Human rights lawyer Michael Sfard wants to expose the dark side of Israel’s High Court
Michael Sfard
Shany Littman writes in Haaretz on 29 March 2025:
The corridors of the magistrate’s court in the Russian Compound, in the center of Jerusalem, are exceptionally narrow. So narrow, in fact, that attorneys and their clients are compelled to push up against the walls in order not to bump into the judge as she leaves her chambers to get water for her electric kettle.
The hearing in the libel suits filed by Regional Cooperation Minister David Amsalem against no fewer than 16 people was supposed to begin at 9 A.M., but the claimant is running more than 40 minutes late. Mordechai Shimon, the minister’s lawyer, can shed no light on the delay. I was misled about the time, Amsalem explains, when he finally shows up and takes his place.
Ten lawyers, one law clerk and four defendants are huddling in the small courtroom. Not everyone has a place to sit. Later, another respondent, Judy Shalom Nir Mozes, who lives in New York, will appear via Zoom. Attorney Michael Sfard, who is representing Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Haskel in one of the libel suits involving Amsalem, is supposed to open the day’s proceedings with a cross-examination of the minister.
In short order the event becomes a circus. Amsalem repeatedly breaks into the remarks of others, Shalom Nir Mozes keeps calling the minister’s lawyer “cutie” and “sweetie,” and the lawyers bust a gut laughing.
The reason for this auspicious gathering? In November 2021, Amsalem declared that Likud would incarcerate the legal advisers of the government ministries in pens, but was misquoted as having promised to imprison all leftists. Now he’s suing a group of people who circulated the erroneous quote. According to Sfard, one of Israel’s leading human-rights lawyers, it’s not by chance that Haskel – a former air force pilot and one of the leaders of the anti-Netanyahu protests on Balfour Street in Jerusalem about five years ago – is one of those being sued.
“This is the most ridiculous lawsuit,” Sfard says. “It’s pure political cherry-picking. A million journalists and others posted about Amsalem’s remarks on social media but he singled out Amir and filed a lawsuit against him. And Amir’s tweet wasn’t even about what Amsalem said in that specific instance [about Likud]. It was a response to a personal insult. Amsalem once called him a criminal in the Knesset. Amir wrote: ‘Amsalem said I’m a criminal and lawbreaker, and now he’s inciting against the left and saying he’ll imprison them – when will we put an end to this man’s incitement?’ After receiving a threatening letter from Amsalem’s lawyer, Haskel even corrected his statement.”
Sfard is also dealing with another, similar case: a defamation suit filed by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir against the former leader of the dovish Meretz party, Zehava Galon. In fact, Sfard is far busier than he cares to be fighting slander and libel suits. “I just don’t know how to put this monster back into the bottle,” he says a few days later, speaking in his Tel Aviv office. “There’s an uptick of hundreds if not thousands of percent in defamation suits. It’s atrocious. This is not why I studied law.”
And it has a price.
“The amount of time I invest in censoring the social media posts and the press communiqués of the human rights organizations that are my clients [in order to protect them] is terrible. I have to check every tweet. There are groups that devote a large amount of resources to looking for places where it’s possible to sue. It’s part of the atmosphere of suffocation that we’re experiencing.”
Besides which, an endless number of unnecessary deliberations are being foisted upon the judges. It’s exhausting and weakening the system.
“It’s win-win [for the plaintiffs]. If you win the case – of course. But if you lose, it gives you license to ride roughshod over the judicial system. It’s a very successful method from their point of view. One of the things the political center doesn’t grasp well enough, unfortunately – and I’m putting this delicately – is that dismantlement of civil society is at the heart of the [regime] coup.”
Israeli High Court in session
Can you explain what exactly is not understood?
“That the incitement, the legislation and the lawsuits are intended to bring critical civil society to its knees. If the leaders of the protest against the coup and the leaders of the political center fail to understand that they must fight those things exactly as they [fought] the annulment of the reasonableness criterion [aimed at eliminating the Supreme Court’s power to overrule administrative and government decisions it deems unreasonable], or a change in the composition of the Judicial Appointments Committee – they will lose and we will all lose. They just don’t get it.”
Sfard offers an example of the center-left’s slackness on this subject. Not long ago, a bill submitted by MK Ariel Kallner (Likud) came up for a preliminary vote. It stipulates that a donation by a foreign entity to an Israeli nonprofit will be taxed at a rate of 80 percent, unless the nonprofit also receives funding from the Israeli government. While the legislation is producing yawns among center-left MKs, Sfard sees it as a grave danger.
