June 2003 Suing for Justice: Victims Take the War on Terrorism to the Courtroom By URIEL HEILMAN Early on the morning of Sunday, April 9, 1995, a young American named Alisa Flatow boarded a bus in Jerusalem bound for Gush Katif, an Israeli community in the Gaza Strip. An undergraduate at Brandeis University, in Massachusetts, Alisa had been spending the semester studying in an Israeli yeshiva seminary, and she had taken the day off to travel to the beachfront community in Gaza for a little pre-Passover R&R. Shortly after noon, as Egged bus no. 36 was passing by the Jewish town of Kfar Darom, in Gaza, an Arab driver commandeering a car laden with deadly explosives pulled up alongside the vehicle and detonated his bomb. The bus was thrown into the air, its frame blown apart and its interior set ablaze in a fiery explosion that littered the pavement with car parts, shards of explosives, and pieces of human flesh. Several passengers were killed instantly. Alisa, who was still alive but barely breathing, was pulled from the wreckage and rushed to Soroka hospital, in Beersheva. Back home, in West Orange, New Jersey, Alisa's parents were notified of the attack and immediately boarded a plane for Israel. By the time they arrived at their daughter's bedside, doctors has determined that Alisa was brain dead; she expired within hours. Alisa's organs were donated to patients in Israel, and what remained of her body was flown back to New Jersey for burial. With the detonation of the bomb, a deadly but familiar course of events immediately was set in motion. A Palestinian-Arab terrorist group, Islamic Jihad, claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing, Israel prepared a corrective security operation, and the bereaved families buried their loved ones at crowded, heartrending funerals. But in this particular case, there would be another consequence of the attack that nobody had foreseen. Struck by a foe beyond his reach, Alisa's father, Stephen Flatow, would decide to strike back. And as a real-estate lawyer living in suburban New Jersey, Flatow would mount the only counter-offensive he knew how: He would sue. When Flatow first decided to take his case to the U.S. courts, few saw his legal crusade as anything other than a publicity stunt with little practical significance. After all, whom could he sue? The bomber had been killed in the suicide attack, and his sponsors at Islamic Jihad were already being hunted down by the long arm of Israeli law, which used guns, tanks, and precision operations as often as it did courtrooms in bringing Palestinian terrorists to justice. Setting his sights beyond the terrorists themselves, Flatow laid the blame with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which he believed provided the material support that made it possible for Palestinian terror groups like Islamic Jihad to function. But the utility of suing Iran was, at best, questionable. Even if Flatow's lawyers were able somehow to prove Iran's culpability in the Gaza Strip attack, as a sovereign nation the Islamic republic could not be sued in the U.S. Furthermore, any Iranian assets frozen in the United States since the severing of diplomatic relations between the two countries were protected by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), which gave diplomatic cover even to the most unsavory of countries. So, when five years and countless court battles later the Flatows were able to collect about $26 million of a $248 million judgment against Iran that they had been awarded in court, their victory signaled the opening of a new front in the war on terrorism-one that could be fought by individual American citizens. Ordinary Americans-victims and bereaved families-had a new weapon in the crusade against terrorists: the civil lawsuit. "Hopefully, this will have a deterrent effect. The sponsors of terrorism will realize that they have a price to pay," said Allan Gerson, an attorney working on the biggest civil suit filed thus far by American victims of terrorism-the $1 trillion class action by families of Sept. 11 victims against Saudi Arabian banks, charities, and government officials. Gerson is also the lead attorney in a class-action suit against the Libyan government by families of victims of Pan Am Flight 103, which was blown up in the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988. "So far, the only people that have paid the price of terrorism have been the victims," Gerson said. "No state has ever really been made to pay. It's a question of justice." The road for plaintiffs seeking to collect damages for their losses is long, arduous, and quite costly. The Flatow lawsuit, for example, required millions of dollars, the changing of several laws, stealthy detective work, political connections, a contest of will with the president and State Department, and indefatigable resolve. Even now, the Flatows have only collected the compensatory portion of their multi-million dollar judgment; they still are fighting to gain control of frozen assets from which to recover the larger, punitive portion. Yet what began as largely symbolic gestures-civil actions by citizens against enablers of terrorism that the U.S. government was unwilling or unable to pursue-has become a groundswell that threatens to encumber terrorists' financing and wrest a measure of control of foreign policy away from the State Department and into the hands of judges and ordinary citizens. The significance of the growing number of these lawsuits is becoming clearer as they gradually impact not only the U.S. government's dealings with terrorists and terrorist-sponsoring nations, but possibly also the way terrorists and their