Honenu: inside the legal machine defending Israeli extremists
Honenu CEO Shmuel Meidad handing out the NGO’s calling cards to Border Policemen
Jessica Buxbaum reports in The New Arab on 19 August 2026:
In 2025, Israeli society became embroiled in debate after leaked footage of Israeli guards raping a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman military base was released to the public. The right justified the assault as part of Israeli wartime efforts, while the left supported then-Military Advocate General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi’s decision to release the video as necessary for upholding Israeli democracy.
The dual narrative, though, erased the atrocity itself, focusing on the actions of Tomer-Yerushalmi instead of the heinous crimes allegedly committed by the soldiers. By March 2026, the scandal barely made headlines when the military’s top lawyer dropped all charges against the five guards.
The cancellation of their indictment was thanks to a group called Honenu, who hailed the acquittal as a legal victory.
Worst of the worst: Honenu’s clientele
Established in 2001 by Shmuel Meidad, a longtime resident of Kiryat Arba, an illegal Israeli settlement in Hebron, Honenu represents Israel’s worst of the worst.
The group’s namesake loosely translates to “pardon” in Hebrew, and on its website, the organisation boasts that it has helped “over 15,000 Jews who have acted on behalf of Am Yisrael [nation of Israel in Hebrew]”.
The group’s lawyers have defended Jewish terror suspects like members of Bat Ayin Underground, a terrorist group based in the Bat Ayin settlement, convicted in 2002 of attempting to blow up a Palestinian girls’ school in occupied East Jerusalem, and a member of Jewish supremacist group Lehava, indicted in 2014 for arson at the Jewish-Palestinian school, Hand in Hand, in Jerusalem.
The group has also defended Yaakov Teitel, who murdered two Palestinians in 1997 and attempted to murder Israelis with explosive devices in 2008, and Ami Popper, convicted of murdering seven Palestinians in 1990.
Lawyers also represented three Israeli settlers who abducted 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir from his neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem in 2014 and then beat and burned the Palestinian minor alive in a forest outside of Jerusalem.