Professor Yuval Elbashan, in a scathing response to all those defending attorney Michal Pomerantz, who assisted with a legal opinion for antisemitic enemies of Israel seeking to prosecute ten IDF soldiers:
Every word is essential reading.
A. It is no coincidence that the false legal action with which Pomerantz cooperated concerns precisely the same moral issue: a citizen’s duty of loyalty to their country. British law demands of its citizens a degree of loyalty that prevents them from serving as mercenaries in foreign armies. What is true for soldiers is also true for lawyers. The attempt to evade responsibility after the fact with the excuse, “I was only a legal hired gun in a war that did not concern me at all,” is even more ironic than usual in this particular context. It is also, to put it mildly, inconsistent with the legal opinion itself; one need only read the two paragraphs photographed here.
B. The same feigned innocence (“she was merely a lawyer who provided an opinion to a private firm,” as some commenters claimed) is mistaken. Lawyers are not technicians. We are not plumbers of the law who unclog pipes at the homeowner’s request and bear no responsibility for where the water ends up flowing. This is especially true of those who define themselves as “public-interest lawyers” seeking to promote a culture of human rights (as the attorney describes herself in her opinion). Law is not a service but a calling.
C. The claims that this amounts to the “persecution” of lawyers who are merely doing their jobs—coming from people who support the persecution of IDF soldiers who were merely doing theirs—give hypocrisy and double standards a bad name. Let us recall the facts: neither R., the soldier, nor his nine comrades (who, as noted in the photographed passage, are mentioned as part of an intention to pursue criminal proceedings against them as well) are suspected of any unlawful or immoral conduct, let alone war crimes. Their only “sin” is that they dared to report for reserve duty and defend their country when it was brutally attacked on October 7. In other words, it is permissible to persecute IDF soldiers, but not those who pursue them.
And incidentally, those pursuing our soldiers abroad (Hind Rajab Foundation organizations) seek to put them in prison and impose real penalties on them—not the minor sanctions available from the Israel Bar Association’s disciplinary tribunal (and, as I wrote in my article, it is not at all clear to me that any ethical violation occurred here).
In one of the conversations I had today with a colleague with whom I had worked for many years defending refugees from Africa, I asked her: “Would you have reacted the same way if she had written a ‘technical’ legal opinion on Israeli law that could be used to have X arrested in Europe?” (X is a political refugee who fled Africa and entered Israel illegally—a refugee whom both of us had assisted for a long period.)
She immediately protested: “How can you even compare the two?! X committed no crime; he only wanted to protect his life and the lives of his people!”
“And our soldier? What crime did he commit? Wanting to protect his life and the lives of his people?” I asked her.
And that was where the conversation ended.
And that, friends, is the whole story.