state sponsors conduct themselves. Above all, what Flatow's collection and others since have meant is that these suits-with their staggering sums, their rogues' galleries of defendants, and their ambitious goals-actually matter. "These lawsuits have unleashed the plaintiffs bar-that's why we did this," said the Flatow family lawyer, Steven Perles. "I think they are gaining momentum, and I know that the Iranians are paying attention," he said. "If we can translate the judgments in terms of a stripping away of a terrorist state's assets, they're not going to take it lightly. It could be more damaging than lobbing a few cruise missiles somewhere. It becomes a huge disincentive for them." Some lawsuits take aim at terrorist-sponsoring nations like Iran and Libya, while others set their sights on charities and other organizations in the United States that support terrorist groups. Many experts say they believe these civil suits are helping propel U.S. law-enforcement agencies' criminal targeting of domestic supporters of terror like the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the Islamic Committee for Palestine, and such individuals as Sami Al-Arian, the University of South Florida professor indicted in February for raising money to finance suicide bombings. Of course, the growing law-enforcement effort to identify and prosecute domestic supporters of foreign terrorism owes at least as much to the shift in public sentiment in the wake of the horrific events of September 11, 2001. The government's criminal indictments, including Al-Arian's arrest, "demonstrates a new aggressiveness by the government in the pursuit of terrorists," said terrorism expert Steven Emerson, author of American Jihad and executive director of the Investigative Project, a Washington-based research group that focuses on Islamic terrorism. "Up until 9/11, the government was unable for a variety of reasons to pursue these groups. The whole issue of what is politically palatable and possible invades every decision." Political considerations represent the most significant hurdle to date for the development of the civil lawsuit as an effective weapon against terrorists. Until Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996, which amended FSIA to suspend diplomatic immunity for countries on the State Department's list of terrorist sponsors-allowing individuals like Flatow to sue countries like Iran-plaintiffs had no way to recover damages awarded them in the courtroom. The original civil action in the Lockerbie case, filed in 1993, was dismissed in 1995 by the U.S. district court in New York on the grounds that Libya enjoyed sovereign immunity under FSIA. The suit was reinstated once Libya was stripped of its immunity by the 1996 amendment. Even now, after the passage of that law, the State Department continues to oppose in court efforts by American citizens to recover monetary damages against frozen diplomatic assets in the U.S. It seems that for most plaintiffs, the hardest part of the process is overcoming their own government's objections to enforcement of their judgments. For now, only Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and Cuba can be sued in American courts for sponsoring terrorism against Americans. That's one reason why families of Sept. 11 victims are suing Saudi banks, charities and individual financiers rather than the government of Saudi Arabia, even though the lawsuit implicitly blames the Saudi government and names several Saudi princes as defendants. One lawsuit not related to the 2001 attacks, by the family of David Boim, a 17-year-old American yeshiva student killed by Hamas in a shooting attack in the West Bank in May of 1996, seeks to recover $600 million in damages from terrorist-promoting organizations in America, some of which are also the targets of criminal prosecutions or investigations. Another suit by the family of a Hamas murder victim, Yaron Ungar, an American killed in Israel about a month after Boim, names Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and the Palestinian Authority as defendants. Because the PA does not constitute a sovereign government, it does not enjoy the immunity granted by FSIA. The PA is the subject of lawsuits both in the United States and Israel (see accompanying story). The key difference for the government between cases like Boim's and Flatow's is that the Boim suit implicates many of the same non-governmental groups and individuals that the government is itself pursuing; therefore, the civil suit and the government's criminal investigations complement each other (because the level of admissible evidence under civil law is at a lower threshold than in criminal prosecutions, culpability is a little bit easier to prove in civil suits). With Flatow and the 9/11 cases, however, the civil suits point the finger at foreign governments with which the United States has delicate, complex relationships. These suits complicate those relationships, and the State Department views them as obstacles to cautious, deliberate diplomacy. Furthermore, the State Department is fearful that if frozen foreign assets in the U.S. can be given away, U.S. assets abroad may well suffer the same fate. If it has become politically untenable for the government to oppose publicly lawsuits by victims of terrorism, public sentiment hasn't stopped the State Department from going to court to block judgments awarded in these suits. The State Department refused requests for comment on this story. "The State Department is losing control of foreign policy," said Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and an expert on militant Islam. "While the Congress passed this