Felicia Langer died on
June 21st this year. She was probably the first radical Israeli
whose name I knew.  I can remember that she was a hate figure for people in the local Jewish community as someone who was ‘anti-Israel’. She was known as both an Arab lover and a
communist – a deadly combination.  

Below are two
appreciations of the life of this wonderful woman who dedicated her life to
supporting those who were the target of Zionist oppression.

Tony Greenstein

Felicia Langer was a Holocaust survivor, a
communist, and one of the first Israeli lawyers to defend Palestinian residents
of the occupied territories in the Israeli Supreme Court. She died in
Germany. 

Published June 24, 2018

Attorney Felicia Langer in 2008. UNiesert,
Wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0)

Israeli human rights lawyer Felicia
Langer died Thursday in Germany.

Langer was a human rights and peace
activist, a communist, and one of the first attorneys to represent Palestinian
residents of the occupied territories in Israeli courts. In Israel’s Supreme
Court, she pioneered legal practices that today seem natural and obvious but
were once considered outrageous. She was the first to challenge the expulsion
of Palestinian political leaders from the West Bank, the first to challenge the
army’s practice of demolishing the homes of Palestinians suspected of militant
activities, the first to accuse the Shin Bet of torturing detainees, and the
first to fight the practice of administrative detention.

In those days, there were very few
Israeli lawyers willing to represent Palestinians. Langer — a Polish-born
Jewish lawyer and Holocaust survivor who moved to Israel, joined the Communist
Party, and defended Palestinians — became a hated figure among the general
public. She was a Jew and a woman who joined forces with “the Arab enemy.” When I interviewed her during research for my
book, The Wall and the Gate, she told me that there were periods
when taxi drivers in Jerusalem would refuse to pick her up, that the threats
against her were so severe that she was forced to hire a bodyguard, that she
had to take the sign off of her office in Jerusalem, and that her neighbors
asked her to clean off the words “you
will die soon,” spray painted on her office’s door, because “it was not aesthetically pleasing.”

Langer fought, almost alone, against
the heads of the judicial system at the time, against people with tremendous
political and public power, like Justice Meir Shamgar and state attorney (and
later a Supreme Court justice) Mishael Cheshin. The hearings in Langer’s cases
were contentious. She never hesitated to accuse the establishment of carrying
out crimes against her clients and to represent them — some of whom were
members of the Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories, such as
Nablus Mayor Bassam Shaka and Hebron mayor candidate Hazmi Natcheh — as victims
of an evil regime.

Over the years, others followed the
path that Langer blazed. First among them were Leah Tzemel, Elias Khoury, Raja
Shehadeh, and Avigdor Feldman. Many others have joined since, as Langer’s path
became a road, then a highway. But, in the 1990s, she came to see that highway
as a fig leaf — that the judicial system was exploiting legal proceedings for
public relations purposes and pro-Israel propaganda. She closed her office and
moved to Germany, where she continued to fight the occupation and struggle for
peace and coexistence.

Veteran residents of Jerusalem will
tell you that the winter of 1968 was particularly harsh and snowy. And they
know that when it snows in Jerusalem, Hebron is usually also covered in white.
In the winter of 1968 both of these biblical cities and the road between them
were blanketed in snow. But neither snow nor impassable roads could stop
Felicia Langer. With her famous determination, she decided to take to the
slippery road and drive from her office in downtown Jerusalem to the Hebron
police station. A Palestinian sheikh from East Jerusalem  had come to her
office in the middle of the storm and told her that his son, who had just
returned from studying in Turkey, had been arrested and taken to the Hebron
station. When the parents sent their son clean clothes through the authorities
in the detention facility, they received, in return, a dirty bundle that
contained a bloody shirt. They had no idea what had happened to their son and
they were very worried. Having been retained by the father to represent the son
and visit him, Langer took a file folder and marked it with the number 1, the
first case involving a subject of the occupation. Client number 1, the son of
an East Jerusalem sheikh, would be the first of hundreds, maybe thousands, of
Palestinians Langer would represent before the Israeli authorities over the
next twenty-two years.

The Hebron police and the jail were
housed in an old building in the center of the city, the Taggart Building,
named after a British police officer who had gained expertise suppressing
insurgencies in India and who designed fortified police stations all over
Mandatory Palestine for His Majesty’s forces. The Israeli army was the third
regime to use the structure, following the British themselves and the
Jordanians.