“Since 2011, a great many attempts have been made to limit donations to human rights organizations,” he notes. “They’ve all failed. Now they [the government] is trying the taxation route. They are creating a situation in which the only organizations that will be harmed are those that voice criticism – not only about the occupation, but also in regard to issues concerning the LGBTQ community, asylum seekers, the environment. Similar legislation that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin initiated totally erased civil society organizations in Russia.”
True, and it must be said that even irrespective of the legislation you mentioned, government budgets for left-wing organizations pale in the face of those for right-wing organizations.
“Yes, huge amounts of money are flowing to the right, especially to the settlement movement. The last time I checked, the Elad nonprofit [which seeks to settle Jews in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem] had an annual budget of 70 million shekels [currently almost $20 million]. That’s more than the annual budgets of [human rights organizations] B’Tselem, Yesh Din, Breaking the Silence and Peace Now all together. By comparison, the leftist group with the largest annual budget of all is apparently the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, with 9 million shekels.”
Kallner’s bill passed its preliminary reading by a majority of 47 MKs from the coalition versus 19 against from the opposition. Other members of the latter simply didn’t bother to show up to vote.
“Our greatest tragedy is the political center,” Sfard observes. “More than the center is afraid of the coup, it is afraid of being identified with [anti-occupation or human rights groups like] Breaking the Silence or B’Tselem. That futility, the way they’re chickening out – it’s genuine cowardice. I think [Yesh Atid leader, MK] Yair Lapid understands that shutting down B’Tselem isn’t exactly good for democracy. So what is he fighting for? For something that will prevent the coup, or for what will increase his popularity?”
Sfard’s criticism isn’t leveled solely at Lapid and National Unity Party head Benny Gantz, but also at the leaders of the current, renewed protest against the judicial overhaul. “If you think you can conduct a struggle for democratic values and totally ignore the occupation and also the assault on human rights organizations – you’re mistaken. You will fail. Democracy doesn’t only exist on Mondays and Thursdays. I have friends who haven’t participated in demonstrations against the coup exactly because of that.”
Do you go to demonstrations?
Demonstration by the anti-occupation bloc of Israel’s anti-government protests marking 56 years since the start of the military occupation, on Dizengoff Street,Tel Aviv, 3 June 2023
“Yes. Being critical of some of the protests’ goals doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go to them. The people who went to Kaplan [Street, Tel Aviv, the hub of anti-coup demonstrations in 2023] want to live in a democracy. Excuse the patronizing, but if people must be helped to understand that this whole thing cannot be done solely in a secular-Ashkenazi-Jewish environment, but must be right for everyone, then we” – a reference to like-minded human rights advocates – “will help them.”
Sfard’s view that the regime coup, the occupation and the enfeeblement of civil society are interconnected is the overriding theme of his new book, “Occupation From Within: A Journey to the Roots of the Israeli Constitutional Coup” (in Hebrew). “The book wrote itself in my head on Saturday evenings at the Kaplan protests, when I stood off to the side with the Bloc Against the Occupation [rights organization].
“On the one hand,” he continues, “I was enthralled by the protest. But at the same time, I went crazy inside because people didn’t want to talk about what’s going on a quarter of an hour from here [in the West Bank], and is directly connected. The injection of antidemocratic poison into our veins didn’t start with [Justice Minister] Yariv Levin, nor with Netanyahu, either. It’s a process of many years.”
Sfard submitted a manuscript of the book to the Berl Katznelson Center, which had initiated the idea for it as part of a series of books, in September 2023. Then came October 7 – and “it became clear to me that it would stay in the drawer, that it was no longer relevant, that the regime coup was over and done with and that this government was about to be booted out. A few months later I went back to the text. I added references to October 7 and to the war, and now the book is being published when the coup has achieved its greatest momentum.”
Sfard does actually understand why the occupation has been shunted aside at demonstrations against the judicial coup, even if he completely disagrees with the rationale. “Fine, there’s the argument that the struggle against the coup requires a broad tent, and that messages against the occupation will diminish it. But that tent is already totally perforated; the winds are whistling through it. I prefer a smaller but sturdier tent rather than what we have now.”
