Jacob Turkel

Jacob Turkel (; 24 March 1935 – 29 May 2023) was an Israeli judge who was a Supreme Court of Israel Justice. Turkel served as a judge for 38 years, a decade of that time on the Israeli Supreme Court. In June 2010, he was appointed to head the Israeli special independent Turkel Commission of Inquiry into the Gaza flotilla raid.

Biography Turkel was born in Tel Aviv in 1935 to a family that had immigrated from Vienna. When he was five the family moved to Jerusalem, where Turkel attended Ma'aleh, a state religious school. Turkel studied law at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, graduating from its law school in 1960.

Turkel died in Tel Aviv on 29 May 2023, at age 88.

Judicial career From 1967 onwards, Turkel served on various courts, including the Shalom Court, as a Regional Court judge. In October 2000, he rejected an appeal by Holocaust survivors and the Simon Wiesenthal Center against the first Israeli performance of a work by German composer Richard Wagner, who Holocaust survivors and others say promoted anti-Semitism.

In June 2004, he issued a temporary injunction prohibiting the State of Israel from removing thousands of tons of earth and rubble mixed with assorted archaeologically rich artifacts lying on Jerusalem's Temple Mount. He still sat on a military court appeals panel as late as 2010.

Turkel was known during his tenure on the Supreme Court for writing a relatively large number of dissenting opinions, compared to his fellow Justices. This accorded with the Supreme Court opinion in which he wrote about the right of the individual to "shout out [his own] truth", and the article he wrote in Mehkarei Mishpat (Bar-Ilan University Law Review) in which he said: "The stand of the individual against an 'overwhelming majority' is not a negligible matter." The commission proposed in 2006 that the law's definition of a couple be altered from "husband and wife", so that it would apply to both gay and heterosexual couples. He also served as a member of the Committee of Judicial Appointments. The Commission investigated whether Israel's actions in preventing the arrival of ships in Gaza were in accordance with international law.