Israel has been put on trial every day throughout its history. But according to JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, the case against it, including blood libels about its committing “genocide” or being an “apartheid state,” are nothing but myths and lies that can be systematically exposed and refuted by simple research and legal logic. He’s joined on this week’s episode of “Think Twice” by federal judge Roy Altman, who has written a book that does exactly that.
Altman, who serves on the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, is the author of the new book Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence and the Law. In it he goes about the task of exploring each of six major accusations against the Jewish state: that Jews are colonists in the land of Israel; that Israel’s founding was illegitimate or aberrational; that Israel has prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state; that Israel was occupying Gaza (and had turned the Strip into an open-air prison or a concentration camp) before Oct. 7, 2023; that Israel is an apartheid or white-supremacist state; and that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. All are false.
The judge says he was motivated to write the book not so much because of the atrocities committed on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas and other Palestinians when they attacked southern Israel. Rather, it was because of the way American institutions turned their backs on Israel and the Jews in the wake of the massacre.
But he believes that the truth about the accusations against Israel can help turn public opinion around. Altman says he estimates that about 10% of Americans believe the lies about Israel, while another 30% are both patriotic and understand that Jews are an integral part of what has made America flourish and therefore don’t believe the blood libels. The rest, he says, are persuadable if they are given the truth.
His book treats the various false assertions about Israel as if the Jewish state were being put on trial. And he then goes about examining each of them as if they were legal charges that rise or fall based on objective evidence, at the end of which he renders a verdict, as if it were a court case, and declares Israel innocent on all charges.
Altman believes that at the heart of the case against Israel is the fact that anti-Zionism is indistinguishable from antisemitism. And the effort to delegitimize Israel and treat Palestinian-Arab claims as credible is an inversion of the truth.
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