At the height of the Second Intifada, Attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner decided to change the rules of the game. When a wave of terrorism raised its head and tragically claimed hundreds of Israeli victims, Nitsana, a young and energetic lawyer, began to fight the extremist groups herself with legal tools and cut off their economic oxygen pipelines.
Since then, over two decades later, the organization "Shurat Din" that she founded has been operating from Tel Aviv in all legal arenas around the world and is leading unprecedented legal struggles against terrorist organizations, states that support terrorism, financial institutions involved in funding terrorism, and anti-Israeli activity in the global arena.
Nitsana, a married mother of six from the Hashmonaim community, began her career working with the legendary “Harpoon" unit of the Mossad, which was tasked with thwarting terrorism through economic warfare and worked to eliminate the financial infrastructure of the terrorist organizations.
The late spymaster Meir Dagan, the head of the Mossad at the time, who recruited Nitsana for the mission, told her - “if you want to defeat terrorism - go after the money.” Indeed, since then, this advice has led to hundreds of lawsuits in Israel and around the world against Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, the Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Qatar for financing and supporting terrorism, and has even won precedent-setting rulings that have yielded hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for victims of terrorism.
"Since the October 7 massacre, Israel has been facing many challenges including dangers far from the military battlefield," explains Darshan-Leitner. "The threat that had hovered over us for years in the International Criminal Court in The Hague has become real."
"With the issuance of arrest warrants against the Israeli Prime Minister and Minister of Defense," she continued, "we acted firmly against this unlawful decision and were the only Israeli organization to represent the Israeli side in the matter. In addition, we have established a special online task force that will be able to assist and protect IDF soldiers all over the world in the event they are harassed, detained or prosecuted pursuant to an international arrest warrant."
During the war, Nitsana led a sweeping fight against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, incitement to terrorism and anti-Semitism, and false accusations against IDF soldiers for war crimes, which she will detail during the Jerusalem Post Conference on May 19th at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan.
The attorney is known for her determination to stand up to powerful bodies, and her activism has made her a symbol in the fight against terrorism and in protecting its victims along with the Jewish community through innovative legal means.