Dr. Michael Krampner is a Jerusalem-based writer, Ph.D. in Jewish history, and retired American trial lawyer whose writings and book reviews primarily focus on Jewish history, historical warfare, judicial reform, and geopolitical critique.
Read his review Of Roy K. Altman’s "Israel on Trial: Examining The History, The Evidence And The Law," Advantage Books, (2026) - and get the answers to the most popular anti-Israel canards.
After October 7, 2023 Roy Altman spoke on American college campuses defending Israel. During that time Altman, a United States District Judge for the Southern District of Florida, repeatedly heard six claims made about Israel which he knew were totally false. Those claims are:
(1) that Jews are colonists in the Land of Israel;
(2) That Israel’s founding was illegitimate or aberrational;
(3) That Israel has prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state;
(4) That Israel occupied Gaza before October 7, 2023 or had turned Gaza into an ‘open air prison’ or ‘concentration camp;’
(5) That Israel is an apartheid or white supremacist state, and
(6) That Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
All these are claims are lies, originating with Israel-haters and Israel-hating, Jew-hating regimes and organizations who advance them for the specific purpose of delegitimizing Israel. In Israel On Trial: Examining the History, The Evidence and The Law, Advantage Books (2026) Judge Altman takes on those six claims by asking the reader to apply some standards of clarity, evidence and reason to the false claims.
Altman asks that the reader act as a juror in a courtroom in which a party to a lawsuit is trying to prove these claims. What is particularly important to Altman’s argument is that the jurors take a solemn oath to follow the court’s instructions to apply recognized standards to the issues so that the issues cannot be decided on whims or irrelevancies, on prejudices or as popularity contest. He does not require ‘proof beyond a reasonable doubt’ as in a criminal case but only proof ‘by a preponderance of the evidence’ (that it is more likely than not) as in a civil case. Even on that relatively low standard, Altman shows that every one of these claims fails.
1. Altman deconstructs the ‘colonialism’ claim with archeological findings referring to the ancient Jewish kingdoms and the presence of Jews in the land of Israel and a history of the Jewish partial expulsion by the Romans and the almost two millennia of non-Jewish rule, by Romans, Byzantines, Arabians, Crusaders, Ottoman Turks and finally the British. During that entire time there were some Jews in the land.
Israel-haters like Professor Masad at Columbia University who teaches "Jihad"-I mean aa course titled ‘Near Eastern Studies’- has dismissed all the archeological evidence of the ancient and continuing connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel by saying: ‘This is all a game of archeology and we know that archeology, of course, is part of colonialism.’ So says an "academic". It is the kind of circular and dishonest argument that Israel-haters are famous for. Even though physical evidence of the ancient and continuing Jewish connection to the land is supplemented by the documentary evidence, the written observations of ancient and medieval travelers and visitors, including many Moslems and Christians.
To refute the ‘colonialism’ claim, Altman also cites the genetic evidence that ‘all the major Jewish populations in the world, including the Ashkenazim of Europe, the Sephardim in Spain and North Africa and the Mizrachim of the Middle East, share a common and unique ancestry that spread from the Levant more than two thousand years ago.’ The conclusion is obvious that the Jews returning to their ancestral home can not be colonialists and that is especially true when they did not come to exploit either local labor or local natural resources, but instead, most came as refugees, particularly after 1945, when almost all Jews were expelled from Moslem-majority lands in the Near East and North Africa.
2. Regarding the second claim, that Israel was somehow illegitimate in its founding, Judge Altman points to the accepted international framework for what constitutes a legitimate state, the Montevideo Framework that sets four criteria for a legitimate state. The criteria are that the state must have a permanent population-which Israel did by 1948- it must have a defined territory- even if there are disputes about precisely where some of the borders belong, it must have an effective government - that is, a government that is able to govern- and it must have the capacity to conduct foreign relations. Israel had all of this in 1948 and additionally had the approval of the United Nations vote to begin operations as a state.
Incidentally, Judge Altman points out the stunning hypocrisy of the countries that claim to recognize a ‘State of Palestine’ that has a population claim, but has three governments (Hamas, Fatah and Israel), does not have defined borders or anything close to it, cannot govern (not peaceably) and cannot effectively conduct foreign policy on behalf of those it claims to represent.
He then describes the historical and continuing rejection of a Palestinian Arab State by the Arabs to refute the lie that Israel prevented the formation of a Palestinian Arab state (a second one in addition to Jordan, which was carved out of British Mandate Palestine). Arab ‘Palestinian’ rejection was always fueled both by the Arab lack of interest to have a state of their own if the creation of a Palestinian Arab state meant there would also be a Jewish state.
It has consistently been the Arab position not that there must be an Arab state, but rather, that there must not be a Jewish state. That was followed by the internal Arab war against the Jews before statehood and the invasion of Arab armies against Israel in 1948. After a brief lull in the Arab war against Israel Egyptian President Nasser’s attempt to slaughter the Jews in 1967 and the Jewish victory in the Six Day War was followed by the famous three ‘No’s’ of the Arab Khartoum Conference: no recognition of Israel, no peace with Israel and no negotiations with Israel! The Arabs have been at war with Israel since before the state was founded and continue even today for theological and ideological reasons.
