Felicia Langer

Felicia Langer
Felicia Langer, 2008
Born	(1930-12-09) 9 December 1930 (age 86) Poland

Felicia Langer (born on 9 December 1930 as Felicia-Amalia Weit in Tarnów, Poland) is a German-Israeli attorney and human rights activist known for her defence of Palestinians charged with political violations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Langer has authored several books alleging human rights violations on the part of Israeli authorities. She has been living in Germany since 1990 and acquired German citizenship in 2008. In July 2009, the former German President Horst Köhler awarded her the Federal Cross of Merit, First class, which is the fifth highest of Germany's federal order of merit's eight ranks. The bestowal triggered a public controversy because of her attitude towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Felicia-Amalia Langer was born of Jewish parents in the Polish town of Tarnów in 1930. In 1939, her family fled from the German invasion to the Soviet Union, where her father died in one of Stalin's prisons. Other relatives were murdered by the National Socialists. In 1949 she married Mieciu Langer in Breslau, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps who had lost his entire family in the holocaust.

In 1950 the young couple emigrated to Israel, where their son was born in 1953. In 1959 she started studying law at Hebrew University Jerusalem, from where she obtained a law degree in 1965. She briefly worked for a Tel Aviv law firm, but then opened up her own lawyer's office in 1966. She was opposed to the conduct of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and so established a private practice in Jerusalem defending Palestinian political detainees. Langer was the first lawyer to assist Palestinians in cases involving land confiscation, house demolition, deportation, and torture before Israeli military courts. Langer only infrequently won cases in her 23-year career. In 1977, she lost her licence to defend Israeli conscientious objectors before Israeli courts and could be excluded from proceedings at any time on the account of security concerns. Langer counts her successful defence in 1979 of Nablus mayor Bassam Shaka as the high point of her career. Shaka had been a PLO supporter and outspoken critic of the Camp David accords, and was subsequently accused of inciting terrorism by his public statements and issued an expulsion order. Langer defended him successfully, having the expulsion order overturned by the Israeli supreme court. For many years Langer was vice president of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights. She joined the bi-national, anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian New Communist List Rakah, in which she became part of the central committee. In 1990 she departed from the party after an internal conflict of orientation, closed her lawyer’s office and moved to Germany with her husband. In an interview with the Washington Post, Langer said she quit because Palestinians no longer can expect justice in Israel.