Similarly, Other Municipality Requests 470/76 Najem v. Yaakov, IsrSC 33(1) 169 (1979) (hereinafter: Matter Najem) was given about two decades earlier, the Acting President M. Landau On the fact that obtaining third-party consent can indeed be a suspension condition -
"But this is not the case when one of the parties to the negotiations prior to the conclusion of the agreement is a legal entity acting through its organs, and in the form of the agreement it is explicitly stated that the agreement will not enter into force unless a certain organ of that legal personality approves it - then there is no suspension condition before us and the agreement is not entered into until the necessary approval is given" (ibid., at p. 754).
We find a recent example of a judgment in which this rule was applied Other Municipality Requests 979/17 Sela Concrete Products Company in Appeal Taxes v. Israel Land Authority [Nevo] (19.4.2020) (hereinafter: Matter Rock). In that case, the judge noted D. Barak-Erez that the need for approval by the ILA's exemption committee, which is an organ of the state, was part of the ILA's consent process for the engagement, and therefore it should not be viewed as a suspension condition (ibid., paragraph 2 of its judgment, and see also paragraph 5 of my judgment regarding the distinction between A condition required to perfect the contract and a condition for its performance; For more on this topic, see Peaceful and Plant, p. 596; Friedman & Cohen, vol. 3, p. 35).
- The application of the matter to the circumstances of the case before us supports the conclusion that obtaining the approval of the JNF officials was indeed a condition for the purpose of perfecting the contract. Thus we can understand the plain meaning of the contractual stipulation, which did not impose on the JNF, which was a party to the details, the The Responsibility to receive the approval of the JNF-accredited institutions, but rather determined that the agreement would be "brought for approval" by the JNF-accredited institutions, "and subject to this approval" the settlement agreement would be signed.
[Note: It can be argued that a distinction should be made in this regard between the perfection of the detail into a binding contract and the perfection of the settlement agreement. In other words, the detail is valid even before receiving the approval of the JNF officials, while the refinement of the Settlement Agreement into a binding contract, which was conditional on receiving the approval of KKL-JNF officials. This interpretation, on the face of it, is consistent with the fact that according to the language of section 3 of the Particular, it was the Settlement Agreement that required the approval of the JNF officials, and not the Particular. If this is the case, then our conclusion regarding the particular's being a binding contract would have remained the same even if we had found that there is substance to the patriarchate's claim regarding the non-receipt of the approval of the JNF officials. In any event, in view of our conclusion (about which we will expand below) that the approval of the JNF officials was in any case duly obtained, I do not see the need to make this distinction as it has no relevance to the outcome of the appeal, similar to the manner in which the need to obtain the approval of the holy synod to which we referred above is classified].
- Further to our conclusion that the approval of the competent bodies in the JNF was a condition for the perfection of a binding contract, the question that needs to be decided is whether this condition was fulfilled or not. This is in light of the Patriarchate's claim that this approval was not granted.
There is no denying that the raising of this argument on the part of the patriarchy raises some perplexity. In the typical state of affairs in contractual claims such as this, the party who claims that No Contract Entered into and that the approval of the relevant party Not accepted It is the party to the contract that is subject to the competent authority whose approval is required, while the opposing party is the one who claims that a binding contract has been entered into and seeks to enforce it. For example, in the case of Cohen As mentioned above, the person who filed a lawsuit for the enforcement of the contract was Mr. Cohen, while it was the Israel Lands Administration in the Jerusalem District who claimed that the contract was not concluded because the approval of the Israel Lands Administration management was not obtained. Similarly, in the case of Rock It was Sela that claimed that a binding agreement had been reached between the parties, while it was the ILA that claimed that a binding contract had not been concluded since the ILA's exemption committee had not been approved (see similarly the circumstances in the matter Najem). On the other hand, in the case before us, Himanuta and the JNF both sought to fulfill the contract and claim that the required approval of the competent authority On their behalf was accepted, while it was the Patriarchate that sought to refrain from fulfilling the contract on the grounds that KKL-JNF Did not receive the required approval from the competent authority In the JNF. As noted, this is something that raises a certain perplexity.