Israel on Trial

A graduate of Columbia University and Yale Law School, Roy K. Altman served as a decorated federal prosecutor, twice earning the Department of Justice’s highest honor (the Director’s Award for Superior Performance) and named Federal Prosecutor of the Year in 2013. In 2019 he became the youngest federal district court judge in the country, and the youngest ever appointed in the Southern District of Florida. Judge Altman is also an award-winning writer and sought-after public speaker on the topics of law, public service, Israel, and antisemitism.

The moral inversion we’re experiencing in the West today finds its roots in six extremely compelling—almost intoxicating—claims about the State of Israel.

October 7 was a turning point for Judge Altman. Watching Jews being framed as oppressors and violators of human rights, he sought to understand the cause of this moral inversion. After delivering hundreds of speeches about Israel in churches, synagogues, community centers, colleges, and law schools (and having thousands of conversations), Judge Altman arrived at a conclusion: “The moral inversion we’re experiencing in the West today finds its roots in six extremely compelling—almost intoxicating—claims about the State of Israel.”

Judge Roy K. Altman

Judge Altman set out to scrutinize each of these six claims as he would in a court of law, “…deploying the legal methodology judges, juries, and lawyers have used for centuries in courtrooms across this country.” He explains, “This methodology—and the set of rules on which it’s based—doesn’t bend to fashion. In my courtroom, accusations don’t become true simply because they’re asserted loudly or because they’re popular. We test them. We define our terms. We show our work.”

 

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The result is Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law. An instant New York Times bestseller, the book contains extensively-backed conclusions that are indisputable to anyone who values facts, legal definitions, and objective evidence over rhetoric and catchy slogans. And with a comprehensive list of endnotes representing more than a quarter of the book, Judge Altman did, in fact, show his work.

Among widespread praise for the book, John Spencer (Chair of Urban Warfare Studies, Modern War Institute at West Point) says: “Roy Altman has done something rare and urgently needed. He applies the discipline of evidence, methodology, and truth-seeking that governs a courtroom to the most misunderstood conflict in the world. Israel on Trial cuts through slogans, propaganda, and moral inversion with the clarity of a legal mind and the precision of a fact finder.”

If you’re looking for a clear and unbiased assessment of the facts regarding this conflict and the history that precedes it, Israel on Trial is your definitive guide.

The claims examined in Israel on Trial are summarized below.

Claim 1: “Jews are colonizers in the Land of Israel”

• This assertion is not new. “But this claim fundamentally inverts the concept of colonization and ignores the historical evidence—casting the Jewish people, who have ancient and continuous ties to the land, as colonists while attributing indigenous status to Muslim Arab populations whose presence stems only from later conquests of the region.”
• Three types of evidence are evaluated extensively: ancient artifacts, genetic studies, and written accounts—all of which corroborate and support the legitimate historical connection Jews have to the Land of Israel (thousands of years before Islam even existed).
• Judge Altman explores consistent archaeological evidence referencing the Kingdom of Israel originating from every country on Israel’s geographical borders. Among many findings, the earliest archaeological record comes from a large granite tablet constructed in Egypt in 1205 BC—the Merneptah Stele. “In other words, Israel was a kingdom in the geographical location of the modern State of Israel more than 1,800 years before Islam arrived in the Middle East. There’s no other example anywhere in the world of a ‘colonialist’ government whose roots in the ‘colonized’ land precede the supposedly ‘indigenous’ population’s presence by thousands of years.”
• Genetic studies yield the same conclusion. “These repeated studies by different sets of scientists across many decades (analyzing dozens of genetic markers) have uniformly determined that all the major Jewish populations in the world—including the Ashkenazim of Europe, the Sephardim of Spain and North Africa, and the Mizrahim of the Middle East—share a common and unique ancestry that spread from the Levant more than two thousand years ago.”
• Written accounts corroborate the same story. Much of the evidence even originates from Israel’s enemies, a trait that further solidifies its reliability in a court of law. “The Quran itself makes clear that Allah promised Israel to the Jewish people….”
• “In the end, if you go back 3,200 years to Merneptah’s Stele and look at all the different peoples who existed at that time, there is only one people who still speaks the same language, who still practices the same religion, who still lives (and governs) in the same land as it did 3,200 years ago—and those are the Jews who live and govern in Israel today.”
• As is done with each claim, the terms are defined: colonialism must include the element of foreignness of the colonizing population. “The conclusion this evidence compels is unavoidable: The Jewish people cannot be ‘colonizers’ in the Land of Israel because they are the indigenous people of that land.”