legislation"-which enables certain plaintiffs to collect on favorable judgments-"it's wildly unpopular in the State Department and in other government departments. It takes policy out of the hands of government and puts it into the hands of judges and American citizens. Already, the American political process is the most open to non-governmental forces. This throws it wide open." Justice Department sources say some government lawyers who have had to fight in court on behalf of the State Department feel morally compromised by their work against the interests of bereaved Americans. At least one government attorney reportedly resigned his position after being compelled to participate in one such case, sources said. The government's opposition is even more demoralizing to the families of the victims. "It's been very confusing," said Stephen Flatow. "When President Clinton called us after Alisa's murder to tell us he was sending an FBI team to investigate the murder, it makes you feel on top of the world," he said. "When you go to court two years later and the State Department and the Justice Department are opposing your efforts, it makes your head spin." "The State Department is not the friend of the American victim," Perles, who represents Flatow, said. "The hardest moment in Steve Flatow's case was the entry of the U.S. government to defend Iranian assets under control of the State Department's treasury. I had never seen him that low." The hundreds of Americans who are suing Saudi groups and individuals connected to the 9/11 attacks may not yet have encountered courtroom opposition from the U.S. government, but unless the Bush administration reverses decades of American foreign policy, the families can expect little help from the president. Several months ago, amid an intense lobbying effort by the Saudis to have the suit dismissed, a group of families of 9/11 victims went to Washington to stage a demonstration at the Capitol urging the White House not to stand in the way of their lawsuit. In a letter sent at the time to President Bush on the families' behalf, New York's Sen. Charles Schumer wrote, "We have invaded Afghanistan, pursued al-Qaeda to the far reaches of the globe, and shut down organizations accused of financing terrorism. Why, then, would the federal government intervene and block these 9/11 victims' lawsuit, severely undermining their ability to prosecute their case?" The federal government has not blocked the suit, but in contrast with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, the White House maintains cozy relations with the oil-rich Gulf kingdom. "The federal government has vested interests that prevent them economically and politically from participating in suits against governments like the Saudis," Gerson said. Gerson's co-counsel in the 9/11 suit is Ronald Motley, the renowned South Carolina attorney who successfully sued tobacco companies for hundreds of billions on behalf of three-dozen states. "Unfortunately, for many years, our officials, worried about keeping reasonably priced oil flowing and using Saudi Arabia as a possible staging area in the event of war with Iraq, have been soft on the kingdom," Motley and Gerson wrote in an op-ed column in the New York Times in January. "The [U.S.] government should also be more cooperative with the victims' families. Richard V. Allen, a former national security adviser to Ronald Reagan, is one of many former officials who have urged the government to support the suit because its discovery process may help to expose the mechanics of terrorist financing. Families of the victims have had enough grief to contend with. They deserve the full support of their government." As in virtually all the civil lawsuits against sponsors of terrorism, Gerson and Motley are not trying to prove that the Saudis were directly complicit in the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Rather, they must demonstrate that the defendants had reason know about the nefarious financial, military and political activity taking place under their noses and that they chose to look the other way. The suit charges them with negligence, racketeering, wrongful death, and conspiracy. "We're not saying the Saudi government intentionally funded terrorism," said John Loftus, a terrorism specialist and former Justice Department prosecutor who is helping the motley crew of lawyers behind many of these civil suits obtain evidence linking the defendants to terrorist organizations. "We're saying they were negligent. They could have known or should have known and were conduits for terrorism." The process of linking foreign states to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, or Hamas is a costly, labor-intensive, and sometimes dangerous endeavor. Collecting evidence as part of discovery can take years and often requires the help of intelligence agents, foreign governments, and convicted felons. Much of it happens under cloak-and-dagger-like secrecy, and a large part of the work is done abroad. Lawyers must hire translators, pore over bank records, and generally work in a field with which few litigators are familiar. The pioneering nature of the work makes these lawsuits that much more daunting to undertake. "We spent years doing research and speaking with a host of terrorism experts who have devoted their lives to researching groups and individuals that are supporting these terrorist groups," said attorney Alyza Lewin, who represents the Boim family along with her father, Nathan Lewin, a renowned advocate of Jewish causes. "Based on the information that we were able to gather from our sources, we narrowed down the field to those groups we thought there was enough