Countries exist, and whether they’re the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan or Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus or China, no one doubts their basic right to continue their existence—unless it is Israel. Roy Altman, a young federal judge in Miami, has been lecturing about Israel widely on campuses since October 7. Israel on Trial distills his rebuttals of the six claims he has most often encountered that aim to undermine and delegitimize the presently constituted Jewish state.
I’m pleased to say Judge Altman is a friend, and kindly praises my work in his book—but I will risk my other friendships by recommending this book as absolutely indispensable equipment for any college student in America today.
The first three claims challenge Israel’s creation or existence, claiming it is a “settler colonial project,” illegitimately founded, and displacing what should be a Palestinian state. The other three focus on Israel’s supposed conduct. Israel cruelly occupied Gaza before Oct. 7, 2023, one claim goes. This lets Hamas sympathizers, especially on campus, present that attack as more like a plucky prison break than an attempt to destroy Israel. Then there are the invocations of seldom-used international criminal law concepts of genocide and the even more obscure crime of apartheid.
Altman’s answers to these critiques draw broadly from law and history. He provides excellent distillations of the abundant archaeological evidence for Jews’ indigeneity in the Land of Israel. He also shows how this has not impeded their willingness to make repeated territorial concessions in the name of peace. Altman details six occasions on which the Jews agreed to the creation of a Palestinian state, only to have the Arabs reject it. His longest and most thorough chapter shows that “if anyone has colonized the Land of Israel, it has been [a] succession of Muslim armies.” This is particularly important to recount now, as arguments challenging the authenticity of Jewish historical claims have started to sprout up on the political right, transmogrified into crank theories about how today’s Jews are not the real Jews (a pet theme of Tucker Carlson’s).
Many have heard of Israeli “settlers” living in the supposedly Arab city of Hebron, but do not know about the Arab ban on Jewish entrance into the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron—800 years ago. They have heard of “Palestinian rights,” but not Napoleon’s proclamation recognizing Jews as the “rightful heirs of Palestine.” Altman’s quick tour through history is crucial for a generation that, at best, knows about the past from podcasts and social media.
One place Altman falters is in describing Gaza and the West Bank as having been occupied before Israeli troops left in 2005. He makes the remark in passing, as his discussion focuses on rebutting the unprecedent proposition that Israel has since then occupied Gaza without physically occupying it, a unique doctrine invented for Israel. But Israel’s presence before 2005 was not an occupation either, because these areas were both part of the League of Nations’’Mandate for Palestine, also known as the British Mandate, formed after the collapse of the previous sovereign, the Ottoman Empire. As the successor state to the Mandate, Israel inherited its borders under the international law doctrine of uti possidetis juris (Latin for “as you possess under law”)—the same rule that accounts for Jordan’s odd borders, the Kurds’ statelessness, and Syria’s boiling melting pot.
Altman analyzes the accusations with a legal methodology, closely examining the evidence presented for each—and marshaling the facts to the contrary. But unlike in a courtroom, Israel’s “acquittal” is not enough. The accusations are so sensational and passionately made that many neutral observers would conclude that even if they are off the mark, Israel must be guilty of some lesser included offense. Proof is not necessarily the point of these criticisms as much as creating a taint. Dreyfus’s acquittal surely did not convince his accusers that he was entirely honorable.
Altman points out that the Palestinians’ claims all mirror those of the Jews. The Jews’ indigeneity in the Land of Israel has served as a paradigm for a people connected to a particular land. The Palestinians present themselves as the genuine natives. The word “ghetto” was invented to describe the tiny, crowded areas in European cities where Jews were permitted to live—and, therefore, Gaza becomes the world’s largest open-air prison.
Israel achieved statehood in a manner that clearly satisfies all international criteria, and so the Palestinians pronounce a fake “State of Palestine” that is recognized by roughly as many countries as Israel. It even mirrors Israel’s use of the word “State” as part of its official name.
The second-most distinctive fact of modern Jewish history (apart from the reestablishment of a sovereign state)—and a grim monument in the history of the entire West—is the Holocaust. It was almost inevitable that the claim of genocide against the Palestinians would become a central accusation against the Jews, without any evidence of systematic and deliberate extermination of civilians. Israel’s purported genocide consists of not preventing all civilian casualties while fighting a lawful war of self-defense against an enemy that purposefully puts civilians in the line of fire, and inflates their casualty statistics if, due to Israel’s extraordinary precautions, not enough of them are killed.
World War II does provide an imperfect analogy to Israel’s conduct in the war, but it is via the conduct of the Allies, who fought Hitler even though doing so would necessarily cause significant German civilian casualties. Of course, Israel took precautions far beyond anything the Allies did or could, and the proportion of civilian casualties is incomparably lower. In the ultimate exercise of identity theft and narrative replacement, the Jews are falsely accused of genocide for not allowing their own genocide.
The predictive power of Altman’s mirroring thesis was proven shortly after his book was published. One of the more shocking things about October 7 was the use of mass sexual violence by Hamas. So it is entirely predictable that Hamas supporters are now trying to spread unsubstantiated and bizarre accusations of Israeli sexual assaults and rapes by trained dogs against Palestinian prisoners, and that New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof chose to publish these libels the day Israel was scheduled to publish a massive report on October 7 sexual violence.
But the accusations against Israel may have less to do with the West’s relationship with the Jews than with itself. The United States was, as Altman notes, founded by colonial settlers, and subsequently received massive numbers of migrants from non-indigenous European peoples. It expanded its borders through conquest and imperial machinations such as the Louisiana Purchase, and extinguished whatever political status the Indian tribes here had. If the Gaza war is genocide, then most of America’s conflicts from World War II to Iraq have been genocides as well.
By rights, a progressive should be boycotting the United States, known since Soviet times as the source of imperialism and fascism. Yet doing so would be mighty inconvenient, especially if you are enjoying living there.
The war in Iran has crystallized this point, as nearly all Democratic senators voted to cut off arms to the Jewish state, with many citing its role in the war. But Israel is fighting as a cobelligerent of the United States—by this logic, Congress should defund the U.S. military. But while Democratic congressmen may believe in multiculturalism, they surely do not want to learn Chinese, so cutting arms to America is not an option. Thus they are left with an ideology that leads them to feel guilt but not be able to stop from sinning. Perhaps for them opposition to Israel provides expiation for the sins of America and the West.
Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law
by Roy K. Altman
Advantage Books, 304 pp., $32
Eugene Kontorovich is a professor at George Mason University Scalia Law School and a senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom.
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