However, we have already noted that the return of the land plots in kind by the plaintiffs to defendant 4 is not possible, since the administrator took back the plots in accordance with his authority under the lease contracts. In such a case, according to section 21 of the Contracts Law, the plaintiffs must "pay him the value of what he received," and according to section 31 of the Contracts Law, the court may exempt him from restitution, "if it deems it justified to do so, and under the conditions it deems appropriate, to exempt a party from the obligation under section 21, in whole or in part, and to the extent that one party has performed its obligation under the contract, to obligate the other party to fulfill the counter-obligation, in whole or in part" in the words of section 31 of the Contracts Law (see more: the Sigal Faraj-Geshuri case).
In my opinion, in our case, as I noted at the beginning of the chapter "The Plaintiffs' Damages and the Remedies to which they Petitioned", the application of the provisions of section 21 and section 9(a) of the Contracts (Remedies) Law, and alternatively the application of section 31 of the Contracts Law, leads to the conclusion that the requirement of reciprocity of restitution should be deviated.
In other words, according to section 21 of the Contracts Law, each of the plaintiffs must return to defendant 4 "the value of what he received" (the same applies to section 9(a) of the Contracts (Remedies) Law); Compare further: Section 2 of the Unjust Enrichment Law, 5739-1979). The rule is restitution following the annulment of a contract, and below it stand the other two options, exemption from restitution and the fulfillment of obligations, in a horizontal ratio (Civil Appeal 701/87 Biham v. Ben Yosef, IsrSC 44(1) 4, 17 (1989); The Tendler case). In our case, in light of the principle of restitution, each of the plaintiffs received a certain amount of compensation from the manager as well as a right to initiate which he exercised (Investigation of the Transfer of the Place of Hearing, p. 289, paras. 3-12). This is the economic value of the resource or of the benefit that the plaintiffs derived from the parcels of land they received. Therefore, each of the plaintiffs must return to defendant 4 the cumulative value of the compensation and the right of initiation that it received (hereinafter: the "cumulative amount"), and in effect, deduct the cumulative amount from the amount that each of the plaintiffs paid to defendant 4 by means of the transfer of the Goren hearing place.