Natasha Hausdorff

Natasha Cigal Hausdorff (born October 1989) is a British barrister with Pump Court, and international news commentator and Israel advocate. A specialist in international law, she clerked for the Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court. On a volunteer pro bono basis, she is also the legal director of the NGO UK Lawyers for Israel.

Natasha Cigal Hausdorff
Born	October 1989 (age 34–35)
Citizenship	British
Alma mater	Oxford University (Lincoln College) Tel Aviv University Columbia Law School
Occupation	Barrister
Years active	2013–present
Employer	6 Pump Court Chambers
Organization	UK Lawyers for Israel
Known for	specialist in international law

Early life

Hausdorff grew up in Kensington, a borough of London.

Her Israeli father was born in Tel Aviv. Her paternal family goes back eight generations in Israel. Her paternal ancestor Azriel Zelig Hausdorff was born in a village near Leipzig, Germany, and emigrated to Jerusalem, by way of London, in 1847. Her Zionist German-Christian mother met her father at a horse farm in Israel. After her parents married, they immigrated to Britain. Hausdorff is fluent in German.

Education

Hausdorff studied law at and holds law degrees from Oxford University (Lincoln College, Honors, in 2012) in England and from Tel Aviv University in Israel, from which she graduated with an LL.M. magna cum laude in international public law and the law of armed conflict in 2016. In 2010 as a Pegasus Scholar she was a Fellow in the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School.

Career

Hausdorff specializes in international law, and is a barrister with 6 Pump Court Chambers out of London since 2016. Before coming to the Bar, Hausdorff qualified as a solicitor in 2015, with the United States multinational commercial law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, with whom she practiced in London and Brussels from 2013 to 2015 where she worked on international disputes and regulatory matters. Hausdorff clerked for the President of the Israeli Supreme Court in Jerusalem, Chief Justice Miriam Naor, from June to August, 2016.

Hausdorff’s practice includes commercial litigation, arbitration, regulatory matters, and public international law. She represents domestic and international clients, including private companies and government departments, and has appeared before the High Court of Justice, County Court, Crown Court, magistrates’ court, and Tribunals, both as sole counsel and junior to leading counsel.

Hausdorff appears as a commentator on legal matters for international media, including the BBC, Sky News, CNN, GB News, Talk TV, and Fox News. She has also written for the Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, and Law Society Gazette. She has briefed politicians and international organisations, and has spoken at European Parliaments and at the United Nations. Hausdorff has been a keynote speaker on aspects of public international law, foreign affairs, and national security policy.

In October 2024, The Jerusalem Post named Hausdorff the #2 young "2024 ViZionary," that being the #2 most influential young Zionist, and a "prominent advocate for Israel’s legal rights on the global stage."

Israel advocacy

On a volunteer pro bono basis, Hausdorff is also the legal director of the NGO UK Lawyers for Israel. She speaks for Israel on a pro bono basis. She has appeared on the debate program "Intelligence Squared," and spoke at the University of Cambridge, Trinity College, and Durham University.

Lawfare; the ICC, ICJ, and UN

On October 2, 2023, Hausdorff opined that because Israel's opponents had noted that warfare and terror attacks had not achieved their goal of eliminating Israel, they had taken a different approach to attack Israel, which she called "lawfare," meaning the abuse of the law for political means. She is of the opinion that many of the cases brought against Israel before international bodies such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague, and the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) are based on falsehoods and the manipulation of international law. She says that even if the case is not successful, those bringing it benefit in public relations, as they generate negative media attention about Israel. She believes as well that lawfare creates "pseudo international law that operates on a double standard concerning the Jewish state."

Hausdorff also questioned the jurisdictional issue in the ICC taking on cases brought by the Palestinian Authority, inasmuch as the PA is not a state - which is a requirement for the ICC to take on a case.

She noted the peculiarity of the UNHRC having a Standing Agenda Item 7 covering "Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories," given that no other country in the world is subjected by the UNHRC to a stand-alone focus on the UNHRC permanent agenda. She also found unusual the fact that there is a UN blacklist of firms identified by the UN as contributing to human rights abuses--which mostly singles out Israeli companies, and is meant to damage the country’s economy, despite there being a great number of other companies based in other countries that have exceptionally poor human rights records, but have been excluded from the list.

