Michael Sfard

Sfard was born and raised in Jerusalem, in the Rehov Brazil public housing complex in Kiryat HaYovel, in an environment largely insulated from Palestinians living nearby in East Jerusalem.[2] His grandparents survived the Holocaust, and his father was imprisoned in the 1960s for campaigning for democracy in Communist Poland.[2] His grandfather was the Polish-British Holocaust survivor and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman.[1]

During service in the Israel Defense Forces, including in Gaza, Sfard’s views about military force and occupation changed.[1] He became a conscientious objector in the 1990s and spent three weeks in military prison for refusing to escort Israeli settlers in Hebron; he was released from the army in 1994.[1] Afterward, he attended a course on Jewish-Arab encounters at Neve Shalom.[1]

Sfard studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and, before entering legal practice, wrote for the local newspaper Kol Ha’ir.[4] He began an apprenticeship with attorney Avigdor Feldman in 1998 and worked with him for several years.[1] In 2000, he moved to the United Kingdom with his wife to pursue a Master of Laws at University College London, subsequently returning to Israel.[1]

Sfard opened his Tel Aviv law practice in 2004, specializing in international human-rights law and the laws of war.[1] His clients have included Israeli and Palestinian human-rights and peace organizations, movements, and activists, whom he has represented before Israel’s Supreme Court.[1] In 2005, he and several women from Machsom Watch established Yesh Din to pursue human-rights cases through the courts.[2] He has served as Yesh Din’s primary legal counsel and edited many of its reports, sometimes with his associate Emily Schaeffer.[5]

By 2010, Sfard had been involved in more than 100 High Court petitions concerning targeted-killing policy and the separation barrier.[6] Alongside Yesh Din, Peace Now, and Breaking the Silence, his clients have included the artists’ organization Tali.[2][4] His practice has also encompassed petitions against animal testing and representation of foreign workers, adoptive parents, and families of foreign nationals killed in the territories.[4]

His work on land seizure, settlement construction, torture, and targeted killings began while he was an intern in Feldman’s office.[3] He later concentrated extensively on challenges to the separation barrier’s route and outposts built on private Palestinian land in the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria.[3] Describing his professional role in 2013, he said: “I’m an Israeli human rights attorney who fights to strengthen human rights in Israel and in the territories it occupies and represents my clients the best I can.”[2]

In the Alfei Menashe barrier case, a nine-justice panel ordered a route change that would remove three Palestinian villages from an enclave created by the barrier.[3] In Bil’in, the court accepted Sfard’s argument that settlement considerations, rather than security considerations, had influenced the route and ordered it changed.[3] The change returned approximately 2,000 dunams to village residents, an outcome Sfard identified in 2018 as among the victories of which he was proudest.[3]

Sfard also challenged the barrier route at Azzun, where a proposed route would have included 1,200 dunams of cultivated Palestinian land and served an industrial zone for the Tzufim settlement.[6] Discussing that case in 2010, he argued that the state had concealed its actual reason for selecting the route.[6] His broader barrier litigation helped secure the restoration of farmland to Palestinian villages.[2]

Sfard represented landowners from Silwad in a Yesh Din petition concerning Amona, an outpost established in 1995 on their property.[7] In December 2014, the High Court ordered its permanent structures demolished within two years, finding that they stood on private Palestinian land and could not be authorized retroactively.[7] The court also awarded the landowners their legal fees.[7] Sfard welcomed the decision as a landmark against the seizure of Palestinian property, while emphasizing that the owners still needed to regain access to their land.[7]

Petitions he brought concerning Migron, Amona, the Ulpana neighborhood in Beit El, and 17 structures at Derekh Ha’avot in Gush Etzion were followed by evacuations.[3] Sfard regarded these cases as important not only for their immediate results but also for keeping settlement policy on the public agenda and contributing to political processes.[3]

In November 2014, Sfard was among the lawyers filing a general petition for eight human-rights organizations against the demolition of homes belonging to people suspected of terrorism.[8] The petitioners argued that the policy violated international humanitarian law, international human-rights law, and Israeli administrative and constitutional law, and could expose individuals to war-crime liability.[8] A later account described his representation of ten organizations challenging the practice as unlawful collective punishment; the High Court rejected the general petition, although justices expressed doubts about the practice’s legality in other cases.[3]

Sfard’s litigation also addressed white phosphorus following its use by the Israeli military during Operation Cast Lead.[3] During the proceedings, the military informed the court that its orders had changed to prohibit use in populated areas, subject to two undisclosed exceptions.[3] Sfard said in 2018 that the military had since refrained from using it in populated areas.[3] His other work included a petition against targeted-assassination policy and land claims by Bedouin residents of al-Araqib.[3][9]

