Karen Glaser
The JC, Mar. 2, 2023
“From the get-go I felt it was my duty to explain the context and provide the content they didn’t have.”
Natasha Hausdorff’s debut radio broadcast was during the Israel-Gaza conflict in 2014.
She’d been invited onto Nick Ferrari’s breakfast show on LBC to debate Israel’s military operation codenamed Protective Edge, and she left the London studio determined to go on air again.
“It was a turning point. I was only 24 and a trainee solicitor, but I was able to tell Nick things about the anti-Israel propaganda machine that he had clearly never heard before. It felt good. Right.”
This Sunday, the 33-year-old barrister and legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel will be making the country’s case again at Jewish Book Week.
Hausdorff, who clerked for the late President of the Israeli Supreme Court, Chief Justice Miriam Naor, is taking part in a roundtable discussion entitled, “Israel: A Fragile Democracy?” with JC columnist Jonathan Freedland, fellow lawyer Anthony Julius and historian Sir Simon Schama.
The exact remit of their conversation is still to be determined, she says, but its general departure point is the new Israeli government’s planned changes to the judicial system: a proposal Supreme Court president Esther Hayut has described as “a plan to crush the justice system”, that opposition leader Yair Lapid has said is a “struggle for the soul of the country” — and which saw 80,000 Israelis take to the streets in protest earlier this year.
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