Claim 2: “Israel’s founding was illegitimate and aberrational”

• “…Israel is older than two-thirds (134 of the 193) of the world’s countries. Even so, Israel is the only country whose existence is constantly being questioned and debated.”
• Israel meets all four Montevideo factors set by international law for the creation of new states. Israel’s founding is further supported by three additional factors, using the legitimacy of the United States as a baseline test case.
• “Israel is called illegitimate even though it meets (and has met since its founding) all the factors international law sets out for the creation of legitimate nation-states, while the new ‘State of Palestine’ is recognized as legitimate even though it fails many of these same factors.”

 

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Claim 3: “Israel has prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state”

• Arab rejection of a two-state solution is detailed on six historical occasions: 1937, 1947-48, post-1967, 1993-95, 2000, and 2008.
• “On six prior occasions…Israel offered (or accepted) the creation of a second Palestinian state—in additional to the one the Palestinians had received in what is now Jordan—only to have each of those attempts thwarted, not by Jews or the United States or Europe, but by the Palestinians’ own demand for an Arab state that stretches ‘from the river to the sea.’”

Claim 4: “Israel illegally occupied Gaza and turned it into an open-air prison and concentration camp”

• Judge Altman provides a thorough recap describing how Israel came to occupy Gaza from 1967-2005, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza in 2005 (in hopes that Gaza’s sovereignty would yield a flourishing state and peace with Israel).
• Hamas (a terrorist group intent on eradicating Israel) was elected in 2006. “The massacre of Israelis on October 7—and the devastation of Gaza that followed—have made clear that this exercise in Palestinian self-government hasn’t redounded to anyone’s benefit.”
• Judge Altman defines the terms, describes the realities on the ground, and concludes pre-October 7 Gaza cannot, in any way, be described as an open-air prison or concentration camp.
• “…the concentration camp myth isn’t just wrong—it’s also malicious. It doesn’t simply accuse the Jews of any-old crime and call it a day. It takes the worst crime that has ever been perpetrated in the history of humanity (the Holocaust)—a crime perpetrated specifically against Jews—and cheapens it to the point of insignificance by analogizing it not just to a crime that didn’t happen but to a crime the Jews themselves are now accused of perpetrating. The consequences of this mirroring of Jewish suffering cannot be overstated.”

 

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Claim 5: “Israel is an apartheid and white-supremacist state”

• “Apartheid” is defined and it’s concluded, yet again, that this term cannot be applied to Israel. “Israel is a country of some ten million people, more than 21 percent of whom are Arab Israelis—Muslims, Christian, and Druze—with full political, civil, and commercial rights.”
• The myth of white supremacy doesn’t apply either. Ashkenazic Jews (with fair skin) “…represent less than 45 percent of Israel’s Jewish population. The rest (some 55 percent of Israel’s Jews) are non-white—a combination of North African and Middle Eastern Mizrahi Jews, Sephardic Jews, and black Ethiopian Jews.”
• In Nazi Germany, Jews were not white enough, and now Jews are cast as white supremacists. Jew hatred adapts to whatever traits society deems as negative.

Claim 6: “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza”

• The four characteristics seen in real-world examples of genocide are entirely inconsistent with Israel’s actions in Gaza. Israel goes to great lengths to protect Palestinian civilians (even when it means endangering the lives of IDF soldiers to do so).
• Though not required, Israel coordinated the distribution of unparalleled amounts of aid to Palestinians in Gaza. “…Genocidal regimes don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars creating food programs to distribute sustenance to the civilian population they’re trying to eradicate.”
• Israel’s militant-to-civilian kill ratio was unprecedented, improving upon the US’s previously set ratio by more than 50 percent. “As Major Spencer has said, echoing the detailed findings of the HLMG report, Israel set a standard for both effectiveness and civilian protection in war that no other army has ever met—or may ever meet again.”
• Genocide requires intent. If Israel was truly intent on exterminating the Palestinian people in Gaza, it could have done so in a single day. This would have saved billions of dollars and the lives of hundreds of IDF soldiers.
• In a 2024 report, Amnesty International changed the definition of the word in order to accuse Israel of committing genocide.

Bonus 7th claim addressed in the conclusion: “anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism”

• All of the claims against Israel lead to differential treatment of Jews (from a legal perspective: discrimination).
• “The anti-Zionists don’t confine themselves to arguing about the propriety of this or that Israeli policy. They, instead, go much further and insist that Jews don’t have the same right—as other nations do—to self-determination in their national homeland.”
• As we’ve seen with other claims, the definition of “Zionism” has been altered in order to morph it into something negative. “Zionism stands only for the unfortunately controversial proposition that Jews are equal to everyone else.”

 

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Leah Grossman: Chapter one is the longest chapter by a huge margin—you present an extensive amount of evidence supporting the fact that Jews are indigenous to Israel. Why do you think the colonizer label gets so much traction when the evidence clearly refutes the claim?