If all the hostages were brought back home from Gaza, and you were to organize a demonstration against the war, who would show up?
“Police officers would show up, to arrest the demonstrators. We live in a country where the police commissioner wants to send the people who demonstrate against the war to Gaza. Those who’ve tried to protest have been brutally dispersed – and also received no support from the High Court of Justice. But this situation won’t last. It’s impossible to think that we will maintain democracy here with pluralism and academic freedom and separation of powers and a court that will protect human rights, when there’s a torture chamber in the backyard. That’s just not how it works.”
* * *
Sfard and Amsalem have one thing in common: Both are originally from Jerusalem. Going outside for a cigarette, Amsalem looks like he’s the king of the city. People approach him, one after the other, asking for a hug, a selfie. To give him a pat on the shoulder, to kiss his hand. For his part, Sfard feels deeply estranged from the city of his youth.
“Jerusalem is the city where I grew up and where I was shaped, but today it’s like a settlement for me. It’s the capital of everything I don’t like in Israel. It projects human misery and toughness. I also really don’t like myself when I’m in Jerusalem, because my attitude toward people in the street is stereotypical. The escapism of Tel Aviv bothers me no less, but it at least allows me live my life quietly. The city I grew up in, the places I went to – that city no longer exists, so coming to Jerusalem makes me sad.”
Is there no beauty in its human diversity?
“When there are many types of people that are at the same level, that’s fine. But we have classes here. More than one-third of [Jerusalem’s] inhabitants are Palestinians – hewers of wood and drawers of water, lacking rights, transparent at best and targets for incitement at worst. So it’s not a very pretty picture. And there’s also no little incitement and racism aimed at the Haredim.”
Sfard, 52, grew up in the Maalot Dafna neighborhood of Jerusalem, where many journalists from the Israel Broadcasting Authority lived at the time. His father’s best friend was the well-known journalist and writer Israel Segal. “Every evening they played backgammon in the stairwell,” he recalls
His parents, Polish dissidents who arrived in Israel in the late 1960s. Leon, his father, is a mathematician who works in the computer field; his mother, Anna, is a professor emerita in the Department of Mathematics Education at the University of Haifa. His younger sister, Emi Sfard, is a mixed-media artist and illustrator. He’s married to Nirith Ben Horin, a couples and family therapist who established an organization called Parents against Child Detention, which fights for the rights of Palestinian minors who have been arrested by Israeli authorities.
Sfard initially considered following in his father’s footsteps but then he became curious about whether he would be accepted to law studies. “I went to study law, in the end, out of some romantic perception that I would handle all kinds of human rights cases in the style of American courtroom dramas, like the right to privacy in the era of the information superhighway. Never for a minute did I imagine that I would be doing what I am actually doing today.”
He ended up getting a degree in law from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a master’s in international human rights law from University College London. While clerking for the well-known civil rights lawyer Avigdor Feldman, he became aware of the vast implications of the occupation: “It became clear to me that this is the field I needed to deal with. There’s a marvelous saying by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: that in an open society few are guilty but everyone is responsible. So I am not guilty, but I am responsible. And I’m not capable of living here if I don’t fight against something that’s being done in my name.”
Did you pay a price for that choice?
“I don’t think the price I paid was steep. It’s obvious that I’d have a hard time getting a teaching position at an Israeli university today, but that’s not a steep price. People curse me, there have also been threats against me, but that hasn’t changed my routine. In 1998 I refused to do military service in Hebron and I was jailed for it. So, yes, there is a certain price, but people pay a price to be decent.”
When we met a few days later for another conversation, he said he had a different response to the same question. “I was quick to answer before, but certainly I have paid a price. To begin with, pressure and anxiety at levels I’d never experienced. Anxiety with respect to my clients, my family and myself, too, to the point where it damages your health and affects your sleep. I also need to come to terms with the fact that in many senses I am outside the fence now. I used to feel I belonged. In the past I was a desired guest at certain events, to which I would surely not be invited today.”
Settlers throwing stones in the South Hebron Hills.
Such as?
“For example, continuing education courses for lawyers. There’s no chance that I would be invited today to deliver a lecture at a course like that – not because they don’t want to hear me, but because of the shitstorm the invitation would bring down on them. It’s a small price, but in terms of my identity, it hurts.”
