The Israeli attorney who built Shurat HaDin around one idea: make terrorism expensive. Registration is open for her group's third Rage Against the Hate conference in New York.
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner is the Israeli attorney who turned a Mossad doctrine, follow the money, into a two-decade legal campaign against Hamas, Iran and the banks that fund them. She founded Shurat HaDin, the Tel Aviv-based Israel Law Center, in 2003. Her group has recovered more than $200 million for terror victims and now targets campus groups and social platforms too.
Why Did Darshan-Leitner Choose Courtrooms Over Battlefields?
For more than two decades, governments have fought terrorism with soldiers, sanctions and intelligence services. Darshan-Leitner chose a different battlefield: courtrooms, bank ledgers and civil judgments.
She is the founder and president of Shurat HaDin, the Tel Aviv-based organization she built around one operating idea: make terrorism expensive. Not politically expensive, but financially and legally expensive. Banks, governments and technology platforms have to weigh the cost of doing business with terror's infrastructure against the cost of a lawsuit.
Her clients are not governments. They are victims: families of murdered teenagers, survivors of bombings, relatives of the dead. She has represented them in courts from Jerusalem to Brooklyn to The Hague.
Her targets are not only the people who plant the bombs or pull the triggers. They are the states that fund them, the banks that clear their money, and the platforms that host their propaganda.
What Was Meir Dagan's Eight-Word Instruction to Darshan-Leitner?
Meir Dagan's instruction to Darshan-Leitner, by her own account, was eight words long: if you want to defeat terrorism, go after the money. Dagan was the late Mossad chief credited as the architect of Israel's modern covert war on terror financing. Their conversation became the founding doctrine of Shurat HaDin.
A 2007 WikiLeaks cable quoted her telling an American embassy official that Shurat HaDin received evidence and information from Mossad. There is no public evidence the organization has operated as an intelligence arm. What the cable documents is contact, not command.
Darshan-Leitner took a doctrine built inside Israel's intelligence services, that terrorism is a financial enterprise before it is a violent one. She rebuilt it as a civilian legal weapon. No security clearance. No classified authority.
Open courts replaced closed operations rooms. That translation, from covert doctrine to public lawsuit, is the actual innovation. It is also the subject of Harpoon: Inside the Covert War Against Terrorism's Money Masters, the 2020 book she co-authored with journalist Samuel M. Katz.
The book draws a clear line. Intelligence services can freeze or seize financial networks under classified authority, with no obligation to prove their case to a jury. Shurat HaDin's version of the same fight has to survive discovery, cross-examination and appeal in open court, which is slower and far less certain. But it produces a public judgment that stands on its own once won.
How Did Darshan-Leitner Build Shurat HaDin?
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner's early biography shows she was born in Petah Tikva to a family of Persian Jewish immigrants from Iran. She earned her law degree at Bar-Ilan University and an MBA from the University of Manchester. She is married to attorney Aviel Leitner, who works alongside her at Shurat HaDin, and the couple has six children, including a set of triplets. She had already been litigating against Palestinian and Islamist terror organizations since 1997, years before Shurat HaDin existed as an institution.
The organization was founded in Tel Aviv in 2003, built around a model borrowed from the American civil rights movement. The Southern Poverty Law Center's use of civil lawsuits had financially crippled the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups in the United States. Darshan-Leitner has said her founding goal was to go after terrorists the same way the SPLC went after racists.
Applied to the Middle East, the model became something new: an organization that treats terror groups as businesses with balance sheets, assets and financial vulnerabilities. It then attacks those vulnerabilities in court.
Under Darshan-Leitner, Shurat HaDin grew from a small Tel Aviv operation into a global network. The group describes it as several hundred volunteer attorneys working across Israeli, American, Canadian and European courts. Its motto: bankrupting terrorism, one lawsuit at a time.
She did not invent the idea of suing terrorists. She institutionalized it, building a repeatable model for identifying the financial infrastructure beneath a terror organization. She attacked it, case after case, for more than two decades.
Which Court Cases Made Shurat HaDin's Reputation?
The clearest test of the model is the case Shurat HaDin brought on behalf of the families of Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrah. The three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped at a West Bank hitchhiking post in June 2014 and murdered by a Hamas cell. The killing helped trigger that summer's Gaza war. Shurat HaDin sued Hamas for roughly NIS 500 million.
In September 2021, the Jerusalem District Court ordered Hamas and the convicted mastermind of the killings to pay NIS 38 million, about $11.8 million. The court also held the Palestinian Authority responsible for the debt as a third party. Shurat HaDin's own filings argued the PA's continued financial support for Hamas's Gaza administration made it liable.
