The Jerusalem District Court has allowed an Israeli man to sue Facebook in Israel, while submitting a translation of the lawsuit to the company’s headquarters in the United States - although the online social network’s terms of use state that any legal case brought against it will be heard in California, where its offices are located.

Omri Weil, who was suspended from Facebook after he created a page criticizing Education Minister Shay Piron, is demanding that Facebook be prevented from deleting content and blocking users without giving a reason or the ability to appeal. He also claims that social-networking site must be obligated to disclose to him the identities of the users whose complaints led to his suspension.

Last month, Weil filed a lawsuit against Facebook in the Jerusalem District Court. Since the company has no branch in Israel, he asked the court to accept his lawsuit even though the other party is based outside Israel’s jurisdiction. He also filed suits against Facebook in the United States and in Ireland.

Last week, the court registrar, Judge Reuven Shamia, granted Weil’s request. “The fact that the respondents allegedly removed the content posted by the plaintiff unilaterally, without giving any real reason or discussion with the plaintiff about the deleted content, raises the possibility that the respondents violated their contract with the plaintiff,” Shamia wrote. “The plaintiff’s user profile, including personal and business pages that had nothing to do with the page that was declared as containing offensive content, was completely blocked from Facebook’s services for six days.... The plaintiff asked that the court order the respondents to refrain from deleting his content and blocking him from the site’s services without providing real justification, and without hearing his claims. The plaintiff’s lawsuit and the assistance he seeks raise a serious question, and it seems that this is no empty claim or frivolous lawsuit.”

Last March, just before Piron’s appointment as education minister, Weil created a Facebook page to collect negative information about him. He posted a screenshot of a post by a woman supporter of Piron along with his comment on her post. Following a complaint about the post from an unidentified user, Weil was suspended from Facebook for 24 hours and the post was deleted. Weil was later suspended again for posting “forbidden” content, which Facebook also deleted. The content — a list of twelfth-grade students, most of them of Mizrahi extraction, of a religious boarding school for girls where Piron served as principal — was an attempt to prove that Piron had been guilty of racial segregation. Weil was suspended for three more days for what Facebook called a violation of its policies. With each suspension, Facebook never told Weil who had complained about the content he posted, nor did it allow him to respond to the complaints or appeal the suspensions.

According to Judge Shamia, the fact that Weil joined Facebook and has an active profile there means that “a contract exists between the parties, even without going into the question of whether the contract was entered into explicitly or tacitly.”

Attorney Jonathan Klinger, who specializes in Internet law, says this claim is odd. “Usually, permission to file a lawsuit against a defendant outside Israel is given for one of the following reasons: Either the contract was signed in Israel, or the damage was caused in Israel, or things of that nature (as detailed in Regulation 500 of the Civil Procedure Regulations). But this case contains something odd: There is a binding contract between the parties — Facebook’s terms of service state that any conflict between users and Facebook will be heard in the courts in Santa Clara, California. So this raises a question of how the court did not express an opinion on the contract between the parties, which states that the case must be heard there, exclusively.”

“In my opinion, Facebook is asking to be rewarded for wrongdoing,” says Weil. “A foreign company that has a small office in Eilat with a clerk who works once a month is obligated by corporate law to register as a foreign company in Israel with an Israeli representative, and then it may be sued in Israel through that same representative. Facebook, which has millions of users in Israel and a Hebrew-language interface, and posts advertisements by Israeli ad companies, is taking advantage of the fact that there is no ruling or enforcement of virtual presence as a place of business in Israel, nor is it legally registered in Israel, in violation of corporate law. Because of that, I had to make a special request to file the lawsuit outside the country and incur unnecessary expenses for postage and translation.”

Last year, attorney Guy Ophir found a fake profile on Facebook that used his photograph. He demanded the removal of the profile and $200,000 in compensation. Then, too, Judge Avigail Cohen, the registrar for the Tel Aviv District Court, ruled that the plaintiff could file the lawsuit against Facebook abroad.

Spokespersons for Facebook said that since the case was pending, they did not wish to comment.