Felicia Langer

“For the exemplary courage of her advocacy for the basic rights of the Palestinian people.”

For more than two decades, Felicia Langer (1930-2018) single-mindedly fought a system of Israeli lawlessness, administered in particular through military courts. After the Six-day War in 1967, Langer was shocked by the oppression and injustice of the Israeli regime in the occupied territories and began to defend Palestinian victims. Langer, who was a lawyer, called for an end to the occupation and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

Her accounts of the treatment of her Palestinian clients by the Israeli military make chilling reading: systematic and widespread torture, sometimes culminating in death; confessions extracted under duress; routine violation of the international laws against deportation and collective punishments, such as demolition of the homes of those who ‘confessed’ to crimes, thereby rendering their whole families homeless.

For this work, Langer suffered enormous abuse and hardships at the hands of her fellow Israelis and lived under the permanent threat of violence. She left Israel in 1990 and moved to Germany, but kept close contact with the peace movement in Israel and Palestine.