Gideon Levy Holocaust Survivor and Palestinians' Rights Lawyer Felicia Langer Dies in Exile at 87
I never met her, only called her two or three
times in her place of exile, but I well remember what she was for me and
most of my generation in our brainwashed youth: a symbol of hatred for
Israel, a public enemy, a reviled, outcast traitor. That’s how we were
taught to regard her and a few other early dissidents, and we neither
questioned nor cared why.
Now, at 87, she has
died in exile; her image glows brightly in my eyes through the distance
of time and space. Felicia Langer, who died in Germany Thursday, was a
hero, a pioneer and a woman of conscience. She and a few of her allies
never got the recognition here that they deserved; it’s not clear they
ever will.
In a place where “alumni” of a murderous Jewish terror organization are welcomed — one a newspaper
editor, another an expert on religious law — and where self-declared
racists are accepted as legitimate participants in the arena of public
debate as they are nowhere else, there is no room for courageous justice
warriors who paid a high personal price for trying to lead a camp that
never followed.
Langer was a Holocaust survivor
from Poland who studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
After the occupation, was the first to open a law office dedicated to
defending its Palestinian
victims. In this, she followed an illustrious tradition of Jews who
fought injustice in South Africa, Latin America, Europe and the United
States.
Here,
her sense of justice brought her into conflict with her state.
Occasionally she even succeeded: In 1979, in the wake of her petition,
the High Court of Justice blocked an expulsion order against Nablus
Mayor Bassam Shakaa. A year later, the Jewish underground attached a
bomb to his car that destroyed his legs, and Israeli justice came to
light.
Langer was a pioneer among Israeli lawyers of
conscience who came out for the defense of the rights of the occupied
population, but she was also the first to throw in the towel, closing
her law office in 1990 and going into exile. In a 2012 interview with
documentary filmmaker Eran Torbiner, she explained: “I left Israel
because I could no longer help the Palestinian victims with the existing
legal system and the disregard for international law that was supposed
to protect the people whom I was defending. I couldn’t act. I was facing
a hopeless situation.” She told The Washington Post she “couldn’t be a
fig leaf for this system anymore.”
She said she didn’t
switch battlefronts, only her place on the front, but the front is
currently at its lowest point. The occupation is entrenched as never
before and nearly all of its crimes have been legitimized.
Langer came to the
conclusion that things were hopeless. Apparently she was right. The
fight in the military courts was doomed to failure. It has no prospect
of success because the military courts are only subject to the laws of
the occupation and not to the laws of justice. The proceedings involve
nothing more than hollow and false legal ritual.
Even the civil legal system, headed by the vaunted High Court of Justice,
has never come down on the side of the victims and against the crimes
of the occupation. Here and there restraining orders have been issued,
here and there actions have been delayed. But in the annals of the
occupation, Israel’s Supreme Court will be remembered as the primary
legitimizer of the occupation and as an abject collaborator with the
military. In such a state of affairs, perhaps there really was nothing
for Langer to do here. That is a singularly depressing conclusion.
What did this brave
and courageous woman fight against? Against torture by the Shin Bet
security service at a time when we didn’t believe that such torture
existed, yet it was at the peak of its cruelty. She fought against the
expulsion of political activists, against false arrests, against home
demolitions. Above all, she fought for the enforcement of international
law from which Israel decided to except itself on unbelievable grounds.
That’s what she fought and that is why she was considered a public
enemy.
In her old age, her
grandson told her that ultimately the Palestinians will win and will get
a state of their own. “You won’t see it, but I will,” he promised his
grandmother. In the end, the grandson will be disappointed, just as his
distinguished grandmother was.
Gideon Levy
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