A public servant is responsible for any injustice he has committed, and if he is prosecuted for it, he will be sued personally; However, without derogating from the force of the provisions of sections 6 and 8, the employee will have a defense against any claim that is not about negligence, if the act was lawfully within his jurisdiction or if it was done in good faith as he believes that he is acting within his lawful authority.
Thus, the principle that prevailed in Israeli law for decades, inspired by common law, was thePrinciple according to which The public servant is personally responsible for the injustices he committed. The conclusion of Section 7(a) Although the aforementioned provided some protection to public servants, the exclusion of negligence claims from this defense and the restrictive interpretation adopted by the case law in this context, led to the fact that in practice the same protection applied in relatively rare cases (Tamar Kalhora and Michal Bardenstein "The Law to Amend the Torts Ordinance (No. 10) - Immunity of a Public Servant" The Attorney NA 293, 301-302 (2011) (hereinafter: Kalhora and Bardenstein); Gilad, Part 1, at pp. 375-376; Yoav Dotan: "An employee's tort liability-the public exercising powers" Law 15 245, 276-282 (1985); Dafna Avnieli Immunity Law 461 (2014) (hereinafter: Avnieli)).
- The first seeds for the reversal of the perception regarding the personal liability of a public servant in torts were sown in 1952 with the enactment of the Civil Torts Law (State Liability), 5712-1952 (hereinafter: Civil Torts Law). This law has adopted the modern legal concept, which has also been adopted in other countries, based on basic values of equality before the law and the recognition that in this way the rights of the individual will be better and more adequately protected and the principles of distributive justice and efficiency in distributing damage will be promoted.Civil Appeal 2906/01 Haifa Municipality v. Menorah Insurance Company Ltd., [Published in Nevo] Verse 18 (25.5.2006) (hereinafter: The Haifa Municipality Matter)). This principle of equal status was expressed In section 2 of the Civil Torts Law, which states that "The law of the state, with regard to liability in torts, is the same as the law of any incorporated entity, except as stated below in this law.".
The starting point according to this approach is that the state no longer enjoys sweeping immunity as in the past, with the exception of certain exceptions that are explicitly set out in the Civil Torts Law. However, the process of internalizing and assimilating the change that took place in the matter of state responsibility, with the abolition of the special immunity that it had enjoyed in the past, was a relatively lengthy process (See more detail on this issue In the matter Haifa Municipality, in verse 18