1930 -

Israeli human rights attorney; defender of Palestinian rights.

Born in Poland in 1930, Felicia Langer emigrated to Israel with her husband, Moshe Langer, a Holocaust survivor, in 1950 to be with her mother. Langer became a member of the anti-Zionist Israeli Communist Party. She became disenchanted with the new state of Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. Trained as a lawyer, after the 1967 war she devoted her entire practice to assisting Palestinian political prisoners. She worked for more than two decades in defense of Palestinian rights, often taking her cases to the Supreme Court, charging violations of the Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory.

Langer faced social ostracism, physical assaults, and death threats for her defense of Palestinians. During the first Palestinian intifada (uprising) of 1987 through 1991, she was overwhelmed by the impossibility of adequately representing her clients in the Israeli courts. "I felt I could not address the judge as 'your honor' as a gesture of protest I closed my Jerusalem office and left the country."

Langer resettled in Tübingen, Germany, and continued to criticize the Israeli treatment of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories. She is a member of the Israeli League for Human Rights and received the Right Livelihood Award for human rights in 1990. She is the author of several books documenting human rights violations in Palestine, including her best-known work With My Own Eyes (1975), These Are My Brothers (1979), An Age of Stone (1987), and an autobiography, The Epoch of Stones, and Rage, and Hope.

Bibliography

Rady, Faiza. "A Portrait of Felicia Langer." Al-AhramWeekly, 1998. Available from http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1998/1948/402_flci.htm.

— CAROLYN FLUEHR-LOBBAN

Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.