An Israeli woman fights terrorists…one lawsuit at a time

By Cindy Mindell

If you think terrorism can’t be successfully combated, you haven’t heard of Nitsana Darshan-Leitner.

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner

The attorney from Ramat Gan in Israel, and her group of civil-rights lawyers, represent victims of Palestinian and Islamic terrorism in courtrooms around the world. To date, the organization she founded, Shurat HaDin, has won $1 billion in judgments, frozen $600 million in terror assets, and recovered $120 million that went directly to the victims and their families.

Darshan-Leitner will explain what it takes to bring down terrorist organizations on Tuesday, March 25 at Congregation Beth El in Fairfield.

Darshan-Leitner was born in Israel to a family of formerly well-to-do Iranian Jews who left everything behind when they fled their homeland for the Jewish state in the 1950s. While attending law school in Ramat Gan in the early ‘90s, she met American immigrant Avi Leitner, a product of the Civil Rights and Soviet Jewry movements in the U.S.

On a visit to the U.S., the two made a stop at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil-rights organization that had a successful track record of using lawsuits to bankrupt the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups in the South. This was the model Darshan-Leitner followed when she established Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center (literally, “the letter of the law” in Hebrew). In the late ‘90s, she began filing a series of motions on behalf of terror victims, first in Israel, and then in federal courts in the U.S., with the help of local counsel.

“When Israel’s enemies realized that they cannot win militarily – despite opening seven wars against us and launching waves of terrorism against us, and they still can’t throw us into the sea – they started using a different type of weapon, which is very devastating: delegitimization; lawfare; the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement; trying to isolate Israel and make it illegal for the Jews to live in the country,” Darshan-Leitner says. “We try to utilize the court system to help Israel in its war for security and survival, which changed its face but didn’t come to an end.”

Shurat HaDin has been involved in defending Israel in such high-profile cases as the 2010 Gaza flotilla and, more recently, in suing Oxfam for its support of the Union of Health Workers Committee and the Union of Agricultural Workers Committees, groups affiliated with the Gaza-based Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Darshan-Leitner says that it is the misconceptions about terror that prevent people from taking action against it. “People think you can’t combat terrorism, and we see it all over the world, not only in Israel: the U.S. is having a war in Iraq for years and in Afghanistan and can’t stop terrorists; Syria can go up in flames and nobody can help because there are groups of terrorists fighting each other,” she says. “You can’t fight terrorism in a conventional way. Terrorists are not a military group or an army; you can’t bomb them because they are living among civilians; you can’t shoot a missile toward an area where they are located, like they do to us. So you can’t fight them unless you are willing to sacrifice yourself, unless a government is willing to send its soldiers by foot or car and take out the terrorists one by one.”

This type of action is a costly one in blood and treasure, Darshan-Leitner says, one which governments don’t readily take. As a result, the general perception is that there is no way to fight terrorism.

But there is a way to fight terrorists, she says. “If you go further and try to bring them into a court of law, people don’t think there is a chance you can touch them or harm them. But our cases prove that you can harm them, you can keep funding from their pockets, you can make them not to be able to use the banking system any-more, for instance. At the end of the day, the terror organizations are living with one foot in the lawless world but with one foot in the lawful world – they use banking offices, real estate, and people – so they don’t have a choice but to interact in the Western world. It’s here that you can attack them. If you warn a bank that it’s aiding and abetting terrorism, it doesn’t have an interest in that and in this way, you harm the ones using the banks.”

Shurat HaDin also monitors social media, supported by Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case that prohibits the provision of any type of material support to terrorist organizations. Shurat HaDin recently issued a warning to Twitter and Facebook for allowing terrorist organizations to use their services.

Shurat HaDin is already gearing up for its next potential challenge. “If the peace process fails and if the talks break down, we know that the Palestinian Authority is planning a third intifada or going to the criminal court in The Hague and charging the Israeli military and IDF soldiers for war crimes,” Darshan-Leitner says. “So, we are going on the offensive by preparing war-crime allegations against the head of the Palestinian Authority for being involved in terrorism and inciting terrorism and crimes against humanity, according to international law.”

“Bankrupting Terrorism… One Lawsuit at a Time,” with Nitsana Darshan-Leitner; Tuesday, Mar. 25, 7:30 p.m., Congregation Beth El, 1200 Fairfield Woods Road, Fairfield. Admission: $10/person; proceeds donated to Shurat HaDin. For information and/or reservations: (203) 374-5544 / congbethel@aol.com.

Comments? Email cindym@jewishledger.com.