Israel Bar Association Faces Complaint Over Lawyer Who Aided UK Lawsuit Against IDF Reservist
The Israel Bar Association is reviewing a complaint against attorney Michal Pomerantz, who assisted a UK lawsuit targeting an IDF reservist. The British court dismissed the case, calling it a politically motivated abuse of process.
An unprecedented complaint has landed on the desk of the Israel Bar Association. According to the complaint, attorney Michal Pomerantz participated in a legal campaign targeting an IDF reservist, a dual Israeli-British citizen, who left his life in England immediately after the October 7 massacre to don his uniform and rush to Israel to join his fellow combat soldiers.
The fighter contends that while he was wearing his uniform to defend the country—including Pomerantz herself—she chose to use her professional legal standing to target him.
The uniqueness of this case stems from two factors. First, the attempt to prosecute the soldier in England did not even allege that he was linked to any war crime; he was targeted solely for standing alongside his brothers-in-arms. Second, the prosecution that Pomerantz assisted presented such a distorted picture to the British court that the judge ruled the proceedings were an "abuse of the court's process to assert a political agenda."
Consequently, parallel proceedings have been initiated against the prosecutors before the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) in the UK. Almost simultaneously, both professional institutions must now address the same fundamental question: what should be done when lawyers abuse their status to wage political warfare in the courtroom?
Thrown Out of Court
On April 8 of this year, Judge Paul Goldspring, the Chief Magistrate of England and Wales, dismissed the application to issue a criminal summons against the IDF reservist.
The pro-Palestinian organization ICJP had sought to revive a forgotten Victorian statute from 1870, originally designed to prevent British subjects from serving as mercenaries in foreign armies, in order to turn the reservist's service in the IDF into a criminal offense.
The judge did not merely dismiss the application; he ruled in exceptionally harsh terms that the prosecutors had committed a serious and inexcusable breach of their duties of candor to the court.
Concealing Key Facts
The judge was particularly incensed that the organization was well aware that the historical law does not apply to dual nationals serving in the military of their second citizenship. The prosecutors deliberately concealed the fact that successive British governments have repeatedly and explicitly clarified that the law does not apply to British citizens serving in the IDF. As a result, the prosecutors were ordered to pay the reservist substantial legal costs amounting to nearly 390,000 shekels.
What upset the soldier far more was the fact that while he was risking his life on the front lines "so that lawyers could continue to sit safely in their offices in Tel Aviv," one of those lawyers chose to assist the prosecution by providing an expert opinion on Israeli military law, claiming he was not legally obligated to return.
The soldier argues this was a deliberate deception designed to present his mobilization as a voluntary choice to join a "foreign" army, which was necessary to prove the alleged offense. In reality, failing to report under an emergency mobilization order (Tzav 8) constitutes criminal desertion, making his return a binding legal obligation.
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, president of the Shurat HaDin organization, which assisted in filing the complaint with the Bar Association, joined the soldier's stance:
"It is unacceptable for an Israeli lawyer to abuse her license and her purported expertise in Israeli law to provide ammunition to a radical anti-Israel organization, aiming to criminalize service in the IDF in a foreign country. Her opinion was designed to pave the way for the arrest of reservists who fulfilled their legal and moral duty after the massacre."
The British Precedent
Ironically, the precedent for a lawyer being severely punished for aiding a legal hunt against his own country's soldiers also comes from Britain. Phil Shiner, a British lawyer who styled himself a "human rights activist," facilitated a series of criminal claims against British soldiers who served in Iraq. After it was determined that these claims were based on deliberate lies, he was permanently struck off by the British Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and later prosecuted for fraud.
While there is no comparison between the severity of Shiner's actions and the disputed legal interpretation attributed to Pomerantz, both involve the same methodology of lawfare based on distorted facts.
The Israel Bar Association now faces two questions. The first concerns professional integrity: did attorney Pomerantz present a partial and biased opinion to a foreign court, and was this done intentionally? The second is far more profound: does providing a legal opinion against an IDF soldier in a proceeding that a foreign court ruled was "fundamentally misconceived in law" and a "political abuse of process" constitute a disciplinary offense in itself? The complainant argues it does, representing an abuse of legal standing to harm state security.