When Langer arrived, she looked not
just for the sheikh’s son, but also for two other clients, ‘Abd al-‘ Aziz
Sharif and Na’im ‘Odeh, both members of Palestinian Communist movements in the
Hebron area. Unlike the sheikh’s son, who, Langer found out during her visit,
was suspected of membership in Fatah and infiltration into the country, the two
Communists were suspected of nothing. They had been arrested under special
powers stipulated in the Defense (Emergency) Regulations that were enacted by
the British Mandate and had survived long after it ended. The regulations
permit “preventive” (or administrative) detention, which is designed not to
respond to an act already committed but to stop the potential danger posed by
the detainee. Administrative detainees are neither accused nor suspected of anything
and may be held without trial or charges being brought. Langer’s clients,
Sharif and ‘Odeh, were to be the first raindrops in a monsoon of administrative
detentions that would flood the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Langer was born in Poland in the early
1930s. Nearly all her relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. She and her
parents managed to escape the Nazis to the USSR, but her father fell victim to
Stalin’s regime. He died a short while after being released, in very poor
health, from a Soviet gulag where he was held in dreadful conditions. Langer
nevertheless became a devout communist. After immigrating to Israel, she joined
the local Communist Party and became a pivotal activist. She began practicing
law in 1965 and for a while worked in a Tel Aviv law office as an associate
litigating all sorts of cases, but immediately after the 1967 war, Langer
decided to devote her practice to representing Palestinians living under the
occupation and opened her own office in Jerusalem.

In the late 1960s, she was one of
just a handful of lawyers representing West Bank residents. Most of these
lawyers were Palestinian citizens of Israel, almost all of whom had ties to the
Communist Party of Israel (known as Maki). At the time, communist factions were
deeply entrenched in Palestinian urban centers and the connections between the
Israeli and West Bank and Gaza Communist movements paved the way for lawyers
from Israel to represent Palestinian residents under occupation. Following
Langer’s lead, these lawyers laid the groundwork for the extensive legal
activism that continues today, activism marked by partnership, Sisyphean legal
battles, and trust, given daily by Palestinians to Israeli lawyers, some of
them Jewish, to represent them before Israeli institutions, primarily the High
Court of Justice. This trust and partnership was maintained through five
decades of occupation: even in the hardest times, when it seemed as though all
the bridges between Palestinians and Israelis had been burned or bombed,
solidarity in the fight against human rights violations did not wane.

Langer arrived in Israel in 1950,
after living through the rough years of the war in the USSR, where, as we know,
her family had fled from Poland. Her father had been sent to the gulag for
refusing to become a Soviet citizen (he feared being unable to return to Poland
after the war). After he died in late 1944, Langer and her mother struggled to
provide for themselves in extremely harsh conditions, selling their few
possessions to survive. When the war ended, Langer returned to Poland, where
she met her future spouse. Her mother, who had remarried, emigrated to
Palestine; Langer and her husband answered her pleas and eventually followed
her.

In the early 1960s, Langer realized a
dream, and, unusual at the time for a woman who had a child, she enrolled in
the Hebrew University Law School branch in Tel Aviv. Her past compelled her to
represent the disempowered, to fight for people who, like her family and
herself, were victims of government malice. She studied law to put her
worldview, which had crystallized during the war, into action and challenge
discrimination and injustice. By the mid-1960s, Langer had become a qualified
lawyer, but her attempts to find work in the public sector were unsuccessful.

Langer claims she was written off
because of her Marxist convictions and her membership in Maki, Israel’s
Communist Party, at the time. She had no choice but to turn to the private
sector. But there she faced a different obstacle—her own conscience. After refusing
to represent a man who was a pimp and was trying to evade paying alimony, she
realized she had to set up her own practice if she wanted to pick her cases
according to her many principles. In her practice Langer represented clients
who aligned with her ideological commitments: detained protesters, women whose
rights had been violated, and Arab citizens of Israel in conflict with the
authorities. This continued until 1967, when, in the space of six days, 1.5
million Palestinians came under Israeli occupation. At a time when Israeli
society, with its many Holocaust survivors, was dedicated to the notion that
the moral of the rise of the Nazis, their conquest of Europe, and the Final
Solution was that the remnants of the Jewish people were obliged to build an
invincible country that would protect Jews from victimhood, Langer drew a
different lesson: any discrimination or occupation was fraught with danger, not
just by the Germans and not just against Jews.

Representing Palestinians who had
suddenly come under Israeli military rule, a regime of all-powerful army
generals, was the very fulfilment of the goal for which she had studied law.
The only lawyers representing the occupied at the time were a handful of
Palestinian Israelis. Langer was a far cry from the typical defender of
Palestinians: a woman, a Communist, and a European Jew. With her Polish accent
and command of Latin, her partnership with West Bank and Gaza Palestinians may
have been the strangest sight in the Middle East. To provide access to West Bank
residents, Langer rented a small office on Koresh Street in Jerusalem, which
would be her home base for the next twenty-three years. She soon became
synonymous with the fight for Palestinian rights. To others she was a traitor
and an enemy sympathizer.

In 1990, after a long career of
public and dramatic battles with the authorities, Felicia Langer closed her
Jerusalem office and left Israel to take up a teaching position in Germany. In
an interview in the Washington Post Langer said, “I couldn’t
be a fig leaf for this system anymore.”

Michael Sfard is an Israeli human
rights lawyer and the author of The Wall and the
Gate: Israel, Palestine, and the Legal Battle for Human Rights (Metropolitan
Books, 2018).

 Felicia
Langer in 1991. Her personal ethical boundary was that she would not represent
anybody who was suspected of having blood on their hands. Photograph: Ullstein
Bild/Getty Images