In 2004 he established his own law firm, now located in south Tel Aviv. On one wall is the Bill of Rights of the new South Africa, signed by Albert Sachs, a Jewish lawyer who opposed apartheid, lost an arm and an eye in an assassination attempt, and who, after Nelson Mandela came to power in 1994, was appointed to the then-newly established Constitutional Court, the country’s highest judicial instance.
Also on a wall is a photograph of Bassem Abu Rahmeh, a 30-year-old Palestinian who was killed in 2009 in the West Bank village of Bil’in, at one of the regular protests there against the separation barrier; he was struck by a tear-gas grenade fired by Israeli soldiers. For various reasons the military advocate general refused to investigate the incident and closed the case. In 2015, the legal team representing Abu Rahmeh’s family – including Sfard – filed a petition to the High Court of Justice, demanding that the case be reopened and that those responsible for his death be brought to justice.
“For almost 10 years we fought to have the shooters placed on trial,” he says. “In the end they received an astonishing ruling from the court. It found that there had been multiple flaws in the investigations [of the incident], but that after a decade it was impossible to know any longer what actually happened and who was to blame. Bassem’s sister was also killed at a protest in the village, from gas inhalation.”
The court ordered that further investigative steps be taken, but ultimately no indictments were filed.
“Over the years,” Sfard continues,” I demanded that investigations be conducted in hundreds of cases in which innocent people were shot and wounded or killed. I discovered that there’s a façade of investigations, but there are no real ones. The system doesn’t investigate Palestinian casualties.”
Today, he says, his firm is the smallest it’s ever been: three lawyers, a law clerk and an office manager. “I’m proud of the fact that I’ve never fired anyone, but when people leave I don’t always replace them. Besides, the number of candidates wanting to clerk with me has dropped drastically in the past few years. I used to invest a lot of time screening people in order to figure out whom to invite for an interview. That’s not the case today. It also happens quite frequently that people come to an interview and ask whether working for me will ‘close any doors’ for them. I immediately reply that yes, it will.”
But it actually sounds as if you have more work now.
“More work isn’t more money.”
What is the economic model for the type of work you and your associates do?
“My family asks me the same question. Lots of pro bono, plenty of low bono, but most of the income comes from organizations that underwrite legal representation for people who can’t afford it. At any given moment I have dozens of cases of Palestinians who can’t afford to pay even the price of a train ticket to Tel Aviv. Different organizations fund those cases. I also have many private clients, and they are the ones who pay the most – such as foreign organizations that need legal advice in Israel. My firm is 100-percent human rights, but it’s not only about the occupation. I represent Bedouin in the Negev, and I represented the transgender child from Givat Shmuel” – referring to a case where the Education Ministry wanted to remove a transgender boy from his state-religious school. (The Tel Aviv District Court eventually ruled against the ministry and in favor of the family’s request to allow the child to remain in that school, but he was eventually transferred to a nonreligious school for gifted students.)
* * *
In his new book, Sfard describes the Israeli judicial system in Jekyll-and-Hyde terms – it has two very different faces: “The judicial system is magnificent, capable of competing in terms of professionalism and creativity with every such system in the world. But it has a dark side. When we approach issues relating to the conflict – all the laws of physics become twisted. Things that are perfectly clear in certain contexts within Israel proper become totally unclear when it comes to the territories. The assertion that the High Court of Justice is left-wing or pro-Palestinian is the biggest lie in Israeli politics.”
After three decades of first-hand experience, Sfard can probably say with authority that the High Court has given its stamp of approval to almost every government policy that has harmed and/or dispossessed Palestinians. There have been a few rare exceptions, such as the ban on the use of torture and on the expropriation of property privately owned by Palestinians, in some instances – but even those rulings have been eroded over the years, he says.
“That isn’t to say that there was no point in the Palestinians turning to the High Court,” he adds, “because in specific cases it did help. But the strategic role of the Supreme Court over time has been to aid in intensifying the occupation and turning it into apartheid. Ultimately, there is one law in the West Bank that applies to settlers – and a different law for Palestinians. The High Court has approved almost every policy, including, for example, the staggering disparity in the allocation of land in the territories.”
According to Sfard, “the fact is that 99.76 percent of the public land that was allocated by the Civil Administration [a branch of the military government] has gone to Israelis. Less than a quarter of 1 percent to the Palestinians.”