Speaking in May 2024 about ICC prosecutor Karim Kahn having requested the issuance of arrest warrants against both the leaders of Hamas and against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip, she said: "[T]here should not have been any threat from the criminal court, because it has no jurisdiction to investigate the events taking place on the soil of Israel or Gaza. The court's jurisdiction is limited to conflicts that occur on the territory of countries that are signatories to the Treaty of Rome that established the ICC ... or to actions for which a complaint has been filed by a member state.... Since Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Convention and has never recognized the jurisdiction of the court, [the ICC] cannot deal with what is happening on [Israel's] territory. Since a Palestinian state does not exist, he cannot discuss its claims either.... Therefore, it is easy to see that the motives of the criminal court and prosecutor ... are distinctly political."

Blood libels

On October 27, 2023, Hausdorff said that the underlying cause of the shift in world opinion against Israel as the war against Hamas carried on was that people attributed an evil intent to Israel, irrespective of any evidence against it, which was reminiscent of "some of the worst attributes of the antisemitic blood libels of old. They are here in an updated form."

International Court of Justice ruling; genocide, proportionality, Hamas casualty figures

In January 2024, Hausdorff discussed the International Court of Justice ruling in South Africa v. Israel on whether Israel is perpetrating genocide, and said that it was a "complete nonevent," inasmuch as there was "nothing substantive found and nothing substantive required or ordered as part of the provisional measures, because there is no evidence that Israel is engaged in genocide; quite the contrary." She said that the "provisional measures" that the court said Israel was obligated to undertake, Israel was already doing, and that the "incitement to genocide comments" of individuals that the court asked Israel to prevent and punish to were clearly not references to civilians (a condition of genocide), but rather to Hamas terrorists.

She spoke as well to the meaning in the law of the term proportionality, suggesting that the legal term was often misunderstood, by people who believed that the higher Palestinian death toll was proof of "disproportionality." She said that proportionality is a legal term that calls for the military commanders in war to make an assessment as to whether the military advantage sought by a military strike is proportionate to the anticipated collateral damage.

As to the Hamas-reported casualty figures in the Gaza war, she noted that Hamas has an interest in maximizing its reports, that the Hamas figures do not indicate how many of those allegedly killed were Hamas combatants, and that while civilian deaths were certainly to be lamented, the ratio of civilian deaths in the packed urban Gaza Strip were likely significantly lower than in comparable military engagements. She said that data suggests 1.8 civilian deaths to every combatant death in Gaza, while the United Nations has reported that usually in urban warfare civilian casualties average 9.0 to every combatant death, and United States statistics in its wars Iraq and Afghanistan reflected 3.0 to one and 5.0 to one civilian death tolls, respectively.

Speaking in May 2024 about the decision, she noted that South Africa's requests that the ICJ state that Israel must immediately stop the war were rejected outright, even though they were submitted four times. Among the reasons for the rejection by the ICJ was that Israel has a right to self-defense, as stipulated in Article 51 of the UN Charter, which states that the primary responsibility of any government is to protect its citizens and maintain their safety.

Munk Debate; antisemitism, anti-Zionism, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide

In June 2024, she partnered with Douglas Murray at the Munk Debate, debating against Mehdi Hasan and Gideon Levy, and she and Murray convinced two-thirds of the audience that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are the same. She attacked the notions that Israel is a colonial state, that it has ethnically cleansed Palestinians, that it is an apartheid state, and that it is committing genocide in Gaza. She said that: "The genocide libel inverts reality.... Genocide is the latest modern blood libel that antisemites use to justify their anti-Zionism.

Hezbollah pager attack; targeting

After the Hezbollah pager attack in September 2024, in which over 3,000 pagers intended for use by Hezbollah militants exploded simultaneously across Lebanon and Syria, Hausdorff said that if Israel was responsible, then on the information that was available the attack appeared to be "incredibly precise. Rules on targeting are principally necessity, distinction, and proportionality. It is hard to imagine a better means of targeting Hezbollah operatives."

External links

• Instagram page
• "Natasha Hausdorff discusses Israel and International Law with 92NY’s Rabbi David Ingber," UKLFI Charitable Trust, September 17, 2024
• Yaakov Lipszyc (June 4, 2024) "London barrister Natasha Hausdorff spoke with Mishpacha about Israel’s two court cases and its options," Mishpacha.