MIDDLE EAST

Crusading for Israel in a Way Some Say Is Misguided 

“I understood that I can come on behalf of terror victims, give them a voice, and get my day in a court. It doesn’t matter what the decision is," says Nitsana Darshan-Leitner. Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times 
The Saturday Profile
By  
JERUSALEM — She is a crusading lawyer who serially sues rogue nations, terror groups and international banks to show, as she put it, “there is a price to Jewish blood.” She is a mother of six who, while seven months pregnant with triplets, astonished an Israeli court with a motion requesting that a hearing be moved to her home. (It was denied.).
Yet it took Nitsana Darshan-Leitner three years to figure out how to bake her own challah, the braided egg bread that is a staple of the Sabbath table.
“You take different recipes from different places, and you’re trying and you’re trying and you’re trying, and you say, ‘How come it doesn’t come out like the bakery?'” she recalled in a recent interview. “You can’t have a shortcut. You can’t let it rise for half an hour in the oven — no, hour and a half, two hours — and then you have to let them rise again after you knead them, after you braid them. If you want something perfect, you have to do it the hard way.”
There is a metaphor hidden somewhere in that challah dough for the relentless — and relentlessly publicized — but often fruitless campaign Ms. Darshan-Leitner, 40, has been waging for more than a decade to empty the pocketbooks of people who harm Israelis.
Her arguments are regularly rejected by courts. About 90 percent of the $1.6 billion in default judgments against no-show defendants including Iran, Syria, North Korea and the militant Palestinian group Hamas have not been paid. Attacks continue, and she continues to file complaints (and news bulletins).
“What happens in the end doesn’t affect your mission,” she said. “If we win the money, it will be great, but this is not the reason we’re going to court.”
This month, the first jury trial by relatives of victims against the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority opened in federal court in Manhattan, a case seeking $1 billion that Ms. Darshan-Leitner helped start 11 years ago.
At the same time, her organization in Ramat Gan, Israel, has filed a series of war-crime charges against Palestinian officials in the International Criminal Court at The Hague, complaints she does not expect to see prosecuted but hopes will deter the Palestinians from pursuing parallel claims against Israelis.
Critics call it “lawfare,” abusing the courts to score political points. Some on the left have refused to face off with Ms. Darshan-Leitner on Israeli talk shows after she made what they saw as ridiculous statements, like suggesting that Israel drop a nuclear bomb on Tehran.
“She’s definitely a nuisance,” said Jonathan Arnon, an Israeli lawyer who has represented the Palestinian Authority opposite her. “She has a lot of resources. She tries and finds every niche and note and every possible argument whether it is relevant or not, to make fatigue.”
Even American lawyers who work on the same side have clashed with Ms. Darshan-Leitner over costs, and say she is a tangential part of the process.
“She’s pretty good at filing cases and putting out news releases, but she has really no involvement in actual litigation,” said one, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of ongoing cases. “There are U.S. lawyers who are actually litigating the case, putting up all the expenses, and then there’s this person in Israel who has her own narrative.”
But Robert J. Tolchin, a New York lawyer who collaborates with Ms. Darshan-Leitner, called her a “visionary” unafraid to pursue “guerrilla litigation.”
Like when she tried (unsuccessfully) to compel Israel to rescue Palestinians in the Gaza Strip facing execution for collaboration. Or when she pressed (unsuccessfully) to retain roadblocks preventing Palestinians from driving on Road 443 in the West Bank years after a series of deadly shootings there.
“Nitsana looks at situations and sees arguments and issues that most lawyers don’t see,” said Mr. Tolchin, whose law school roommate is the brother of Ms. Darshan-Leitner’s husband. “The idea of litigation as sending a message is a very valid one. It’s part of our democratic system.”
Alan Bauer, an American-Israeli plaintiff in the current New York case as well as several others, described her as “tireless” and “fearless.”
“We have nobody going to bat for us, and here comes this woman with her six children and she says, ‘O.K., I’m in your corner and we’re going to fight this,'” said Mr. Bauer, a biochemist injured in a 2002 suicide-bombing in Jerusalem along with his son, Yehonatan, who was then 7. “It did not make Yehonatan walk straighter and it did not make my arm work better, but it did give us hope for justice.”
Ms. Darshan-Leitner, the daughter of a retired dressmaker and teacher who were born in Iran, found her calling while studying law at Bar Ilan University (she also has an M.B.A. from the University of Manchester in England). Fellow students chose her to argue their petition in the Israeli Supreme Court aiming to block the mastermind of the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship from entering the country. They lost.
“I understood that I can come on behalf of terror victims, give them a voice, and get my day in a court,” she recalled. “It doesn’t matter what the decision is.”
Her organization, Shurat HaDin, Hebrew for letter of the law, was founded in 2003, and in 2012, the latest year financial reports were available publicly, had 11 employees, three with salaries topping $100,000. It retains not one but two public relations firms, in Israel and New York, pitching Ms. Darshan-Leitner’s perspective on the news. She said the annual budget was $2.5 million, but declined to name her donors, citing security concerns.
The group requires a $600 to $5,000 donation for participants in its mission to Israel, featuring briefings by intelligence agents and observations of military court trials. This summer, it is offering an activist lawyer’s training seminar, with an agenda that includes combating boycotts of Israeli products and defending Israeli soldiers against charges of war crimes.
She claims to have collected $150 million from the various court victories but would not specify which clients got what, citing security again. And she asked that the West Bank settlement where she and her American-born husband, also a lawyer, built a large, immaculate home, not be named, for fear of reprisal.
The successes Shurat HaDin lists on its website, all argued by other firms in American courts, include a $378 million default judgment against North Korea for the 1972 killing of Christian pilgrims at Ben-Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv by members of the Japanese Red Army; $338 million against Syria for a 1991 kidnapping of archaeologists in Turkey; $156 million against Islamic charities; and $70 million from Iran. The Palestinian Authority, the site says, “quietly” paid at least two confidential settlements. Still pending is a huge case against the Bank of China in which Israel has been fighting to keep Israeli officials having from testifying.
A suit in 2011 claiming that former President Jimmy Carter defrauded consumers with his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” has gone nowhere and a 2010 claim against Al Jazeera for broadcasting locations of where Hezbollah rockets hit Israel was dismissed.
In Israel, her efforts to prosecute the Islamic Waqf in the destruction of Jewish artifacts at an holy site in Jerusalem’s Old City failed. So did her efforts to stop the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a kidnapped Israeli soldier, to block Egypt from adding troops in the Sinai Desert and to expel Hamas lawmakers from Jerusalem.
Ms. Darshan-Leitner is spending most of this month in New York. Because she is not licensed to practice law there, she is sitting among the court watchers, not at the lawyer’s bench. And she is missing several Fridays of baking challah.
For Orthodox Jews like Ms. Darshan-Leitner, challah is one of three commandments required for women. It is a ritual process in which a piece is removed and burned, and a blessing recited.
“It’s a time that God is listening, so you can say a personal prayer or personal wish,” she explained. She thinks of sick people, she said, and also “about my cases.”
Correction: January 27, 2015 
Because of an editing error, the Saturday Profile article, about Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, an Israeli lawyer who sues groups that finance terrorism operations, misidentified the location of Road 443, whose roadblocks she sued to retain, preventing Palestinians from driving there, years after a series of deadly shootings. The road is in the West Bank, not in Israel. 
A version of this article appears in print on January 24, 2015, on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Crusading for Israel in a Way Some Say Is Misguided. Order Reprints|  Today's Paper|Subscribe