Yoram Dinstein

Yoram Dinstein was born in Tel Aviv in 1936.[2] His father, Haim Dinstein, had immigrated to Israel from Ukraine, and his mother was Riva Dinstein (née Fishlin).[2] He attended Tel Nordau elementary school and, from 1948, enrolled in the inaugural class of Ironi Aleph high school.[1] Finishing secondary school at an age too young for military conscription, he chose to spend a year studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he enrolled in its relatively new law faculty — initially uncertain which subject to pursue.[1]

Dinstein served in the Armored Corps, where he was responsible for producing the corps publication, Armored Corps Bulletin. In 1959 he entered the Foreign Ministry as a cadet while also working as an assistant in the Hebrew University's law faculty.[1] After completing his undergraduate legal studies, he earned an LL.M. at New York University School of Law in 1960–1961.[2] He then served in Israel's permanent mission to the United Nations in New York in 1961–1962.[2]

In 1962 Dinstein took a post in the Foreign Ministry director-general's office in Jerusalem, later serving as deputy head and, for a period, acting head of that office.[1] He received his doctorate in law from the Hebrew University in 1964 under the supervision of Nathan Feinberg; his dissertation examined obedience to superior orders as a defense for war criminals, with the Eichmann case cited as an example.[2][1]

Dinstein began teaching international law at the Hebrew University's law faculty in 1964, the year he received his doctorate.[2] In 1970 he joined Tel Aviv University's Faculty of Law as a senior lecturer, was promoted to full professor in 1974, and attained emeritus status in 2003.[2] At Tel Aviv University he served as dean of the law faculty from 1978 to 1980, rector from 1980 to 1985, and the university's fifth president from 1991 to 1999.[2][1]

Alongside his academic roles, Dinstein maintained an active career in Israel's Foreign Service and international diplomacy. He served as a member of Israel's UN mission in New York in 1961–1962 and as Israel's consul in New York and a member of the mission in 1966–1970, where he worked on human-rights matters and coordinated efforts to bring the situation of Soviet Jews to international attention.[2] During the 1970s he was involved in legal advocacy for Prisoners of Zion in the Soviet Union, and he contributed to the long effort to secure recognition of Magen David Adom within the international federation of Red Cross societies.[1]

Dinstein represented Israel in numerous international forums, from the UN Commission on Human Rights to Interpol.[1] He served on Israel's legal team in the Taba boundary arbitration with Egypt from 1986 to 1988 and provided legal advice to the IDF Military Advocate General's International Law Department and the Ministry of Justice.[2][1] Before the Six-Day War, at the request of then-military advocate general Meir Shamgar, he assisted in legal training for IDF commanders.[2] He also participated in preparing legal manuals on armed conflict and was involved with the Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research's project on air and missile warfare.[2]

Beyond Israel, Dinstein held visiting academic appointments at the University of Toronto and New York University School of Law and was a Stockton Professor at the U.S. Naval War College.[2] A May 1985 archival memo recorded his plan to begin a two-year sabbatical at the NYU Law Faculty that August.[3] He also delivered a 2009 conference contribution titled "Securing Compliance with IHL: The Promise and Limits of Contemporary Enforcement Mechanisms" at an international conference of the Minerva Center for Human Rights, the Hebrew University, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.[4]

Dinstein published more than ten books and approximately 170 articles on the laws of war, international law, and human-rights law, with works appearing under Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press imprints and translated into numerous languages.[2][1] The Israel Prize committee credited him as a founder of public international-law study in Israel and noted that his six-volume Hebrew series on international law, published by Schocken, filled a void at a time when Hebrew-language textbooks on the subject were scarce.[2]

His treatise War, Aggression and Self-Defence first appeared in 1988 and had reached a fifth edition by 2011.[5][6] The book defines war as "a hostile interaction between two or more States, either in a technical or in a material sense," distinguishing formally declared war from armed conflict generated by actual force.[5] The U.S. Army's Law of Armed Conflict Deskbook draws on the fifth edition in its discussion of self-defence, attributing to Dinstein the view that "immediacy" — in addition to necessity and proportionality — is a required criterion and quoting him: "War may not be undertaken in self-defence long after an isolated armed attack."[6]

