New Lawfare Tactic Threatens all Israelis Who Serve in IDF
Yuval Vagdani. Photo: Courtesy.
JNS.org – The specter of her sons and daughters being hauled before foreign courts on war crimes charges has shaken Israel.
The lawfare tactic came to the public’s attention this week with the drama of a reservist in the Israel Defense Forces on vacation in Brazil being forced to flee the country, aided by the personal intervention of Israel’s foreign minister.
Yuval Vagdani, 21, a soldier in the IDF’s Givati Brigade, found himself in the crosshairs of the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF), a Belgium-based NGO that targets Israeli soldiers for legal action.
Its modus operandi is to monitor the social networks of soldiers for posts about their service—for HRF, service in Gaza appears to be prima facie evidence of war crimes—and then to launch a suit in the countries those soldiers visit, typically on holiday.
It signals an aggressive shift in anti-Israel legal strategy, Brooke Goldstein, founder and executive director of The Lawfare Project, a group dedicated to defending Jewish civil rights, told JNS.
“Previous failed efforts to prosecute Israelis for alleged war crimes have focused primarily on political and military leaders rather than rank-and-file soldiers. The move to target lower-level personnel, like the IDF soldier in Brazil, represents a major escalation in legal and advocacy strategies,” she said.
HRF lawsuits started from a handful, rising as of last count to 28 in multiple countries, including Sri Lanka, Thailand, Holland, Ireland and South Africa. It brought two complaints in Argentina this past week. Israelis fear the number of cases will become an avalanche.
“Given Israel’s mandatory military service … this tactic poses a threat to the broader Israeli population, effectively putting all citizens at risk of legal action,” noted Goldstein.
HRF’s success in convincing a federal Brazilian court to accept the case is unfortunately a shot in the arm for the group, agreed Jonathan Turner, chief executive of U.K. Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), which works to “combat the use and abuse of law” by Israel’s enemies.
“I think there will be a lot more cases coming up of this nature,” he told JNS.
In July of last year, Turner’s group filed a challenge to the International Criminal Court (ICC) over its jurisdiction to issue arrest warrants against Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, predicting that the warrants against Israel’s leaders would encourage a wave of suits against ordinary Israelis.
“One of our observations to the International Criminal Court was [that] it would make it more likely that arrest warrants could be issued secretly against a multitude of other Israelis,” Turner said.
The ICC warrants made war crimes charges against Israelis seem credible, leading national authorities to be more willing to investigate, he said. “The completely bogus allegations made by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, are now liable to be treated as reasonable grounds for courts to issue arrest warrants against other Israelis.”
Worth noting is that no country has yet actually charged an Israeli (even in the Brazil case a court only asked the police to open an investigation). The Israeli government is clearly determined to keep it that way. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar convened a team of Security Cabinet ministers on Sunday, the first of a series of planned meetings to build inter-ministerial cooperation to deal with the emerging threat.
Sa’ar instructed the army to brief soldiers against uploading anything to the Internet related to their operational activities. Turner agreed with the approach. He also “strongly advised” Israelis who have served in the IDF in recent years not to post information about their travel plans as that gives Israel’s enemies “an opportunity to locate them and contact the authorities in that country.”
This happened in the case of Vagdani, the soldier forced to flee Brazil. Interviewed by Israeli radio station Kan Reshet Bet on Wednesday, he said that HRF claimed he had “murdered thousands of children, and turned it into a 500-page document. All that was there was a picture of me in uniform in Gaza.”
Adding insult to injury is that Vagdani is a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre, where Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, slaughtered more than 350 people.
Vagdani praised the work of Israel’s Foreign Ministry. On Jan. 4, “I woke up in the morning, opened the phone and suddenly saw eight calls— the Foreign Ministry, my brothers, my mother, consuls,” he said. He was on a plane out of Brazil the next day.
The vacation was to have been his “dream trip,” one which he had planned for four years. “I was in the best place of my life, with my friends. I thanked God for every moment there,” he told Israeli radio.
While the Foreign Ministry acted with alacrity in this case and has woken up to the danger, with Minister Sa’ar calling for setting up an information hotline and instructing staff to monitor NGOs acting against IDF soldiers abroad, Turner said Israel’s government has “not handled the information war particularly well, unfortunately, and that has made fighting the lawfare war more difficult.”
Israel could act more aggressively on the lawfare front, he said, providing several examples, including Israel’s failure to challenge the bias of the current president of the International Court of Justice, Judge Nawaf Salam, a former Lebanese ambassador to the United Nations, “backed by Hezbollah to be a candidate for prime minister of Lebanon.”
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, president of Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center, an Israel-based group focused on fighting lawfare, told JNS that Israel must take a multi-pronged approach to counter the newest tool in the campaign to “delegitimize and demonize our nation.”
First, Israel should brief and prepare soldiers traveling abroad, so they know what to do when facing such situations, she said.
Second, should they be arrested, it should deploy “every legal and diplomatic resource to secure their release and uphold their rights,” she continued.
Third, it should target pro-Palestinian groups and countries that “arrogate international jurisdiction to themselves, masquerading as champions of justice while blatantly advancing biased political agendas.”
UKLFI’s Turner expressed doubt that groups like HRF could be easily targeted, though he noted a determined U.S. president and Congress might impose sanctions on and target the financing of such groups.
HRF is so new, having been established late last year, that little is known of its financing, said Yona Schiffmiller, director of research at NGO Monitor. “I don’t think that information has been made public yet,” he told JNS.
“The fact that it was founded in September of 2024 is very much indicative of the fact that the organization’s whole purpose is simply to go after Israeli soldiers and Israelis,” he added.
Other groups are engaging in the same lawfare tactics, he noted, referring to DAWN (Democracy for the Arab World Now), a U.S.-based organization that has been submitting names of Israeli soldiers to the ICC and to American authorities.
Despite Israelis’ concerns, The Lawfare Project’s Goldstein expressed confidence Israel is up to the challenge. “This strategy is destined to fail. Israel will always prioritize the protection of its citizens, no matter the cost. We, the Jewish people, have survived centuries of attempts to delegitimize us.”
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