In May 2024, a petition brought by Peace Now through Sfard resulted in a High Court order requiring police to investigate illegal construction at the Yovel outpost in Eli.[10] Initially seeking to halt construction and prevent occupancy, the petition focused from 2019 on a criminal investigation after the state said it would establish a dedicated enforcement unit; the state later said the unit would not be established.[10] Justices Daphne Barak-Erez and Ruth Ronen supported ordering an investigation, while Justice Yael Vilner dissented.[10] Sfard welcomed the ruling, characterizing illegal construction in outposts and settlements as “organized crime on a massive scale” and calling on enforcement authorities to perform their duties.[10]

Sfard worked with Al-Haq on a Canadian lawsuit seeking a judicial declaration concerning Israeli conduct and the security barrier; the case was dismissed with partial costs in September 2009.[5] In February 2013, he represented complainants before the UN Human Rights Committee who alleged that Canada had violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights when its courts found that they lacked jurisdiction over the underlying case.[5]

He served as an expert for the Palestine Liberation Organization in Saperstein v. Palestinian Authority in 2010 and testified as an expert witness for the PLO in Sokolow v. Palestinian Liberation Organization in 2015.[5] The latter case involved damages sought by victims of attacks attributed to the PLO between 2001 and 2004.[5] On May 6, 2016, acting as Yesh Din’s legal adviser, he presented the organization’s data on law enforcement concerning ideologically motivated crimes to the UN Security Council.[5]

In December 2021, Sfard participated in a conference on human-rights defenders in the occupied Palestinian territory held by the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.[5] He described the designation of an organization as terrorist under Israeli and West Bank military law as “the NGO equivalent of the death penalty.”[5] During a U.S. Senate hearing on April 19, 2023, Senator Chris Van Hollen quoted Sfard’s warning that a proposed tax on foreign-government contributions to Israeli NGOs would be “a fatal blow to the human rights community in Israel.”[11]

Sfard co-authored The Wall of Folly with Shaul Arieli, published by Aliyat Hagag and Yediot Books in 2008.[12] He also co-authored a biography of convicted spy Markus Klingberg.[3] With Emily Schaeffer, he wrote the European Union-funded 2011 report No Home, No Homeland for the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.[5] His article “The Legal Tsunami Is on Its Way” appeared in Haaretz on April 29, 2011.[13]

His 2018 book, The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine, and the Legal Battle for Human Rights, drew on his legal practice and examined occupation and legal activism; it was published by Keter.[1][3] A 2025 interview identified Occupation From Within: A Journey to the Roots of the Israeli Constitutional Coup as his latest book.[1] In that interview, he described Israel’s judicial system as both “magnificent” and as possessing “a dark side.”[1]

Sfard’s legal work has produced changes to barrier routes, the restoration of land to Palestinian villages, and evacuations of construction on privately owned Palestinian land.[2][3] His own account of these achievements emphasizes their political and public significance as well as the remedies obtained for individual clients.[3]

He has also reflected on the limitations of human-rights litigation: in a 2013 interview, he observed that securing remedies such as restored land for Palestinian clients could simultaneously provide favorable public relations for the Israeli military.[9] In 2025, he attributed his motivation to “my moral Jewish upbringing” and to the Palestinians and Israeli activists who continued to rely on him as clients.[1]

In a June 2020 study for Yesh Din, Sfard argued that Israel was committing the crime of apartheid in the West Bank, regardless of formal annexation.[14] He said he had rejected that assessment roughly two decades earlier but had concluded by around 2016 that Israel intended to perpetuate the situation.[14] He limited this assessment to the West Bank rather than extending it to sovereign Israel.[14]

In a 2021 interview, Sfard said Israeli policy did not meet the legal threshold for genocide, explaining that he had not seen evidence of the requisite intent to destroy a group among Israeli officials and decision-makers.[15] He also said such accusations “cheapen” the concept of genocide.[16] These assessments, like the claims of unlawful collective punishment advanced in his home-demolition litigation, represent legal positions rather than judicial findings establishing those characterizations.[8][15]

Sfard’s representation of Palestinian claimants has also involved disputed accounts and opposing ownership claims.[17][18] While representing the family of Abir Aramin after her injury and subsequent death, he said he gave police a rubber-coated steel bullet that witnesses reported finding at the scene; accounts of what caused her injury differed.[17] In the Amona case, the Yesha Council disputed the petitioners’ ownership claims and condemned the evacuation ruling.[18]