The Conduct of Hostilities Under the Law of International Armed Conflict was first published in 2004, with a second edition in 2010.[7] On the question of what constitutes a military objective, Dinstein argued that future military purpose "is predicated on intentions known to guide the adversary, and not on those figured out hypothetically in contingency plans based on a 'worst case scenario.'"[7] This position was contrasted by analysts with a more permissive approach under which a reasonably likely military use might suffice without proof of actual intent.[7]

The International Law of Belligerent Occupation was first published in 2009 and appeared in a second edition in 2019.[7][8] The work addresses military government and civil administration, obligations concerning violence by third parties, and the law of detention and internment.[9] A separate 1983 Hebrew-language volume, Dinei milchama ("Laws of War"), was published by Shoken and Tel Aviv University as volume 23 in Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law publications.[10]

Earlier in his career, Dinstein contributed a chapter on "National and collective self-defense" to volume 1 of A Treatise on International Criminal Law, edited by M. Cherif Bassiouni and Ved P. Nanda and published in 1973.[11] He also founded the English-language Israel Yearbook on Human Rights at Tel Aviv University and edited it for more than fifty years.[2] A National Library of Israel catalog record lists Dinstein and Jeff Lahav as editors of volume 46, published in 2016.[12]

The Israel Prize committee described Dinstein as one of the world's foremost authorities on public international law and a founding figure of the field's scholarly development in Israel.[2][1] His research was cited by major international and domestic courts, including the International Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, the UK Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of Canada, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.[2] The U.S. Army's Law of Armed Conflict Deskbook also cites his scholarship in instructional materials for military judge advocates.[6]

He trained generations of Israeli international-law scholars and practitioners, many of whom went on to senior positions in Israeli academia and public service.[2][1] As founding editor of the Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, he established a long-running English-language forum for scholarship on human rights and international humanitarian law and sustained it for more than five decades.[2]

Dinstein died on a Saturday at the age of 88 and was survived by his wife, three sons, and grandchildren.[1] He received the 2023 Israel Prize in legal research in recognition of his scholarly contributions and, according to the official citation, his role in advancing Israel's interests in the international legal arena.[2]

Several of Dinstein's legal arguments attracted sustained engagement from scholars and practitioners. On anticipatory self-defence, a 1970 article analyzed the 1967 war, and he argued that Israel's opening use of force could be characterized as lawful anticipatory self-defence, insisting that legality must be assessed using the information reasonably available at the moment of action rather than through hindsight: "The invocation of the right of self-defence must be weighed on the ground of reliable information available (and reasonably interpreted) at the moment of action, without the benefit of post factum wisdom."[13] This position has been disputed, with counterarguments contending that Egypt was not about to attack and that Israel's action lacked legal justification.[13]

On reprisals against civilians, Dinstein's 1997 article "Comments on Protocol I" argued that while a state may not retaliate in kind against another state's civilian population, the absence of any practical alternative response risks rendering the prohibition ineffective in practice.[14] Discussing the expectation that a state attacked unlawfully should simply absorb the blow, he described that posture as sounding "more like an exercise in theology than in the laws of war."[15] Critics of reprisals counter that they can amount to collective punishment and cause civilian casualties.[14]

Dinstein also addressed the legal status of the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria. He argued that the Jordan-Israel peace treaty and agreements with the Palestinians leave no room for a finding of belligerent occupation in the absence of ongoing war, a position that remains legally and politically contested.[16] A legal reference work attributed to him the view that Jordanian sovereignty over East Jerusalem derived from the inhabitants' exercise of self-determination through a 1949 Jericho resolution requesting the West Bank's annexation to Jordan. It said he considered that sovereignty to have survived the 1967 war, while Israel functioned as a lawful occupant after acting in self-defence.[17]

On the question of whether economic infrastructure that indirectly finances a war effort can constitute a military objective, Dinstein argued that the connection between such objects and military action may be "too remote" to justify their classification as legitimate targets.[7] This placed him closer to the majority view among international-law scholars, which rejects that classification for objects with only indirect links to a war effort, as contrasted with a minority position — including that of the United States — that would permit attacks on certain economic objects.[7]