of a basis that we could survive motions to dismiss, etc., to get us to the point where we would be able to do initial discovery," she said. There aren't many more than a dozen lawyers and their partners prosecuting these civil cases in the United States. Right now, many of the cases are tried on contingency or as pro bono cases, and expenses for materials and fees can easily run to between $2 and $4 million per lawsuit. Translators have to be hired, subpoenas have to be served in faraway places, and evidence needs to be collected in multiple countries. The Lewins reported that they've already spent in excess of $1 million in the Boim case, and they haven't even gotten to trial. Then there's the issue of safety. The pursuit of terrorists is a dangerous enterprise that puts at immediate physical risk some of those collecting evidence abroad, and it raises the possibility that the lawyers, too, are putting themselves in jeopardy. "There are so few people involved. It's a very difficult area of law," Loftus said. "You have to have a willingness to go out in public and get your nose bloody." As the likelihood of success grows, however-aided in part by the introduction of legislation that would make it easier for bereaved families to collect on their judgments-it is possible that many more lawyers will be drawn to these high-risk, high-payout cases. The attorneys interviewed for this story refused to discuss their specific terms of compensation, but fees generally run from those fixed by statute at 10% of the award to the standard personal-injury rate of 33%. Plaintiffs in the 9/11 case said their suit carries a 33% contingency fee for attorneys, or 22% if the case is settled out of court. The awards themselves are based on quantifying the victims' projected lifetime incomes, loss to the family, and pain and suffering endured, as well as assessing punitive damages. In the Pan Am 103 case, lawyers tried to demonstrate that many victims likely did not die in the initial blast and had to endure the terror and suffering of an explosion, excruciating physical injury, sub-freezing cold and 500-mile-an-hour winds as the plane broke up at 31,000 feet, and a hellish plunge to their deaths on the ground miles below. They argued that victims may have lived for up to three minutes following the blast; the court disagreed. In the Flatow trial, lawyers paid for video photographers to visit the Gaza bombing site and interview witnesses, and they hired a pathologist and an economist to try to quantify Alisa's suffering-based in part on her survival of the initial blast-and determine the economic loss of her death to the family-based largely on her plans to become a physical or occupational therapist. Ezra Reinstein, a former litigator in New York, recently left his job as a corporate attorney to head the Zionist Organization of America's new Center for Law and Justice, which seeks to give litigation assistance to American victims of Palestinian-Arab terrorism. Reinstein says the ZOA is looking for big firms to take on terrorism cases pro bono. "Bringing a lawsuit like this would be wonderful in so many ways for a major law firm both in terms of looking like the good guy and in giving their litigators experience in something they wouldn't otherwise have experience in," he said. The ZOA is one of a few American Jewish organizations promoting these civil suits on an institutional level. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has helped lobby for legislation to enable victims to collect compensation, but AIPAC is not active in any ongoing effort to promote the suits in a comprehensive way. The Orthodox Union said its involvement has been limited to support for legislation in 2000 that helped Flatow-a president of one of the OU's member synagogues-collect on his judgment. "Jewish groups are in an awkward position," acknowledged Flatow. "I couldn't ask them to be up there swinging from day one. They're looking at a larger picture, possibly at deteriorating Israeli-American relations." Loftus, who is Irish Catholic, says he believes the American Jewish community is too eager to avoid controversy. "I think what's kind of sad is that Jewish groups aren't more involved in this," he said. "I've never seen a Jewish group sue a terrorist; they're all non-Jewish groups. Why is there no Jewish equivalent of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan?" All things being equal, Loftus says he thinks the government should be doing the job of extracting compensation from terrorists and their sponsors. "These lawsuits are really a reflection of the government's passivity," Loftus said. "These are not cases that should be prosecuted by civilians. In the absence of government investigators, the former prosecutor has stepped up, providing lawyers with access to information gleaned from former FBI agents, CIA operatives, and Mossad functionaries, among others. In the course of his work on the lawsuit by 9/11 victims, Loftus says he helped facilitate the purchase of a laptop computer with 5,000 Al Qaeda emails on it, hired former intelligence officers around Europe to collect evidence, and traded information with the government of Spain, French intelligence agencies, and other middlemen around the world. "It's amazing what they have uncovered that our government didn't know," said Bill Doyle, a Staten Island man who lost his son in the World Trade Center attacks and is a board member of the 9/11 Coalition of Families. "We've gathered so much information that we now are sharing most of the information with the Secretary of Defense and the U.S. Treasury to try to help put a stop to terrorism." In the 9/11 case, investigators