Roy K. Altman: Because it’s the foundation for all the other claims against Israel. I’ll give you one example. How do you get millions of people in Western democracies to believe that the massacres of October 7 were justified? The answer: You tell them the land was stolen. You see, in the law, we have an affirmative defense we sometimes call the “castle doctrine,” which basically says that a homeowner can use lethal force (even deadly force) against a person he finds in his home—no questions asked. This castle doctrine is rooted in the very idea of private property—the protection of which is at the heart of most Western societies. So, extrapolating from the logic of the castle doctrine, we can see why, if this is Israel’s home—if this is where its people belong—then it makes sense to say that Israel has a right to defend itself. And this, of course, is what so many western diplomats say when Israel is attacked.

On the other hand, if Israel has stolen this land—if this land actually belongs to the Arabs—then Israel would have no right to use any force (much less deadly force) to defend the land. To the contrary, under the castle doctrine, since this would be Arab land, then the Arabs would have the right—with no questions asked—to use deadly force to defend their home against the invading Jews. And that’s how you get tenured professors and students on university campuses to say (and to believe) that the massacres of October 7 were justified.

LG: Let’s talk about the idea of mirroring—how each claim Israel is accused of is actually something being done to Israel. How do we combat situations like this, when a claim (even though false) does immeasurable damage by not only creating a false sense of equivalency, but because of its likelihood to be believed simply because it’s the claim that’s asserted first?

RKA: We must call it out for what it is: an attempt to get the Western world to turn against the Jews. Think about the obscene distortion we see when podcasters claim that Israel (the victims of the Holocaust, the ultimate crime of crimes) is the new Nazi Germany. If anyone has ever allied with the Nazis, it’s the Palestinian Arabs. Recall that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the original leader of the Palestinian Arabs, sided with Hitler against America and asked him to invade the British colony of Palestine to massacre all of its Jews. Or think of the inversion at play when Arab states accuse Israel—a country with a Muslim Arab supreme court justice and ten Muslim Arab members of parliament, a country that built a Muslim prayer room in the brand-new National Library, a place where Arabs graduate from universities at rates that far outpace their percentage of the population as a whole—of apartheid.

As Phil Getz of the Maimonides Foundation has said: What do Birmingham, Alabama, Louisville, Kentucky, and the state of New Mexico have in common? Each has more Jews in it than there are in all 22 of the Arab states in the world combined. The notion of a Jewish supreme court justice in Ramallah or a Jewish doctor in Gaza or a Jewish member of parliament in Tehran is obviously inconceivable—because these are the true apartheid states in the region. But no one complains because no one really cares about apartheid; they’re simply obsessed with Jews and want to destroy the one Jewish State in the world.

 

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LG: Tell us about the trips you’ve been leading, bringing federal judges to Israel. Do the participants’ views on Israel typically change after visiting? What has been the general feedback on the experience?

RKA: The trips are powerfully transformative. These are federal judges from all over the country—most of them not Jewish—who have never been to Israel before. And every judge I’ve spoken to about the trips has felt that, in Israel, we see a people who are resilient in the face of great adversity, who are willing to fight and (in some cases) die for the Western civilization that’s been bequeathed to all of us, and who insist on doing all this with a love of country, an optimism for the future, and a degree of compassion and compliance with the law that’s frankly awe-inspiring.

And many of these judges have been so inspired by what they saw that they’ve gone back to their home states and given their own lectures about Israel—speaking to their own communities about what they saw and felt and heard while we were there.

LG: You’ve said in interviews that you wrote Israel on Trial not as a Jew, but as an American. Can you elaborate on why these are American issues, and why non-Jews should be paying attention?

RKA: America’s geostrategic enemies are trying to weaken America by peeling us away from our most important allies. Israel votes with America more than any other country in the world at the United Nations; it provides intelligence we simply don’t have (and can’t get) on many of our adversaries; it promotes our values in a region where democracy and an independent judiciary are as foreign as religious tolerance, freedom of expression, and the rule of law; and it battle-tests our most important military technologies and then returns them to us (for free) better adapted for the conflicts that are coming in the twenty-first century. Allies like this must be guarded and supported—not castigated and rejected. And if we become the kind of country that loses sight of this basic reality, then I’m concerned about the future prosperity of the West.

 

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As Judge Altman points out in the book, “…the virus of Jew hatred always finds its way—morphing and contorting itself to fill the dark, empty superstitions of a fragile, insecure society.” Recognizing the legal nature of the persistent claims against Israel, Judge Altman did what he does best: he defined the terms, considered the objective evidence, and examined the sources according to the legal standards he utilizes in the courtroom every single day.

Israel on Trial reveals definitive conclusions, and the verdict is indisputable: not guilty.

Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law is available now.

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