The Anatomy of Human Rights in Israel

Assaf Meydani is an Associate Professor in the School of Government and Society at the Academic College of Tel Aviv, Yaffo, Israel. His research interests include public policy, politics and law, and political economy. He is the author of several books, including The Israeli Supreme Court and the Human Rights Revolution: Courts as Agenda Setters (2011), Political Transformations and Political Entrepreneurs: Israel in Comparative Perspective (2009) and Public Responsibility and Political Consumption (2009, in Hebrew). His articles have appeared in journals such as Israel Studies, the Israel Law Review, Policy and Society, Constitutional Political Economy, Rationality and Society, Land Use Policy, Contemporary Security Policy, and the International Journal of Public Administration, and in the Encyclopedia of Public Administration and Public Policy.

'The book is a significant attempt at a nonpartisan intervention in an important but highly contentious discussion. Meydani argues that the problems of implementing human rights in contemporary Israel are rooted in a systematic problem of nongovernability, a fundamentally nonliberal political culture, and a general orientation towards short-term, goal-oriented legal and judicial solutions. Making effective use of a wide variety of case studies (including torture, gender segregation, the security fence, organ transplants, and the failure to create a human rights commission) Meydani depicts an Israel that is structurally unable to implement fully its human rights obligations - yet remains deeply if imperfectly committed to struggling to do so.' Jack Donnelly, Andrew Mellon Professor, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver

• 1. Introduction; 2. Institutional theory and social choice studies: understanding the anatomy of human rights; 3. Human rights between constitutional rhetoric and state practice; 4. Structural and cultural variables favoring a short-term orientation; 5. The right to be free from the threat of torture in light of structural and cultural complexity; 6. The right to equality: gender segregation on ultra-orthodox buses following the Israeli High Court of Justice ruling on the 'segregation lines' in 2011; 7. The right to enjoy a decent lifestyle: the case of the Laron law - national insurance law (amendment no. 109, 2008) encouraging the disabled to work; 8. The human rights commission in Israel that never was; 9. Property rights - the issue of designing policy about the separation fence - the High Court of Justice case: Beit Sureiq Village v. the State of Israel, 2004; 10. The right to human dignity and liberty: the organ transplant law, 5768 (2008); 11. Policy evaluation: analyzing the reality for human rights.