Even later in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s when a state was offered to the PLO and to other Arab factions on multiple occasions, they refused because it would mean having to let the Jews live in peace in Israel, something that the Arabs and most of the Moslem world has never been willing to allow.
4. Judge Altman also refutes the fourth falsehood about Israel occupying Gaza before October 7 and Gaza being a ‘concentration camp’ or ‘open air prison’ by a recitation of the unassailable facts that Israel had voluntarily left Gaza in 2005 and that Hamas had been the government of Gaza since 2006. Hamas used the billions of dollars it received in aid to make Gaza a platform for war rather than to benefit the lives of Gazans.
Besides that, no one had ever heard of a ‘concentration camp’ or a prison that had more than 30,000 heavily armed terrorist/soldiers who were committed to wiping out the neighboring country and that had fired thousands of rockets into the neighboring country for years, as Hamas/Gaza had done. These claims are so preposterous that only a know-nothing college student or a committed Israel-hater could believe them.
5. The slur that Israel is an apartheid or white supremacist state is laughable because more than half of Israel’s population is Jews from the Middle East, North Africa, and Western Asia and that there is also a mixture of Ethiopian and Indian Jews who are valued and respected citizens. The majority of Israelis are not descended from Europeans but from other Jews and in addition, Moslems, Druze, Christians, Bahai and others are Israeli citizens all have equal rights with Israeli Jews. Arabs are about 21% of the population of Israel but are 25% of the doctors, 25% of the nurses and a whopping 50% of the pharmacists. In Israel, Arabs are also electricians, glaziers, plumbers, heavy equipment operators, truck drivers, bus drivers, shopkeepers, bankers and are found in every segment of the economy. Some apartheid and white supremacy!
6. Lastly, Judge Altman confronts the lie that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. With this particular lie the accusation itself does most of the work by smearing Israel. Judge Altman examines the definition of genocide and the requirements for a genocide and the facts. Of course, Israel has worked as hard as it could to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties in Gaza while Hamas has worked as hard as it could to increase the number of civilian casualties in Gaza, both by lying about the number of casualties and by assuring that not a single Gazan civilian man, woman or child could take shelter in the elaborate tunnel system that protected Hamas from the response to its barbarian massacre on October 7.
Altman details the many efforts made by Israel by millions of emails and phone calls to warn Gazans to leave certain areas of Gaza (thereby giving up the advantage of surprise) and the opinions of the neutral experts that not only was there no genocide but also that Israel did everything it could to preserve the lives of Gazan civilians.
Judge Altman does not really confront the fact that all of the statements that he is challenging are the product of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel political movements and that those lies are deliberately produced and circulated to delegitimize Israel and Jews. The lies do the heavy lifting of smearing Israel and Jews.
The ‘colonialism’ slur comes from Soviet era propaganda.
The Apartheid slur comes from dishonest Leftist activism.
The genocide lie comes from Jihadi Islamists and their Leftist allies.
All these are deliberate lies and are the weaponization of language against a small people, the Jews, in a tiny country, Israel. Sartre once commented that an antisemite will falsely accuse a Jew of stealing just for the pleasure of making the Jew turn out his pockets to show that the accusation is false.
Judge Altman never really encounters what is at the root of the anti-Israel movement: Jihadi-Islamist and Leftist hatred of Israel and Jews spread widely by social media, by a troll army supported by the governments of Iran, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan and Moslem foundations as well as China, by Leftist institutions and charities, and the Islamic invasion of the West by immigration.
For someone who has sleep-walked through the months and years since October 7, 2023, someone who has not already formed an opinion about the subject, Judge Altman’s book will be a very enlightening read. These are the kind of people who could serve on a jury and swear that they had not already formed an opinion on the subjects for which Judge Altman wants there to be a fair trial.
But it seems that many people throughout the world have had a visceral reaction to the Islamic and Leftist war on Israel, of which the Hamas/Gaza War with its accompanying propaganda is only the latest instance. Most of the world’s almost 2 billion Moslems made up their minds before Israel even responded to October 7, 2023 by cheering on the Hamas rapists, kidnappers and murderers. Most of the world’s millions of Leftists were right there with the Moslems, urging on the destruction of the little Jewish state. On the other hand, Jews who had any Jewish education, Jewish belief, or Jewish pride in their identity had also made up their minds to support little, democratic and tolerant Israel.
Judge Altman’s book equips the reader with the reasonable arguments that needed to refute the lies most often told to delegitimize Israel. It is also a good book for those who have not yet formed an opinion or have little knowledge about these particular anti-Israel claims. To those who Israel-bashers who are willing to read and reconsider, the book makes a clear case for rejecting antisemitic lies. But to those who are committed to the survival of the little homeland of the Jewish people in the face of the hatred of Jihadi-Islamists and their Leftist allies, it feels as if Judge Altman has been forced to turn out his pockets to show that the Jews are not guilty.