Over the past 15 years, the already-diminished support the Palestinians received from the High Court has been reduced even further as a result of two developments. The first is a change in the identity of the justices, he says. “In the decade and a half of right-wing rule, the justices who replaced the bench headed by [former presidents Aharon] Barak and [Dorit] Beinisch have been right wing – not in the Bibi-ist sense, but in being conservative and nationalist. If in the 1980s and ’90s the majority of the justices had a liberal self-image, today they are in the minority.”
The second development, he continues, is the attack on the judicial system, which had been going on for years and reached a peak beginning in early 2023, with Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s announcement of his so-called reforms. And when the court went into a defensive mode, it was reflected in the judgments that were handed down. “The first victims are the Palestinians, because to provide relief to the Palestinians now is to play into the hands of the right. I can feel the deterrence that has been created among the justices, the fear.”
Sfard has experienced some major disappointments with the High Court in recent years, such as when he tried to challenge the policy exclusively allocating state- and Palestinian-owned land to settlers. “We represented a group of Palestinians who sought to be allocated land that they had worked for generations, and which the state intended to apportion to the settlement of Efrat. The discrimination here was flagrant, yet even the most senior composition of the Supreme Court, with the president at the time, Miriam Naor, and her deputy, Uzi Vogelman, wasn’t capable of summoning from within itself the strength to say ‘Stop.’ Even if settlements exist, that doesn’t mean they have to be given everything. Something can be given to the pauper too, no? Half a sheep? That astounded me.”
The lawyer’s most recent disappointment with the court came earlier this year, when Sfard tried to prevent a crowdfunding campaign for establishment of settler outposts – in other words, to support illegal activity. “That was an issue that frightened the court. I wasn’t the one who decided that settler outposts are illegal; it is the State of Israel that says so. If I collect money so that we can buy drugs collectively, that is patently illegal, right? In any event, I was compelled to withdraw the appeal so that the justices wouldn’t write in their decision what they had said in the courtroom – that it [such a campaign] is in fact permissible – and then it could become a precedent. An entire system is financing those who commit offenses, the prosecution and the police are doing nothing, and now the court is also doing nothing.”
There was also no response to petitions to the court submitted after October 7, relating to the disappearance of Palestinians who were taken into custody by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, or to the rights of Palestinian inmates. “Whoever heard of a situation where the national security minister is permitted to order a discriminatory, deficient, starvation diet for inmates of one type – security prisoners – and not for prisoners of other types? That case has been deliberated for almost a year without a decision being handed down.
“And when we talk about security prisoners,” he continues, “it’s not that they’re all [special Hamas] Nukhba forces, even though they too deserve to get regular food like any other prisoner. We’re talking about someone who might have been arrested because of a Facebook post and then accused of incitement to terrorism. Israeli rulings of the 1980s and ’90s are bursting with statements declaring that human rights don’t stop at the prison walls, and that the right a prisoner is deprived of is may be the right to freedom but not other rights.
“Where do they come off accepting a situation in which there is a different – starvation – regimen? That is simply incomprehensible. Or a petition that was filed by Physicians for Human Rights, requesting that the Israel Prison Service take measures to stop the scabies epidemic in the [security] prisons and allow frequent showers and change of clothes. People come out of prison blistered, skin peeling – but that petition was rejected.”
Sfard warns that along with what is going on in the war in Gaza, large-scale injustices are being perpetrated in the West Bank, most blatantly the ethnic cleansing of the pastoralist communities in the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills.
“The situation has never been this bad before, with a combination of settler violence and military violence. I represented a community of three families, to whose homes the access road was blocked. The school bus couldn’t get to them, the elderly couldn’t get out for medical care. But as soon as someone cites security concerns – the story is over. The justices will say they see no place to intervene. You have to understand: There is a dramatic exacerbation of the situation here. In the past the court was a barrier against certain things. No more.”
* * *
If the judicial system is no longer a barrier against the hard right, why was the regime coup set in motion? In Sfard’s view, “The judicial system moved right, but it’s not Bibi-ist. The fact is that it’s judging the prime minister.”
One of the commonly heard claims of supporters of the judicial overhaul is that, due to some of its rulings, the High Court of Justice is interfering with an Israel Defense Forces victory in Gaza.
“Interfering with an IDF victory is a lie that is intended to be used to incite against the court. But the court is definitely interfering with the appointment of cronies [in government ministries]. The court is interfering with the perpetration of corruption. The court is interfering with concentrating all governmental powers in the hands of the executive branch. And also, when the government wants to run ahead with annexation, the High Court is a pebble in its shoe, because it moderates such processes.
