'Israel on Trial': US Judge Roy K. Altman takes on accusations against the Jewish state - review

Using factual, historical, archeological, and 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.

In these pages, Altman provides a convincing fact-based rebuttal to the anti-Israel tropes that are so casually tossed around these days.

To the charge that Jews are colonists, he began with the accepted definition of “colonist” – “an outsider with no historical, linguistic, cultural, or religious connection to the land he is conquering.”

Then he demonstrated 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 rebutted the assertion that the “biblical promise is Israel’s only claim to legitimacy.” He asserted 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 fulfill 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 pointed 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 cited 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, said 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 set out the irrefutable historic facts, linked to the commonly understood meaning of both “prison” and “concentration camp,” which prove the reverse.

Chapter five 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 laid bare an inherent illogicality in the extreme anti-Israel position.

“True,” he wrote, “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.”

Over 140 countries around the world, he noted, 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,” Altman wrote, “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 reached the assertion repeated ad nauseam – that Israel committed, and continues to commit, genocide against the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza.

Altman made it abundantly clear that he regarded 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 demonstrated, with irrefutable facts and figures, that Israel did not have, and never has had, any such intention.