Crusading for Israel in a Way Some Say Is Misguided (original) (raw)
Middle East|Crusading for Israel in a Way Some Say Is Misguided
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“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.Credit...Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
- Jan. 23, 2015
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.”
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