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Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century

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"This is a judicial biography in the grand style, one which looks not only at the central actor, but at the law he influenced as well as the times in which he lived. We learn not only about Agranat, but about Israel, and about an area on which relatively little has been written in English, the development of Israeli constitutional law and the impact of American legal traditions on that development." Dr. Melvin Urofsky Director, Center for Public Policy, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virgini

Pnina Lahav's book Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionists Century is both exceptionally well written and eminently readable. The book is a biography of a deceased and former President Judge of the Israel Supreme Court. Justice Shimon Agranat's life spanned 86 years, from 1906 to 1992.

The book traces the life of Simon's( Shimon in Hebrew) father Aaron, who grew up in Russia, as an ardent Zionist, and how father influenced son. We meet Aaron, a secular - though imbued with Jewish tradition - who was uneducated but extremely ambitious, and learn abut the man as he arrives in Louisville, KY, works as a teacher at a Synogogue and then is either fired or quits and moves his wife and two sons to Chicago. The windy city is the place where Aaron grows and Simon grows up. Aaron while working days, attends dental school and prospers as a dentist.

Aaron becomes influential in Chicago's Jewish Community but especially in Zionist causes. Simon, who worships his father also becomes an ardent Zionist, and begins to write and edit a newspaper that addresses Zionist issues, especially when a conflict in the early 1920s brews between U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brandies and Chaim Weizmann, the President of the World Zionist Organization (and the first President of Israel, from February 17, 1949 - November 9, 1952, when he died. Brandies loses to Weizmann and Simon becomes bitter and despondent. The incident follows Agranat for a good part of his life.
When Simon was 16 years old his father decides that the family must accomplish its dram and they move to Palestine.

The family takes up residence in Tel Aviv and Simon attends the Gimnasium Herzelya, Israel's best and most progressive high school. Aaron is unable to earn a living in Tel Aviv and the family lives in pretty squalid conditions. They move back to Chicago where Simon attends the University of Chicago, and once he graduates attends the University of Chicago Law School. He is influenced by a number of the professors while in law school.

In 1930 the family moves back to Israel. This time, they settle in Haifa, where Aaron's dental practice blossoms. Simon, who was studying for the Bar Exam. Once he passed the Illinois Bar Exam and was sworn in as a member of the Illinois Bar, Simon joins his family in Haifa. Following the required internship or 'stage' in Jerusalem, he joins a friend in practice. Simon is not a good businessman, although he proves himself to be an excellent researcher. He becomes a judge, which suits his personality, and then rises to Supreme Court Justice. He always worked long and hard.

Agranat faces numerous hurdles during his judicial era,including what was probably a nervous breakdown in the early 1960s. His Supreme Court career extended from 1950-76, including, Deputy President 1961-66 and President 1966-76. A good deal of Lahav's book analyzes Agranat's tenure and the handling of the legal issues in three principal cases. The first, a 1953 Supreme Court judgment involving the Communist newspaper Kol Ha'am (trans. 'Voice of the Nation') and its right to criticize the Ben-Gurion led MAPAI government, Agranat pointed out that Israel's Declaration of Independence was based on the foundation of freedom and freedom of conscience: Israel was a 'freedom-loving state', he held. The Kol Ha'am judgment paved the way for the Supreme Court sitting as a High Court of Justice for reviewing a host of administrative actions by the Israeli Government, including the planned deportations of Arabs accused of terrorism.

The second, the Kasztner Trial, was a defamation case involving accusations that Kasztner, who bargained with Adolf Eichmann to save Hungarian Jewery, from the gas chambers, in fact sold out Hungary's Jews. The Minister of Justice brought the case on behalf of Kasztner, who committed suicide, do to the stress of the accusations. Agranat, who wrote the opinion for the Court, found for the government - that Kasztner was defamed - overruling the district or trial trial court, who's judge was bamboozled by the a flamboyant defense attorney. Lahav, correctly frames the case as an attack on the Ben-Gurion government.

The third important case in which Agranat leads the Supreme Court is the appeal by Adolf Eichmann. Although vehemently against the death penalty, Agranat agrees with his colleagues that Eichmannn's punishment declared by the district court, that is, the ultimate penalty for his role in the slaughter of millions of Jews during the Holocaust, must be upheld. Agranat also took on the task of finding and explaining that Israel did have jurisdiction over Eichmann, even though he was kidnapped by the Mossad from Argentina.

Lahav also follows Agranat as he became involved in 1961 the Lavon Affair - a scandal over a failed Israeli covert operation in Egypt known as Operation Susannah, in which Israeli military intelligence planted bombs in Egyptian, American and British-owned targets in Egypt in the summer of 1954 in the hopes that "the Muslim Brotherhood, the Communists, 'unspecified malcontents' or 'local nationalists'" would be blamed - which brought the MAPAI and Ben Gurion government down with a loud thud.

Lahav does an excellent job of showing how Agranat's American training allowed him to find remedy's that were either non-existent or undeveloped in Israeli law. She also demonstrates that Agranat was also a part of a movement of non-common law Russian or German born judges, who sought to graft common law principles into Israel's Ottoman/Turkish, Jewish and Colonial English jurisprudence. Indeed, Shimon Agranat was a singular figure who was a part of a small group of Western-trained lawyers - including former President Chaim Herzog, Justice Itzhak Shiloh as well as the late Judge Helmut Lowenberg - who gave the Israeli legal system an imprint of American and British law.

Fascinating book tracing the ideological and judicial development of Simon Agranat. Agranat's changes over time mirrored Israel's and reflected the tensions within the developing state of Israel-- democracy and pluralism versus unity and nation-building, progressivism and universality versus particularism, human rights versus "security," etc. The sections on the Eichmann trial and the ongoing "Who is a Jew" controversy are the most powerful sections, while other sections, such as that on the powers of the Attorney General, are a bit dense. Since Israel is still confronting virtually all of the issues and conflicts which Agranat faced as a judge over many decades, this book provides essential historical background and context.