Natasha Hausdorff

Natasha Hausdorff (born October 1989) is a British barrister, international law specialist, and pro bono legal director of the advocacy group, UK Lawyers for Israel.

She is a barrister with 6 Pump Court Chambers in London. A graduate of Oxford University and Tel Aviv University, Hausdorff practised with the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and clerked for the chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court. She was a former fellow at Columbia Law School in the National Security Law Program.

Ancestry and education

Hausdorff grew up in Kensington and Chelsea in London, England. She attended the Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, West London. She is fluent in German.

Her Israeli father was born in Tel Aviv, Her paternal ancestor Azriel Zelig Hausdorf, a Zionist philanthropist, was born in Myslovitz, Poland, and emigrated to Jerusalem, by way of London, in 1847. He was responsible for philanthropic building projects in the Old City of Jerusalem, including a shelter and hospitality project and the construction of a hospital. As a leading member of Jerusalem's Jewish community in 1866 he was authorised by the Prussian consul to act as a defence attorney for Jews in legal proceedings.

Hausdorff has law degrees from Oxford University (Lincoln College, in 2012) and from Tel Aviv University, from which she graduated with an LL.M. magna cum laude in international public law and the law of armed conflict in 2016.

Career Hausdorff specialises in commercial, regulatory and international law, and has been a barrister with 6 Pump Court Chambers in London since 2016. Before coming to the Bar, Hausdorff qualified as a solicitor in 2015, with the United States multinational commercial law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, with whom she practised in London and Brussels from 2013 to 2015.

Hausdorff's practice includes commercial litigation, arbitration, regulatory matters, and public international law. She represents domestic and international clients, including private companies and government departments, both as sole counsel and junior to leading counsel. Hausdorff has taken part in Intelligence Squared live debates, and has spoken at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, and Durham University. Sky News, Talk TV, Fox News, CNN, and GB News. Czech, and UK parliaments. In turn, she has also been quoted by British lawmakers. On 24 April 2024, she gave evidence to the Business and Trade Committee of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom on the "relevant legal, political and military issues impacting UK arms exports to Israel".

Through the UKLFI, Hausdorff has made multiple submissions to international courts and tribunals. In 2024, Hausdorff participated in a panel at the 79th United Nations General Assembly High-Level Week, focusing on proportionality in armed conflict.

Debating At university, Hausdorff was active in debate. In June 2024, she partnered with Douglas Murray at the Munk Debate in Toronto, debating against Mehdi Hasan and Gideon Levy, and she and Murray convinced two-thirds of the audience that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are the same; 61% of the audience already believed this before the debate.

In November 2024, she participated in a debate at Oxford University. The event caused much controversy, with several Oxford academics writing to "unequivocally condemn the incendiary remarks made by some speakers in support of Hamas and terrorist violence". The Oxford Union ended up voting for the proposition that "Israel is an apartheid state that is committing genocide" with 278 votes for and 59 votes against.

Recognition In October 2024, The Jerusalem Post named Hausdorff the #2 young "2024 ViZionary," that being the #2 most influential young Zionist, and a "prominent advocate for Israel's legal rights on the global stage".

Views "Lawfare" Hausdorff has stated that because Israel's opponents had concluded that warfare and terror attacks had not achieved their goal of eliminating the state, they had taken a different approach to attack Israel in the international legal arena. She said that even though these cases may not ultimately be successful, those bringing the false charges do so for the public relations agenda they pursue, as they generate negative media attention about Israel. She said that the "provisional measures" that the court said Israel was obligated to undertake were those that Israel was clear it was already in compliance with. Hausdorff also addressed the quotes that South Africa had advanced as part of its case alleging "incitement to genocide comments", which she says had been misrepresented and manipulated, including by South Africa allegedly having left out context which supposedly demonstrated the quotations referred to Hamas.

United Nations Human Rights Council Hausdorff has said that the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has a Standing Agenda Item 7 covering "Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories", and has alleged that no other country in the world is subjected by the UNHRC to a stand-alone focus on the UNHRC permanent agenda.

Gaza Health Ministry casualty figures Hausdorff has been skeptical of the casualty figures coming from the Gaza Ministry of Health, claiming that inflated casualty numbers from the initial reports of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion were never reduced in the official tally. The Health Ministry additionally does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, she argues, as a way to obfuscate high combatant death counts.