In 1959, Felicia Langer qualified in law in Tel Aviv and joined the Israel Bar Association. Her first years as a lawyer were unremarkable, but the six-day war in 1967, with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, provoked a change.
The following year she started her own practice and began representing Palestinians in the Israeli courts, and in the military courts that were a part of the apparatus of the occupation. Langer, who has died aged 87, defended Palestinians who had demolition orders against their homes and activists facing deportation.
Her own ethical boundary was that she would not represent anybody who was suspected of having blood on their hands. And while her choice to defend Palestinians turned her into a hate figure among many Israelis, who branded her “the terrorist lawyer”, her refusal to represent those accused of violent crimes drew criticism from the ranks of some in the anti-Zionist left.
Langer’s most famous client was Bassam Shakaa, who was elected mayor of Nablus in 1976, whom she defended against a deportation order, filed by Israel in response to his criticism of the Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. Langer won the case – amid mass demonstrations and the collective resignation of all West Bank mayors – and Shakaa remained in Nablus.
By 1990, Langer had decided she could no longer work within the Israeli legal system, and told the Washington Post: “I want my quitting to be a sort of demonstration and expression of my despair and disgust with the system.”
She added, articulating a dilemma that faces many human rights activists in Israel: “I realised that all this time, by bringing Palestinians to the courts, I had been legitimising the system, but the system had not brought the Palestinians any justice. And I decided I couldn’t be a fig leaf for this system anymore.”
Langer moved to Tübingen, southern Germany, and accepted teaching positions in the universities of Bremen and Kassel. She was born Felicia Veitt in the Polish town of Tarnow, close to the German border, a city with a large Jewish population. Seven days after the outbreak of the second world war, the Nazis occupied Tarnow and the Veitt family fled to Russia. There, Felicia’s father, a lawyer, was arrested because he refused to take a Soviet passport, for fear that he would not be allowed back into Poland when the war ended.
The family spent the rest of the war in one of Stalin’s gulags. Felicia’s father died in 1945, and she and her mother returned to Poland, where they found that many family members had perished. Despite these experiences, Felicia was an avid communist for the rest of her life.
In 1949, she married Mieciu Langer, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps who had lost most of his family in the Holocaust. The couple followed Felicia’s mother, who pleaded with them to join her, to Israel in 1950 and settled in Tel Aviv, where Felicia studied law at the local outpost of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Langer’s books about her experiences in the military courts included With My Own Eyes (1975) and These Are My Brothers (1979). Youth Between the Ghetto and Theresienstadt (1999) recounted her husband’s wartime experiences. Quo Vadis Israel? The New Intifada of the Palestinians (2001) analysed the second Palestinian uprising following the disappointment that followed the Oslo accords.
Her activity for Palestinians won her many awards, among them the Bruno Kreisky prize for human rights in 1991, and membership of the German Federal Order of Merit in 2009 and the Palestinian Order of Merit and Excellence in 2012. But according to her own account, the accolade that brought tears to her eyes was the naming of a square in her honour in the centre of a refugee camp near Nablus.
Mieciu died in 2015. She is survived by her son, Michael, and three grandchildren.
• Felicia Langer, lawyer, born 9 December 1930; died 21 June 2018