That theory of PA-Hamas financial linkage is Shurat HaDin's characterization, not an independently adjudicated fact beyond this one ruling. Shurat HaDin called the award inadequate and appealed. Whatever the final number, the mechanism, a court forcing the PA to answer for money that reaches Hamas, was new legal ground.
A decade earlier, the Arab Bank litigation gave the theory its first major American test. A Brooklyn jury found the Jordan-based bank liable in 2014 for processing payments tied to Hamas, the first verdict against a major international bank. The verdict was later vacated on a jury-instruction dispute and settled confidentially.
Shurat HaDin was not lead counsel; the case was built primarily by U.S. plaintiffs' firms. But it established, for the first time, that a bank's compliance failures could be argued in an American jury trial rather than negotiated between governments. That precedent is what Shurat HaDin's own bank litigation has run on ever since.
More recently, Darshan-Leitner was among the attorneys representing the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, an American student killed in the 2015 ISIS attacks in Paris. In Gonzalez v. Google, she argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that platforms bear responsibility for algorithmically amplifying terrorist content.
The 2023 decision was a partial result at best. The Court declined to resolve the underlying Section 230 question and sent the case back to the lower courts. That kept the theory alive without validating it.
Across two decades, Shurat HaDin's own reporting credits the organization with securing more than $200 million in actual compensation for terror victims. That is against a far larger total of judgments and liens, reported by the group in the billions. Those liens were obtained against Iran, Syria, North Korea, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority and the banks that served them.
The gap between those two figures is real. It is the honest measure of how hard terror-finance judgments are to collect against sovereign or quasi-sovereign defendants who do not pay voluntarily.
The docket has also moved beyond bank accounts. Shurat HaDin has filed complaints at the International Criminal Court against Hamas and Palestinian Authority officials. It has also worked for more than a decade to intercept Gaza-bound flotillas before they reach Israeli waters.
And it has pursued legal action against BDS boycott campaigns targeting Israeli academics and companies in several Western jurisdictions. Each front runs on the same theory as the bank cases. Find the identifiable actor behind the harm, and put them in front of a judge.
Why Are Terror-Finance Judgments So Hard to Collect?
Judgments against Hamas, Iran or the Palestinian Authority are notoriously hard to collect from a defendant with no reachable assets. Extraterritorial cases can take a decade or more to reach a verdict. Jesner v. Arab Bank later closed off a path foreign victims had used to sue foreign banks at all.
Gonzalez v. Google showed the same ceiling holds for the newer fight against social platforms. The justices declined to expand liability even where the underlying facts were not seriously disputed.
Campus complaints filed since October 7 remain allegations being tested in court, not adjudicated findings. The claim that bank compliance has tightened industry wide because of this litigation, rather than broader regulatory pressure, is Shurat HaDin's argument. It is not a settled fact.
None of that rebuts a courtroom win. It is why Darshan-Leitner has always measured success past the verdict itself. That includes discovery that exposes invisible financing networks and costs imposed on defendants who would rather settle than air their compliance failures in open court. It also includes precedent, like the Jerusalem District Court's PA ruling, that later cases build on even when the immediate award is small.
How Did October 7 Widen the Battlefield?
October 7 did not create Shurat HaDin's mission. It widened the battlefield the organization was already fighting on.
The docket now runs from Gaza and The Hague, where Shurat HaDin has worked to counter international efforts to prosecute Israeli soldiers. It extends to American university campuses, where the organization has filed complaints alleging material support for extremist activity by specific student organizations. And it includes a formal request Darshan-Leitner has made to the U.S. Justice Department.
She is asking the department to investigate the funding and operations of newer advocacy groups active since the war began. Jewish communal organizations across North America and Europe have separately tracked a rise in antisemitic incidents and campus tensions since October 7. That broader climate is the environment this newest front operates in, even where any individual Shurat HaDin complaint remains contested and unresolved.
That international front sharpened in November 2024, when the ICC issued arrest warrants against Israel's prime minister and then-defense minister over the war in Gaza. Darshan-Leitner has argued the case shows the court now behaves as a combatant rather than a neutral arbiter.
The same campaign has reached individual reservists. Shurat HaDin has tracked lawfare complaints against Israeli soldiers filed in dozens of countries since October 7. That is part of why the organization built Shachpatz, an app that gives traveling reservists real-time legal exposure alerts.
The throughline has not moved in twenty years: identify the infrastructure enabling the threat, financial, legal or digital. Attack it through the courts built to adjudicate harm.
When and Where Is the Rage Against the Hate Conference?
Shurat HaDin hosts the third annual Rage Against the Hate conference on November 1, 2026, at Battery Park in New York City. The date is less than two months away, and registration is open now.
Four elements define the program. Author Douglas Murray closes the day in conversation with Darshan-Leitner. He makes the ideological case for Israel; she has spent twenty-five years making the legal one.
