Nitsana Darshan-Leitner
International Law, BDS, Terror, Funding Terrorism
Israeli activist Attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner has been leading the legal fight against Israel’s enemies in the courts worldwide.
She and her colleagues pioneered the strategy of combating terror financing, the anti-Israel boycott campaigns (BDS) and the multitude of lawfare threats against the Jewish State by its enemies using civil lawsuits.
As the president of the Tel-Aviv based civil rights organization, "Shurat HaDin–Israel Law Center", she has represented hundreds of terror victims in legal actions against terrorist organizations and their supporters and has won hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation on their behalf.
Under the motto: “Bankrupting Terrorism – One Lawsuit at a Time!”, she and her associates are handling civil actions against Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PLO, The Palestinian Authority, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, Egypt, North Korea, UBS, and the Lebanese Canadian Bank. The cases, being litigated in Israeli, American, Canadian and European jurisdictions, allow the victims of terrorism to fight back.
In recent years, Ms. Darshan-Leitner initiated a legal campaign to deprive terrorists of social media resources such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, which they use to incite violence on-line against Jews and promote terror attacks.
In her efforts to combat anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli extremism, Ms. Darshan-Leitner assisted in blocking the Gaza Flotilla, brought war crimes complaints against Hamas and PLO leaders in the International Criminal Court, prosecuted multiple lawsuits against the BDS movement. She recently won a major victory against Airbnb for delisting Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria from its website.
Ms. Darshan-Leitner is the nationally bestselling co-author of the book HARPOON (Hachette Publishers). The narrative recounts Shurat HaDin’s work with the Israeli Mossad to wage financial warfare against Israel’s terrorist enemies.
In 2016 and 2018, Ms. Darshan-Leitner was chosen as one of the 50 most influential Jews in the world by the Jerusalem Post, and named by the Israeli financial magazine, The Marker, as one of the 50 most influential Israeli women.
A mother of six, including triplets, Ms. Darshan-Leitner is a graduate of the Bar-Ilan University Law Faculty and holds an MBA from Manchester University.