are trying to recover the paper trail that runs from Saudi charities in Virginia and elsewhere to recipients who used the cash to pay for activities that directly or indirectly promoted terrorist violence against Americans, Israelis, and Jews. In one case, investigators recovered videotapes showing charity officials making fundraising appeals on the basis of killing Jews. In another, investigators are tracking checks written to organizations known to have ties with groups like Islamic Jihad. Because the disbursements of religious charities are relatively unregulated in the U.S., these paper trails sometimes can be very difficult to establish. "This is the opposite of money laundering," Gerson said. "Laundering means you take bad money and put it through a washing machine and it becomes clean. What terrorists use is the reverse. You take good money, you put it through the ringer, and it becomes bad money used for terrorist purposes." There are times when tracing those links is relatively straightforward. In attacks in Israel, the terrorist group that perpetrates the violence almost always takes public responsibility. The identities of suicide bombers generally are discovered within hours, and Israeli authorities help provide other evidence extracted through interrogations or confessions. After Matthew Eisenfeld and Sara Duker, an engaged couple from New Jersey, were killed in a bus bombing in Jerusalem on February 25, 1996, Hamas immediately claimed responsibility for the attack and identified the bomber as Magid Wardah. The bombing's mastermind, Hassan Salamah, later described his planning of the attack and his training in a television interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" and in documented interrogations with Israeli police. When it came to linking Hamas to its sponsors, it was a matter of public record that Iran funded Hamas and Islamic Jihad; Iran's own publicly available annual budget said as much with a line item allocation for Palestinian terrorist groups. That link was further corroborated by Salamah, who described his terrorist training by Iranian military instructors at a base near Tehran. With the Eisenfeld/Duker and Flatow cases, the biggest legal challenges were procedural rather than evidentiary. The families couldn't even file suit until FSIA was amended to allow civil action against state sponsors of terror, and they couldn't collect until Congress passed the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act and the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act in 2000. Access to frozen foreign assets in the U.S. had been blocked repeatedly by presidential waivers citing unspecified national security concerns, but the passage of those acts thwarted the president's obstructions. Once plaintiffs won the legal right to move against frozen assets-thanks to the legislation introduced by Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey-they actually had to go out and find assets, which isn't easy. Flatow, whose suit moved first through the courts, required two other statutory changes along the way that set standards for damages and specified the type of assets from which victims' families could collect judgments. In all the cases against it, Iran has not showed up in court to contest the bereaved families' claims of liability. As long as the plaintiffs are able to "establish [their] claim or right to relief by evidence that is satisfactory to the Court," as required by law, they have been awarded default judgments. Collection is another matter entirely. The Iranians vigorously defend in commercial litigation cases to protect their assets from seizure, and when Iran isn't able to make its case, the State Department steps in and does it for it. Frozen assets remain difficult to find and in nearly every case require litigation, sometimes to prove that seemingly privately owned Iranian companies are in fact the property of Iranian government. The courts generally have disputed the notion that private entities seized or nationalized by the Islamic Republic of Iran after the 1979 revolution are the property of the state. In contrast to Iran, Libya chose to defend its cases on the merits, appearing in court in the case of a German nightclub bombed in the 1980s-an episode that triggered President Reagan's strike against Muammar Qaddafi-and in the Lockerbie bombing case. Consequently, Gerson and Motley have had to work much harder to establish guilt. While the criminal case in the Netherlands against the Lockerbie bombers, who were found guilty in 2001, was helpful, the additional defendants named in Gerson's suit made the civil action considerably more far-reaching than the criminal case, and it required more evidence. Not only did Gerson have to establish that Libyan men bombed the plane, he also had to prove that they worked for Libyan intelligence and took their marching orders from Tripoli. The case reportedly involved interviews with 15,000 people in more than 30 countries and relied on thousands of pieces of evidence collected from the crash site. At one point, the trail linking the Libyans to the bombing hinged on a few miniscule bomb fragments lodged in the label of a baby's jumpsuit that was found at the crash site. Civil suits by Americans against domestic supporters of terrorism can be just as complicated, and some of them require statutory change or interpretation as well. Attorneys in the Boim case are relying on a novel interpretation of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1992-which describes the civil remedies available to victims of international terrorism-that considers as liable those that provide any assistance to known terrorist organizations, not merely assistance for specific criminal attacks. The defendants in that case, which include the Holy Land Foundation, sought to dismiss the suit on the grounds that they could not be held liable for an attack they did not specifically abet. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals was asked to interpret the statute, and oral arguments were set for September 25, 2001. Then came Sept. 11, and the Justice Department filed a brief in the case supporting the Boim position. The court eventually determined that the 1992 statute applied to general support for terrorist groups, not merely specific support for specific attacks, and the suit was upheld. Not long afterward, President Bush announced that he was freezing the assets of the Holy Land Foundation and initiating a full criminal investigation of the group. Boim attorney Alyza Lewin said she felt vindicated by the President's action. "No one had ever interpreted this statute before," Lewin said. "The leading legal theory that's been applied by the government and others that have been brought subsequent to this decision all made use of the statute as it was interpreted by us and adopted as law by the Seventh Circuit." She said, "Our goals in bringing the suits was to shut down these organizations. That's exactly what the president said he's wanted to do. Our objectives are the same. Our lawsuit is the most cost-effective way of doing this for the government, because we're bearing the cost." Canadian legislator Irwin Cotler, an international human rights advocate and professor at McGill University, says these lawsuits are giving the West the most comprehensive look thus far at how terrorist groups operate and are financed. "These lawsuits are important not only because they hold people accountable, but also because of the documentary records that come out of it," he said. In cases like the 9/11 suit against Saudi groups, he said, the discovery process likely will demonstrate that Saudi Arabia "is a country that is a major financer of terror against the U.S. and the international community." The suit, he said, "will bring documentary evidence to the fore. That can reform a country's foreign policy-from considering Saudi Arabia as an ally to realizing it is an adversary. The lawsuits provide a very important looking-glass and an opportunity for the mobilization of shame." Shame may not be much of a deterrent for terrorists, but money is. After Flatow collected his $26 million, the line item in Iran's budget for Palestinian terrorist groups disappeared. That doesn't mean Iran has stopped funding terrorists, but it suggests that the outlaw state is responding to what's happening in American courtrooms. Even after all the judgments against it, however, it is not verifiably clear that Iran has actually paid any money. Once an award is made, plaintiffs receive their checks from the U.S. Treasury-i.e., the American taxpayer-and then the Treasury is supposed to recover those funds from earmarked Iranian assets frozen in the U.S. Flatow said he did not know whether or not the Treasury had actually recovered its reimbursement of $350 million worth of payouts for awards collected against Iranian assets. He did say that the State Department offered him an additional payoff of 10% of the compensatory portion of his judgment (on top of the $26 million he already received) if he agreed to forego the remainder of his $220 million punitive claim against the Iranians. Flatow refused. "The whole purpose of making the Iranians pay is to put them out of the terrorism business," Flatow said. "A state sponsor of terrorism has a finite supply of resources to pay these crazy groups running around the Middle East and other parts of the world. We want to get them to re-think their position. That's the guts behind this." --------------------------- Israeli Victims Sue By URIEL HEILMAN Of all the countries in the world, Israel is the one most frequently targeted by terrorists, yet Israeli citizens struck by terrorism have been slow to seek financial redress for their grievances in the courtroom. There's good reason for that. Because Israel has long been diplomatically isolated from the outlaw states that sponsor terrorism, the Jewish state has had little diplomatic leverage to exact compensation from terrorists or their sponsors. Countries like Iraq, Syria and Libya are beyond Israel's diplomatic reach, and they are no more responsive to Israel's diplomatic overtures than are groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, or Islamic Jihad. In a state with a strong collectivist tradition, Israel's citizens generally have exacted justice against terrorists collectively and militarily, taking their victories on the battlefield as conscripts in the Israel Defense Forces rather than as plaintiffs in court. But with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the gradual warming in relations between Israel and some Arab entities, most notably the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Israel acquired some diplomatic wherewithal within which its citizens could seek legal recompense, not simply military retribution. While politically the Oslo Accords may be all but irrelevant, the landmark agreement charged Israel with, among other things, collecting certain tax duties for the Palestinian Authority. Shortly after the launch of the campaign of Palestinian Arab violence against Israel in October 2000, Israel began withholding tax monies from the PA, and by early 2002, Israel had about $400 million in frozen funds earmarked for transfer to the PA. While Israel has released much of that money in good-will gestures to the