Alan Dershowitz appears earlier in the day, discussing the doctrine of proportionality with defense attorney Benjamin Brafman. Communications strategist Frank Luntz keynotes on the language of Israel advocacy after October 7.
And the families of Rose Lubin, the Lone Soldier killed in Jerusalem in 2023, and of the Bibas hostages, appear alongside the other speakers. They are the reminder that every case Shurat HaDin has ever filed exists because of families exactly like these.
Darshan-Leitner's own keynote, Bringing the SJP Extremists to Justice: The Never-Ending Legal War Against Hate, is the clearest link between two eras of her work. It connects her original terror-finance doctrine to Shurat HaDin's newest legal front. She opens the day's substantive legal argument and closes it, in the same room, hours later.
Registration is open now for the November 1 conference. Register for Rage Against the Hate to hear Darshan-Leitner, Murray, Dershowitz and Luntz in the same room.
The Lawyer and the Movement
Darshan-Leitner started with a simple proposition, by her own account handed to her directly by Israel's former intelligence chief. If terrorism needs money, find the money. If someone enables it, find the legal pressure point.
More than two decades later, the targets have expanded, from banks and state sponsors to social platforms, campus organizations and international courts. The method has not changed. Identify the infrastructure. Attack it through the system built to adjudicate harm.
Rage Against the Hate is the conference. Turning outrage into a courtroom weapon is the project Darshan-Leitner has been running since 2003. Registration for November 1 in Battery Park is open now.
More From Nitsana Darshan-Leitner
Darshan-Leitner also writes her own analysis for The Olam. In The ICC Is No Longer a Court, she argues the court's Israel warrants expose a structural pattern of selective prosecution. In Israeli Defense Tech's Next War, she maps how the same lawfare campaign threatens IPOs, M&A and hiring across the defense sector.
In Lawfare Is Israel's Most Underrated Defense Industry, she makes the case for treating legal warfare as national-security infrastructure rather than charity. And Israeli Soldiers Now Need Legal Armor Abroad covers the individual-reservist front and the Shachpatz app. Read her full Olam author profile for the complete archive.
Frequently Asked Questions About Nitsana Darshan-Leitner
Who is Nitsana Darshan-Leitner?
She is an Israeli attorney, born in Petah Tikva, who founded Shurat HaDin, the Tel Aviv-based Israel Law Center, in 2003. She has recovered more than $200 million for terror victims through civil litigation in courts across Israel, the United States, Canada and Europe.
What is Shurat HaDin?
Shurat HaDin is a Tel Aviv-based legal organization, founded in 2003. It sues terrorist organizations, their state sponsors, and the banks and platforms that fund or host them. The model follows the Southern Poverty Law Center's litigation against the Ku Klux Klan.
What did Meir Dagan tell Darshan-Leitner?
By her own account, the late Mossad chief told her that defeating terrorism means going after the money. That eight-word instruction became Shurat HaDin's founding doctrine.
How much money has Shurat HaDin recovered for terror victims?
The organization reports recovering more than $200 million in actual compensation. That is against a larger total of judgments and liens, reported in the billions, against Iran, Syria, North Korea, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Palestinian Authority.
What is Harpoon about?
Harpoon: Inside the Covert War Against Terrorism's Money Masters is the 2020 book Darshan-Leitner co-authored with journalist Samuel M. Katz. It covers the doctrine of tracking and disrupting terror financing.
When is the next Rage Against the Hate conference?
The third annual Rage Against the Hate conference takes place November 1, 2026, at Battery Park in New York City, with registration open now.
שאלות נפוצות על ניצנה דרשן-לייטנר
מי היא ניצנה דרשן-לייטנר?
עורכת דין ישראלית, ילידת פתח תקווה, שייסדה בשנת 2003 את שורת הדין, ארגון משפטי מתל אביב שהשיב יותר מ-200 מיליון דולר לקורבנות טרור באמצעות תביעות אזרחיות.
מהי שורת הדין?
ארגון משפטי שהוקם בתל אביב בשנת 2003 ותובע ארגוני טרור, את המדינות המממנות אותם, ואת הבנקים והפלטפורמות שמעבירים את כספם, בהשראת המודל של ה-Southern Poverty Law Center נגד ה-Ku Klux Klan.
מה אמר מאיר דגן לדרשן-לייטנר?
לפי עדותה, ראש המוסד המנוח אמר לה שכדי לנצח את הטרור יש ללכת אחרי הכסף, המשפט בן שמונה המילים שהפך לדוקטרינת הייסוד של שורת הדין.
מתי הכנס הבא של Rage Against the Hate?
הכנס השלישי מתקיים ב-1 בנובמבר 2026 בבאטרי פארק שבניו יורק, וההרשמה פתוחה כעת.