“For example,” Sfard elaborates, “take the Regularization Law, which was intended to allow expropriation of private Palestinian land and its allocation to settlers who have squatted on it. That’s legislation that regularizes theft, so it’s quite logical that the High Court would strike it down. But the court does permit other bureaucratic, longer-term processes, which will lead to the same result.
“The High Court is imposing certain rules on dispossession and that doesn’t bode well for the revolutionary leadership of the settler movement. The court is also preserving the freedom of expression of the [human rights] organizations, which in turn influence international discourse, so the same camp wants to eliminate the High Court.”
In light of the right-wing assault on civil society organizations, Sfard finds himself increasingly defending the defenders: the human rights groups, the activists, people like Amir Haskel. About a decade ago, he relates, 100 percent of the cases his firm dealt with focused on remedies for enfeebled groups. Today more than half his work is devoted to defending activists.
“That’s an amazing expression of the changes afoot here. We were a country that at least gave Jewish human rights activists space to act, and we’ve become a place where there is oppression and a huge price [to pay] for activity that is critical of the regime.”
How do the courts react to lawsuits against such organizations and activists?
“There is still defense of rights, but less and less. I also see erosion. The right to demonstrate has been significantly weakened in recent years. Freedom of expression has also been affected. Judges have remanded people who said things that absolutely did not exceed what is permissible.” Sfard cites the incident involving Meir Bruchin, a history teacher who was arrested after calling pilots murderers and also declared that a Palestinian involved in a car-ramming event acted out of despair and should not be considered a terrorist. “We also saw the search warrant that a judge issued for a bookstore in East Jerusalem [on the pretext that it sold materials that incite to violence]. These things have a serious, chilling effect on the freedom of expression.”
Is the regime coup succeeding?
“Ultimately they won’t succeed, but meanwhile we are still living with the illusion that we can rule over millions of people, over a period of generations. That is moral rot, and it’s spreading in our body. We are very sick and in need of treatment. I believe that we [i.e., humanists, supporters of democracy] will win, because I am certain that this situation is by definition unstable. When you deprive millions of people of rights, you must invest more and more force to rule and dispossess them. It’s like a radioactive material with constant emissions. Which is why it’s clear to me that it will end. The big question is how long it will take and how many more people will be affected.”
What about October 7? Does that also reflect a situation that isn’t sustainable?
“There is one of two possibilities: Either the Palestinians are murderers by their nature, or there are other reasons for what happened. The reasons don’t justify the massacre and don’t make it any less serious, and there cannot even be the tiniest bit of lenience when it comes to the horrors they [Hamas] perpetrated. But trying to explain it gives us a glimpse of our reality. It’s quite clear to me that if there were no occupation and there was no siege [in the West Bank] and people were able to conduct regular lives, the chance of October 7 occurring would have been far lower.”
Though it must be said that fundamentalism is also thriving in places in the world that are not under siege.
“Fundamentalism doesn’t spring up in democratic places – in places where people feel that they can write their own life story. In the most open and democratic society there will always be fringes. The question is how the mainstream treats the fringes. When I grew up in 1980s’ Jerusalem and first got to know Itamar Ben-Gvir, I was in the Young Meretz group. At night we would put up signs for [party leader] Shulamit Aloni and he would put up signs for [ultranationalist Rabbi Meir] Kahane.
“I remember looking at him with real pity and telling myself, ‘This guy is totally beyond the pale.’ The fact that today I am on the fringes and he’s in a position of power shows what Israeli society has undergone. The fact that the prime minister brought Kahanism from its illegitimate recesses into his government – that makes all the difference in the world.”
In the preface to your book you express shock over October 7. For a moment I thought you would write that you had seen the light – become disillusioned about coexistence, as many Israelis are now.
“Absolutely not. I am in shock from October 7, and I am also in shock from what we did in Gaza. I didn’t think we were capable of doing things like that. All my friends say I am naïve. To erase, to destroy, to raze a place that is home to 2 million people and kill tens of thousands like that, to shatter the health and education systems and the water infrastructure like that? I didn’t think we were capable of it.”
