Barbara Kay is a columnist and writer focusing on political subjects who writes a regular opinion column for the National Post and the Epoch Times. She has authored or co-authored four books.
Israel’s kinetic war against Hamas has been successful. Although still defiant, Hamas is a shadow of its pre-october 7 self. The possibility of an October 7 reprisal is forever nil. But Hamas and their supporters are winning the equally important battle for hearts and minds in demonizing Israel and Jews.
Their toxic flow of accusations - settler colonialism, apartheid and, above all, genocide in Gaza - have never been interrogated in a court of actual law. But they will be. As alpha Israeli journalist Amit Segal recently reported in his daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, “Oct. 7 launched the propaganda war, but the trial of the perpetrators will put the propagandists on trial."
A Knesset (Israel’s parliament) committee is currently at work on a bill that will create the framework “for what is destined to be the largest and most complex judicial event in Israel’s history," Segal writes. As Knesset member Yulia Malinovsky, the bill’s initiator put it: “There is nothing better than a proceeding to tell the story."
This was the rationale for the post-second World War Nuremberg Trials, considered “the true beginning of international criminal law," which prosecuted 24 surviving architects of the Holocaust, and made Nazism the world’s gold standard for moral depravity. The October 7 trial will prosecute 350 pogrom captured agents (Nukhba terrorists, ed). The process may take years, but it will be time and effort well spent.
Since courtrooms are now the last public space in the West where evidence is privileged over ideology and “narratives" that are considered sacred in the woke West, the recent publication of a book by a Florida-based federal U.S. judge, Israel on Trial: Examining the history, the evidence, and the law, dovetails nicely with the above news.
Author Roy K. Altman’s motivation for making what Commentary editor John Podhoretz describes as “the definitive case for the historical necessity of the state of Israel and its actions in its own defence" arose from a perception of the charges swirling around Israel as “quintessentially legal, not moral." It made sense to Altman to apply the same rigorous standards and methodology he uses in his courtroom to the anti-zionists’ spurious claims.
The book’s six chapters explore, in elegantly lucid prose, the most frequently promoted canards against Israel: that Israel’s founding was aberrational; that the Palestinian Arabs’ failure to achieve statehood is Israel’s fault; that Zionism is a colonizing project; that Israel’s “occupation" of Gaza made it an “open-air prison"; that Israel is an apartheid state; and that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
In each case, Altman adduces unrebuttable evidence: archeological records, settled genetic data and international law, which combine to eviscerate anti-zionist arguments. Notably, as he writes in his introduction, in court, when a party stakes their case on a provable lie, the falsehood is treated as evidence of the party’s “consciousness of guilt - evidence of its culpability - and not as an innocent." (If only media applied the same standard to Hamas’s press releases.)
THE CHARGE OF GENOCIDE IS THE UGLIEST OF BLOOD LIBELS.
By insisting on the same courtroom “playbook" that judges give jurors, rules that enable ordinary people to adjudicate even the most complex of issues, Altman invalidates bias, “emotion posing as argument" and political advocacy rather than analysis.
In his analysis of modern Israeli Jews’ connection to their biblical forebears, for example, Altman points to lavish archeological evidence proving beyond doubt the ancient Israelite lineage of “Jewish kings and princes, prophets and priests." Israelis today speak the same language, observe the same religion and honour the same sacred texts they did 3,000 years ago. Even their names connect them to antiquity (born David Grün, David Ben Gurion’s Hebrew name was an homage to a commander of the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66 AD).
Continuing excavations further confirm Jewish indigeneity in Israel. Indigenous peoples cannot be colonizers, Altman argues, because “Under the law, a man cannot be guilty of trespassing into his own home."
How do Palestinian Arab activists counter such solid evidence? By rejecting historical evidence altogether. Joseph Massad, an anti-zionist professor at Columbia University, offers this absurd circular argument: “Zionism is ... the invention of Ancient Israel and the invention of Jews as descendants of the Ancient Hebrews ... This is all a game of archeology, and we know archeology, of course, is part of colonialism."
The charge of genocide is the ugliest of blood libels, and has also been the most successful. It comes very easily to the lips of Islamists, Tiktok addicts, teachers, mayors, prime ministers and NGOS (although, as Altman wryly observes, to make the genocide case in their 2024 report, Amnesty International admitted that it had changed the definition of genocide to exclude “intent," a change which effectively makes every war in history a genocide).
All real genocides have four characteristics in common, Altman writes: a top-down policy directing its forces to destroy a racial, ethnic or religious group “as such"; an architecture for mass killings; an absence of legal restraints; and a gross lack of proportion in the ratio of militants to civilians. Pivotal to any charge of genocide are the words “intention" and “as such." Based on the adduced evidence, Altman concludes, none of these characteristics apply to Israel’s war against Hamas.
As in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the prosecution of the October 7 perpetrators, whose current proposed charges “range from war crimes and harming state sovereignty to crimes against the Jewish people and genocide," will scrupulously observe judicial norms like burden of proof, corroboration and chain of custody. Ideological quasi-defences - “resistance," “liberation" and the like - will not be admissible.
As well, unlike the case in diaspora institutions, pro-hamas protesters won’t be present to suck up media attention, nor will the prosecutor and trial judges be liable to intimidation, cancellation or deplatforming. The jackals may keep howling, but the caravan of justice will move on.