Palestinians and in response to pressure from the United States and European Union, dozens of Israeli families are seeking to collect against those funds in civil suits filed against the PA in Israel's district courts. Israeli families victimized by terrorism are also suing outlaw groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad with the aim of collecting any compensation awarded to them against the frozen assets of Israeli charities discovered to be financing terrorists. Unlike in America, Israelis cannot sue state sponsors of terror because no exceptions have been made in Israel to the rule of immunity for sovereign nations. "I want to crush the Palestinian terror organization and to seek justice," said Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, an attorney representing dozens of Israeli families in lawsuits against the PA, Fatah, Force 17, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad. She's also organizing a suit against the EU that charges the Union with financing terrorism by allowing aid payments to the PA. Darshan-Leitner is the director of Shurat Hadin, an Israeli legal organization dedicated to seeking justice for victims of terrorism and their families. "Israeli victims get compensation, but it all comes from the Israeli taxpayer," she said. "I'm morally opposed to this structure, and therefore I'm willing to take each and every case to court and to win it, to have the PA pay for the damages of the Intifada and not the Israeli taxpayer." In many respects, Israeli plaintiffs seeking compensation are worse off than their American counterparts. For one thing, there is less money in frozen assets to go around. For another, though Darshan-Leitner does not charge attorney's fees-she is working on a contingency basis of 5% to 15%, depending on the family-she requires her clients to pay the case's expenses, which can amount to thousands of dollars. That makes legal proceedings prohibitively costly for Israeli families of modest incomes. While none of Darshan-Leitner's cases have been resolved yet, she has succeeded in putting a lien on approximately $13 million of the PA's frozen funds in a case involving the family of one of the soldiers lynched in Ramallah on October 12, 2000. Her move precludes the possibility of Israel transferring that money to the PA. Darshan-Leitner began her work on these cases only recently, but she says she hopes to be able to put a lien on all of the PA's money being held by Israel-an amount that is shrinking rapidly as Israel hands over increasingly sizable sums to the Palestinians. There is less money available for victims suing such terrorist groups as Hamas or Islamic Jihad; the assets of charities in Israel accused of financing the groups total only a few million dollars. One Israeli plaintiff already has succeeded in winning a judgment against Yasser Arafat and the PA. In February, Tel Aviv district court awarded the Egged bus company about $11 million in damages for losses sustained to the company's buses and business since the outbreak of the intifada. Egged buses are among Palestinian terrorists' most popular bombing targets. That case is currently under appeal. For now, the Israeli government is monitoring the cases carefully. "The government hasn't interfered either in favor or against these legal actions," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Jonathan Peled said. "I don't think the Israeli government believes anything can hamper the non-existent negotiations with the Palestinians, so there's no basis to interfere in these attempts to get a judgment." While the cases against the PA and Arab terrorist groups have not required any statutory changes in Israeli law thus far-the groups are being sued according to standard tort law-they require intense litigation. In many cases, the primary battle has been not over evidence, but on who ultimately bears responsibility for Palestinian terrorism. Palestinian defendants blame Israel, claiming Israeli actions give rise to terrorism, and in practically every case they have filed third-party notice against the State of Israel, Darshan-Leitner said. "They claim that Israel is responsible for the attacks because Israel created a hostile atmosphere among the Palestinian population, and the Palestinian Authority is no longer responsible for the actions of its people," Darshan-Leitner said. "They don't even deny the attack." For her part, Darshan-Leitner has focused her efforts on gathering sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the PA has been involved in actively promoting terrorism. Many of her cases rely on the same evidence that Israel showed President Bush in early 2002 implicating Arafat and the PA in terrorism. Not all the cases in Israel are against Arab groups. Steve Bloomberg, who lost his wife on August 5, 2001 in a shooting attack in the West Bank that left him and his daughter severely injured, is suing the EU in Tel Aviv district court for financing terrorism. A British citizen, Bloomberg said it bothers him that his parents, who live in Britain, are paying tax dollars to a government that provides aid money to terrorist supporters. The EU is protesting the suit on the grounds that it enjoys the sovereign immunity accorded all nations. Meanwhile, in Europe, scores of parliamentarians signed a petition in February demanding that the EU investigate the misuse of the funds it donates to the PA. "If somebody causes somebody to be murdered in this country, they should be liable," Bloomberg said. "I don't want anybody to go through what we've gone through. Just like what the army does helps stop terror, we have to make sure that money doesn't get to the terrorists."