Nitsana Darshan-Leitner

Origins and early life

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner was born in Petah Tikva into a Jewish family from a small village outside Shiraz, in Iran, whose whole Jewish community had emigrated to Israel at around the time the state was founded. Her father, the eldest of eight orphaned children, studied at Bar-Ilan University to become a teacher, served as a cantor and won Israel's adult Bible contest, and in a 2019 interview she said she had never met prejudice in her career as a woman, a religious Jew or someone of Sephardi background.

Work and career

After her national service with Magen David Adom she studied law at Bar-Ilan, and she began representing victims of terror attacks in 1997, while still a law student. In December 2002 she founded Shurat HaDin, the Israel Law Center, taking as her model the civil suits with which the Southern Poverty Law Center in the United States had bankrupted branches of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups. Under her direction it has represented hundreds of victims of terrorism in Israel and abroad in civil actions against the organisations behind attacks and those who financed them, recovering hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, according to a 2019 profile.

In September 2021 the Jerusalem District Court, ruling on a suit Shurat HaDin brought for the families of Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach, three teenagers abducted and murdered in 2014, ordered Hamas to pay them 38 million shekels. With Samuel Katz she wrote Harpoon, published by Hachette in November 2017, an account of the Israeli effort to trace and cut off the money that funds terrorist organisations.

Recognition

She received the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism in 2012, the newspaper Globes counted her in 2011 among the fifty most influential women in Israel, and the Jerusalem Post named her among its fifty most influential Jews in 2014 and again in 2023.