Brooke Goldstein

Brooke Goldstein is the founder and executive director of The Lawfare Project, a New York-based legal advocacy organization she established in 2010 that pioneered the concept of "lawfare" — the strategic use of legal systems and international law mechanisms against Western democracies and their allies, particularly Israel — as both a threat framework and a counter-strategy, and that provides pro bono legal representation to Jewish individuals, communities, and organizations facing antisemitism-based discrimination, harassment, and lawsuits. Born and raised in Montreal, Canada, to a Jewish family, Goldstein earned her law degree and built her legal career before founding the Lawfare Project as a direct response to what she identified as the systematic exploitation of Western legal systems — particularly in European courts and UN institutions — to delegitimize Israel and to intimidate pro-Israel advocates through litigation designed to silence rather than to win.

Goldstein's analytical contribution to pro-Israel advocacy has been to reframe the international legal campaign against Israel not as a good-faith human rights effort gone wrong but as a deliberate strategy — funded, coordinated, and executed through NGOs, UN mechanisms, and European courts — to use legal process itself as a weapon of delegitimization. The Lawfare Project has produced research on the funders of anti-Israel NGOs, the coordination between Palestinian legal organizations and European governments, and the specific mechanisms through which groups like al-Haq and BADIL have used international courts and UN special procedures to advance claims that function as legal delegitimization rather than genuine rights advocacy. This framework — "lawfare as warfare" — has been adopted by think tanks, congressional staff, and Israeli legal experts who needed a conceptual vocabulary for what they were observing in international institutions.

The Lawfare Project has also litigated directly on behalf of Jewish clients: representing students who faced antisemitic harassment on campuses, providing legal defense to pro-Israel speakers threatened with defamation suits, and challenging government-funded programs that they argued discriminated against Jewish students or promoted antisemitism. Goldstein has testified before Congress, appeared in media outlets in the U.S. and Canada, and built a network of pro bono attorneys willing to take cases that establish precedents for Jewish civil rights enforcement. She has also directed and produced the film "The Children of Jihad," examining child soldiers in Palestinian militant organizations, which won the American Jewish Film Festival award. At Rank 96, Goldstein is the legal entrepreneur who identified lawfare as a strategic threat before it became widely understood, built the institutional response, and has spent over a decade fighting it in courtrooms and before legislative committees on both sides of the Atlantic.