On too many college campuses, the verdict on Israel still precedes the trial.
Students encounter declarations that Israel is a colonial project, practices apartheid and is committing genocide at lectures, protests and on social media feeds. These words carry enormous moral weight, but they also have clear legal definitions. Despite this fact, such claims are often repeated before anyone asks the serious questions: What does the term mean? What facts would establish it? Which sources support it? What evidence points the other way?
Universities cannot claim to teach critical thinking while treating accusations against Israel as exempt from proof. As faculty finalize their spring syllabi, they should consider assigning Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence and the Law by Judge Roy K. Altman.
Altman, a federal district judge in the Southern District of Florida, takes the most common accusations against Israel and treats each as an accusation that must be proved. He defines the claim and identifies the facts necessary to support it. He then examines sources, corroboration, contrary evidence and how they fit the governing standard.
Because colonialism is chiefly a historical claim, he tests it against historical records, archaeology and genetic evidence. Because apartheid and genocide are legal claims, he examines the elements international law requires. Only then does he reach a conclusion.
Altman concludes that the charges do not survive examination. I agree. But the book’s value in the classroom does not depend on students agreeing with him. It may not help readers unwilling to test their thinking, and many of Israel’s defenders may already know its arguments. So, the most important audience is the students in between; those who have heard the accusations but have never been shown how to test them.
This does not involve deference to a judge but accountability to evidence. Students should inspect Altman’s sources, challenge his reasoning and seek out the strongest arguments on the other side. If he misstates the evidence, they should find the error. If his critics can rebut him, they should do so source by source and case by case. Discomfort with a book is not a rebuttal.
The distinction between accusation and proof is especially important in law. In my “Law and the Holocaust” course, students trace what happened when false accounts of a people moved from social rumor to official institutions. Some stereotypes were codified directly. Others generated investigations, prosecutions, judgments and official records. Either way, the legal system gave the accusation something the accusation lacked on its own: institutional authority, which could then be mistaken for proof.
Today the vocabulary of law can do similar work. Students hear that there is a “genocide case” against Israel and assume genocide has been judicially established. It has not. When the International Court of Justice issued provisional measures in January 2024, it found that the rights Palestinians asserted under the Genocide Convention were plausible, not that genocide was plausibly occurring.
The court’s president at the time, Joan Donoghue, later said publicly that this was a common misreading. Yet “plausibly genocidal” became the shorthand. Students likewise hear Israel called an “apartheid state” in reports and speeches and mistake the accumulation of assertions for a completed legal analysis. Altman’s method returns the reader to the point where analysis must begin.
That is why Altman’s book belongs in law schools. An international law course can set the political use of “apartheid” and “genocide” beside the elements of the legal claims. An evidence course can test source reliability, corroboration and inference.
Altman’s book should be taught as a demanding legal challenge, not an answer key. If students reject his conclusions, they should be able to identify precisely which definition, source or inference fails. A lawyer cannot announce, “This is genocide,” and treat the announcement as the analysis.
Undergraduates would benefit from the book in courses on Middle Eastern history, human rights and colonialism and in first-year seminars on media literacy.
Colleges often invoke critical thinking in the abstract. The debate over Israel is a concrete test.
Can students hear a grave accusation from peers, see it amplified online, or hear it from a professor and still ask for the evidence? Can they scrutinize a position they already favor? That standard applies to arguments defending Israel, too.
This is a familiar ideal in Jewish learning. In the beit midrash, students study in pairs, and the best chevruta partner is the one who pushes back hardest. The selection from the Mishnah Pirkei Avot (“Ethics of the Fathers”) teaches that a machloket l’shem shamayim, a dispute for the sake of heaven, is the argument that endures. Jewish tradition has never shied away from argument. It has only insisted that the argument be honest, and that both sides answer to the text.
Our legal system rests on a similar insight: Truth is likely to emerge when the strongest case on each side is tested against the other. Parents, alumni, trustees and faculty can ask universities to bring that ethic to the debate over Israel: Assign the evidence, invite the rebuttals and let students weigh them.
Students may finish the book persuaded, unconvinced or somewhere in between. They should not finish where too many began: with a verdict they never tested. That is what an education in critical thinking requires. For law students, learning to reason like a lawyer requires the courage to ask, even when the whole room seems certain: “But is it true?”
