While it would seem that most any issue concerning Israel has some political angle to it, federal judge Roy Altman told JNS that his advocacy for the Jewish state comes down to getting the law right.
“I think in recent years, it’s true that judges have taken an active role in advocating for the rule of law, for example, against discrimination,” said Altman, who serves on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
He told JNS when it comes to speaking out on Israel, as he did at the recent Christians United for Israel Summit in National Harbor, Md., “I’m defending the rule of law. I’m also stating the facts and the law as they apply to a place that I think I know well.”
Israel is a place “where I think there’s a great deal of misinformation about what the history is, what the facts on the ground are, and how those facts apply to what I think are well-established legal rules,” he continued.
That’s what judges do every day, Altman said, “and I don’t think it’s political in any way.”
The Venezuelan-born Altman, who moved to the United States as a young child, experienced a meteoric rise to the federal bench, ascending to the position in 2019 at the age of 36, becoming the youngest federal district court judge in the country and the youngest federal judge ever appointed in the Southern District of Florida.
Altman, who spoke at the CUFI summit about “Why Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism,” has given talks nationwide about “the history of the Jewish people on the land and international law as it applies to Israel.”
He told JNS that he’s had thousands of conversations with people all over this country, noting that “most of the conversations that we see in the public debate about Israel revolve around, ‘Is there a genocide going on? Are there violations of the laws of war? Is there an occupation? Is it an apartheid state?’”
“They’re really just questions that are deeply rooted in law,” Altman said.
Over the last year and a half, Altman has brought three different groups of U.S. federal judges to Israel to “see and understand the facts on the ground, to have them learn about what the applicable legal regime is and to have them render an opinion about how those legal regimes apply to the facts as they’re adduced on the ground.”
Altman told JNS that he plans to bring another 25 American federal judges to Israel next year, adding that the World Jewish Congress has sponsored multiple delegations through its Judicial Educational Mission.
Those judge delegations, he said, are not limited to Israel and include visits to countries such as Argentina, the United Kingdom and destinations in Africa.
The trips are important, Altman told JNS, “because they espouse our western views about the rule of law, pluralism, and an independent judiciary to our allies and other countries in the world.”
“They’re important also because of what we learn and can apply in our own chambers and in our own courtrooms from other legal systems and interactions with other judges around the world. And we do that a lot with Israeli judges on our trips,” he said.
‘Exercise that tremendous power’
Asked by JNS to apply an example of something he learned in Israel to his judgeship, Altman cited several instances.
“Israelis are dealing very actively now with the problem of constitutional law that we’ve been dealing with and struggling with since our founding, the question of to what extent can unelected judges—in our case who are here for life and in Israel who are there until they’re 70 years old—can invalidate or strike down the will of the people,” Altman said.
On its face, the concept of the judiciary striking down the will of the elected executive and legislature “seems totally anti-democratic and counter-majoritarian, but nevertheless, in a democracy, or at least a republic that prides itself as being democratic, like the United States, we allow federal judges like myself to exercise that tremendous power.”
He points to the fight over related judicial reform in Israel that spilled out into the streets in massive protests before the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“That led, in some respects, to the dissolution of Israeli society, and maybe to a place that wasn’t focused entirely on what was going on beneath their noses. And that comparative constitutional analysis is a big part of our trips,” Altman said.
He also cited the adjudication of terrorism trials.
Following the attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent war on terror, “we had federal judges all across this country presiding over and adjudicating difficult and complicated motions that try to balance, on the one hand, national security and the interests of protecting people’s safety, and, on the other hand, the individual constitutional rights and the civil liberties of the people, and that is a very fine and difficult line to draw in each individual case,” he said.
Israel, Altman said, is forced into a similar situation in dealing with thousands of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists, albeit with a much smaller judiciary, and one that is not nearly as well-funded, all while needing to provide appropriate access to defense counsel and protect their rights.
“They’ve got to give their trials public access so that the people can see how justice is being done in their communities,” Altman told JNS. “At the same time, they need to protect people from terrorist acts, and they draw those fine lines between protecting national security and securing the individual rights of their citizens on a massive scale, something we in the United States have never done.”
‘Just following the law’
Altman said the missions he led have also spent time at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum, where the head archivist brought the judges to a room that stores all the documentation about the judges’ trials and the Nuremberg trials, specifically dealing with the lawyers and judges.
The trials, Altman said, were “fascinating” because the German judges “had a great defense.”
The essence of that defense was “you can’t punish me. You can’t execute me because I was just following the law. I’m just a judge who applies the law. The law is good, the law is bad. That’s for the legislature. That’s not for me.”
The situation is similar in the United States, Israel and other Western democracies, Altman told JNS, where judges are supposed to “apply the law fairly, impartially, and not to make the law.
“There’s a great deal of controversy about the extent to which judges in America would apply terrible laws if we had to,” he said.
In the Nuremberg Trials, the prosecution was able to convict judges by proving they were “an essential cog in Hitler’s war machine,” because “Hitler understood two things about the German people,” Altman said. “One, that there would be elections again, and just as easily as he could be brought in, he could be thrown out. And two, that inasmuch as the German people hated the Jews, they hated the idea of rule violators.”
That, Altman said, forced Hitler to be “very careful and make sure that it was clear to the people that everything that he was doing was within the bounds of the law. And, in order to do that, he had to appoint and he had to arrogate to himself the power of the judiciary and appoint judges who would distort and contort the law, not apply the law fairly, to suit his genocidal ends.”
That lesson, Altman said, is especially important for American judges to “be extremely strong when we apply the law, to understand what our role in a democratic society is and not to bend it for the powers of the government, not to bend it for the powers of a particularly powerful corporation, to always interpose ourselves between the powers of our government and the will of the people who ultimately we represent.”