* * *
At the court hearing with Amsalem there was a clash of principle that totally exceeded the legal realm. From his point of view, the court stirs genuine repulsion, with its attempt to preserve existing rules. The way the lawyers laughed at his amusing remarks symbolizes everything that has alienated him all these years from feeling that the system works for him as well. On the street, on the other hand, people embrace him, call him king. A totally opposite world, emotionally and symbolically. Is there a chance to resolve this dissonance?
“As a youth in Jerusalem in the 1980s, I knew exactly what the High Court was giving me. For example, the possibility of going to the movies on Shabbat. A kilometer and a half as the crow flies from where I lived, another kid, who had completely different problems, was living. He wasn’t allowed into the club because he was dark-skinned, and the [Mizrahi] culture he grew up in suffered from serious discrimination. The High Court didn’t give him a thing.
“In the 1970s the Israeli judicial system forged an alliance with Ashkenazi secularism and granted what was important to it – which was a struggle against religious coercion and corruption, and in favor of certain individual rights. The court didn’t forge an alliance with enfeebled and excluded populations that were not middle class. So I completely understand and feel the pain of broad swaths of the public that have been excluded. But Amsalem didn’t come along to correct things. Amsalem came for revenge. And that prevents me from being empathetic toward him.”
Despite everything, Sfard doesn’t think Israeli society is a lost cause. “True, there are nationalist, militarist, brutish, fascist and racist elements, but in parallel there are also attributes of a democratic society that sanctifies pluralism and human rights. Both of those souls are ours; one is trying to kill the other. The darker figure is trying to kill the more luminous one. I think that our congenital defect, which tells us that there are only two possibilities – to be a victim or a victimizer – is the strongest tool wielded by the dark soul within us.
“What we experience as Israelis from the moment we are born, via the education system and the media and the political leadership, is indoctrination that leads us to believe that the world is binary in this Darwinist sense. I was astonished by the intensity of the references to the Holocaust immediately after October 7. Yes, both here and there people were murdered, but these are totally different events. Within a second we started to wear the [yellow] patch.”
That was so it would be possible to argue that there are no human beings on the other side, there are Nazis, so it’s possible to do anything to them.
“In that context, everything I said before about the court is doubly true about the state prosecution. All the prosecution and the attorney general are capable of doing now is [dealing with] matters related to the coup. There is no political capital to support investigations of inciters to genocide. A student was arrested after she posted an image of a shakshuka with a Palestine flag on October 8.
“But there are public figures and media people who incite to genocide in Gaza every evening, even after a warrant filed by the court in The Hague ordered us to investigate and try those who are inciting to genocide. A price is being exacted from people who speak out against the war, but nothing is done to those who are inciting to commit war crimes.”
Who is responsible for that?
“The attorney general and the state prosecution. They are responsible and guilty, absolutely.”
The waves of people around Sfard who he says are leaving the country, especially those who share his political and activist inclinations, has lately become a tsunami. “Things are becoming unhinged,” he admits. “These are people who were part of the struggle and have lost hope that things can be better here.”
Does it make you consider leaving?
“No. As long as I can go on struggling, I’m here.”
* * *
At present, Sfard is conducting a series of family-roots interviews with his father, Leon. The lawyer’s paternal grandfather, David Sfard, was a communist, a Yiddish poet and a very cultured person; his grandmother, Regina Dreier Sfard, studied cinema in Lodz and worked with the acclaimed Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. After moving to Israel she was among the founders of the Department of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University. His maternal grandmother, Janina Bauman, also studied cinema, in Warsaw.
The Baumans immigrated with their three daughters to Israel in the late 1960s, but after a few years the parents left for England. “My grandfather, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, didn’t want to stay here,” Sfard says. “They said: We don’t want to switch one nationalism for another nationalism. My grandparents had a Jewish identity and a very humanistic worldview that stemmed from that identity. And that’s something that I fear will totally disappear.”
Because of the violent actions of the State of Israel?
“Because in Gaza we are burying the remnant of humanistic Judaism. My father was involved in the student demonstrations against the regime in Poland in 1968, and was arrested and jailed. The government depicted those demonstrations as a Jewish conspiracy. After three months in administrative detention he was released, and he and his parents were forced to leave Poland. I am returning to their story out of a yearning for a different Jewish identity from what there is here, one that espouses the values of dignity, equality, liberty.”
Maybe that’s why your friends are moving abroad – because that is something that’s still possible there.
“Maybe. It would be very sad if that is true, but it could definitely be.”
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