Israel on Trial

My review of "Israel on Trial:  Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law" 

by Roy K Altman

Published in the Jerusalem Post Weekend Magazine, 7 August 2026

   Roy K. Altman, a graduate of Columbia University, served as a federal prosecutor for the US Court of Appeals before being appointed a US District Judge for the Southern District of Florida – at the time the youngest district judge ever so appointed.

In his new book, Israel on Trial, he takes the six accusations most widely levied against Israel and subjects them to what he calls “the legal methodology judges, juries and lawyers have used for centuries.”  He sets out the evidence for and against each of the crimes that Israel is charged with, and scrutinizes it forensically, using the time-honored rules of evidence that he applies consistently in his own courtroom.

The six allegations that he subjects to this scrupulous analysis are first that Jews are colonists in the Land of Israel; then that the founding of the State of Israel was illegitimate; that Israel has prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state;  that Israel was occupying Gaza before October 7, 2023 and had turned it into an “open-air prison”; that Israel is an apartheid state; and that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.

Using factual, historical, archeological, even the latest genealogical evidence, he demonstrates the shaky, unreliable, often illogical nature of the charges that have become routine among those who reject Israel’s right to exist. 

Why is Altman’s book so important, indeed vital?  After all, his conclusions, solidly based though they are, will certainly not convince committed anti-Zionists, while pro-Israel advocates will already be familiar with them.

No, it is the ordinary every-day Jew faced with irrational antisemitic hatred – the person in the workplace, shopping center or social setting, the young person in the classroom or campus – that needs, and will surely welcome, Israel on Trial.   In these pages Altman provides a convincing fact-based rebuttal to the anti-Israel tropes that are so casually tossed around these days.

There are also vast numbers of largely uncommitted people across the globe who are subject to a constant flood of false narratives about Israel, Zionism and the Jewish people.  If only some could be enticed to open the pages of Israel on Trial, they would discover that there is an antidote for the poison they are perpetually fed.

To the charge that Jews are colonists, he begins with the accepted definition of “colonist” – “an outsider with no historical, linguistic, cultural or religious connection to the land he is conquering.”   Then he demonstrates that “the Jews were living in (and often governing) the Land of Israel thousands of years before Islam existed, hundreds of years before the Roman emperor Hadrian invented the word Palaestina…and long before Arab Muslims first invaded the land in AD 636.”

As for Israel’s legitimacy, Altman rebuts the assertion that the “biblical promise is Israel’s only claim to legitimacy”.  He asserts that the criteria set out in the 1933 Montevideo treaty are universally accepted as international law on the subject of legitimate statehood.  A nascent state has to fulfil four requirements:  have a permanent population, have a defined territory, be governed by a single effective government, and have the capacity to conduct foreign relations.

Altman points out that when Israel declared independence in May 1948, it met all four criteria.

As to the claim that Israel has prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state, Altman cites the six occasions that Israel (or the international community with Israeli acquiescence), “has offered the Arabs a Palestinian state – and, each time, the Arabs have rejected that offer.”

Each of those attempts, says Altman, was thwarted “by the Palestinians’ own demand for an Arab state that stretches ‘from the river to the sea’.”  

To the charge that Israel was occupying Gaza on October 7, 2023 and had turned it into an “open-air prison” or a concentration camp, Altman sets out the irrefutable historic facts, linked to the commonly understood meaning of both “prison” and “concentration camp, which prove the reverse. 

His Chapter 5 is concerned with the widely-voiced charge that Israel is an apartheid state. In addition to setting out the irrefutable facts concerning the equal status and rights of the 20% of Israel’s Arab citizens, Altman lays bare a inherent illogicality in the extreme anti-Israel position. 

“True,” he writes, “the Palestinians who live in Gaza and in parts of Judea and Samaria enjoy none of these rights in Israel. But that’s because they don’t live in Israel, don’t want to live in Israel, and thus aren’t Israeli citizens at all.” 

More than 140 countries around the world, he notes, as well as many of the organizations and individuals asserting the apartheid claim recognize the State of Palestine.

 “Israel cannot be practicing apartheid by refusing to afford citizenship rights to the citizens of another country,” writes Altman,”…but that’s exactly what Amnesty International, for instance, is suggesting when, on the one hand, it recognizes the existence of a “State of Palestine,” while on the other, it claims that Israel is an apartheid state for refusing to afford full citizenship rights to the citizens of that Palestinian state.”

And so Altman reaches the assertion repeated ad nauseam – that Israel committed, and continues to commit, genocide against the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza.  It is an accusation, as Altman demonstrates, that relies on re-interpreting the meaning of the word “genocide”.  It is used by many as a measure of their antipathy to the loss of civilian life during Israel’s fight against Hamas.  But the term “genocide” has a very specific meaning.

Altman makes it abundantly clear that he regards the loss of a single civilian life in war as a tragedy.  However, “the question in a genocide case isn’t whether innocent civilians have died in Gaza. They unquestionably have—just as they have in every war that’s ever been fought.”

The essence of the crime of genocide is the specific “intent to destroy” the victim group’s existence. To be guilty of genocide, the State of Israel must have intended to wipe out the population of Gaza.  Altman demonstrates, with irrefutable facts and figures, that Israel did not have, and never has had, any such intention.

In Israel on Trial Altman provides all who love Israel with sound evidence-based arguments to counter the disinformation that clogs the social media platforms and so often the official news media as well. It is a book entirely in tune with the times, and is highly recommended.