Establishing the Rule of Law

At the beginning of 1949, Ben-Gurion spoke before a gathering of white-collar professionals, many of them lawyers: So long as we were under foreign rule, the job of the Jewish lawyer was, at best, to stand before the foreign country, defending the subjugated victims of the state from foreign laws and judges, to defend Beilis, Dreyfus, to prove that the law applying to the Jews was not just, or that [the Jew] had had no alternative to circumventing the law—not to create the law but to challenge it, because the law was hostile, antagonistic, biased, discriminatory. . . .