sealing off of territories and the imposition of curfews.⁵¹
