Israel on Trial: one judge’s search for truth

I suggested to him that Israel on Trial might ultimately become something like the 21st Century successor to Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel – a book people reach for years from now, when confronted with the standard accusations against Israel.

Altman does not make that claim for himself. He told me he had read Dershowitz’s book long ago but had not revisited it recently. The difference, he suggested, is partly historical. “The arguments against Israel have proliferated to a significant degree” since Dershowitz wrote his tome, he says, adding: “a new kind of analysis, objective, not based on emotion, based on settled legal principles” is essential to confront today’s hostility.

That may prove the book’s longer-term significance. Altman does not principally cast himself as Israel’s barrister. He casts the reader as its jury, because he trusts ordinary people to see through slogans, social media reels, and propaganda.

“You serve as jurors every day in the courtrooms of America,” he says. “Be the jurors in this case.”

We constantly hear that TikTok, algorithms and collapsing attention spans have rendered ordinary people incapable of following complicated arguments. Altman rejects this with the confidence of someone who has seen proof of the opposite. He has watched nurses, mechanics, teachers and retirees absorb weeks of difficult evidence in court and reach sensible verdicts. The book calls the instructions that help them do so “truth guides”.

He believes those habits matter far beyond Israel. Democracy itself depends upon citizens retaining the ability to distinguish assertion from proof.

The urgency is personal. Altman writes that “everything changed” for him on October 7, 2023. In our conversation, he described lying awake with his wife a few days after the massacre, both scrolling through their phones at three or four in the morning, watching as university groups blamed Israel even as the scale of Hamas’s atrocities was emerging.

His wife took his hand and cried.

“How is it that 80 years after the Holocaust, we Jews are still all alone?” she asked him.

For Altman, that question carried inherited weight. “My mother’s half brothers and sisters, four little boys and a little girl, were pushed into the gas chambers and murdered at Auschwitz,” he tells me. Their photographs hang on his wall, “to remind me every day when I go into the courtroom of where I come from.”

Yet what followed October 7 complicated rather than confirmed his wife’s fear. Altman says thousands of Americans contacted or visited them in solidarity. He talks particularly movingly about non-Jewish Christians who stood alongside Jews. One federal judicial colleague, he says, began wearing a Star of David despite not being Jewish, explaining that anyone coming for her Jewish friends would have to come through her.

That experience helps explain an unexpected quality in Altman: his optimism.

He has spent much of the past three years travelling, speaking on campuses and taking groups of federal judges to Israel on judicial education missions. He estimates that around ten per cent of America’s federal judiciary has participated. They meet Jewish Israelis, Palestinians, Druze and Arab Israelis, he says, and return to their communities to describe what they encountered. Altman regards this as part of an information battle the Jewish world failed for years even to realise it was fighting.

He explains it with a story from his past as a two-sport college athlete. His baseball coach would sprint towards the bullpen, where baseball pitchers warm up before entering the game, arrive before him, and then order Altman to do 50 push-ups.

Why?

“Because you lost the race.”

“I didn’t know it was a race,” he protested.

Everything is always a race, he learnt. “We as Jews, we as caring members of Western civilisation, forgot that basic truism,” he says.

But can a Jewish judge who plainly cares deeply about Israel really claim neutrality in judging its case? Altman answers with judging itself. Judges constantly hear cases in which their personal sympathies point one way while the law requires another. He recounts dismissing claims brought by an American-Jewish journalist who had been kidnapped and tortured in Syria, against Qatar Islamic Bank. He recalls finding one of his law clerks crying the following day, “very, very wounded by the decision”. For Altman, that discomfort was evidence of the system working: “It’s precisely when it hurts like that that you know you are doing this job the right way.” Personal sympathy must never determine the result.

The correct question about Israel on Trial, he argues, therefore isn't whether its author is Jewish, but whether “the rules that he’s applying [are] the actual rules of law, and are they being applied evenly and fairly to all parties?” Critics will, of course, dispute Altman’s evidence, his selection of it and his verdicts. Israel on Trial is certainly not coy about where its author ultimately comes down. Its conclusion is that the six central accusations it examines fail under scrutiny. If his conclusions are wrong, his critics must show where the evidence or reasoning fails, rather than simply repeat the accusations more loudly.

Hearteningly, Altman says people are doing something even more surprising: changing their minds. He describes readers approaching him after speeches to say they had believed Israel was committing genocide, practising apartheid or occupying stolen land until somebody persuaded them to read the book. He has heard variations of the story hundreds of times.

That is his ambition for Israel on Trial: not necessarily to convert the committed activist, but to give ordinary people something they can hand across a dinner table when somebody says “colonialism”, “apartheid” or “genocide”.

There is a lesson here for Jews too. Altman frequently hears about dinners at which someone makes an accusation against Israel and the solitary Jewish guest remains silent for fear of causing an argument. Everyone else consequently assumes it must be true. “It’ll be much more awkward for us in 25 or 30 years,” he says, if accusations once held by a minority become accepted by 80 or 90 per cent of society because nobody challenged them.

Yet Altman also warns against seeing catastrophe everywhere. Even at Columbia, which Altman describes as “the epicentre of the Tentifada movement”, he argues that the notorious anti-Israel encampments involved only a minority of students. “Think about the number of people who enter the encampment at Columbia,” he told me. “Is 10 per cent of the student body ever entering the encampment?” The quieter majority, he believes, is easily obscured by the visibility and volume of the activists – and by social media’s tendency to show us precisely what most alarms us. At other American universities, he says, the proportion involved in such activism is smaller still.

That leads him to a more complicated lesson about Jewish life after October 7. Altman believes Jews had, as he puts it elsewhere, “lost their instinct for danger” during the unusually secure post-war decades. October 7 restored it brutally. But vigilance can itself distort the picture if it leaves Jews alert only to hostility and unable to see the solidarity around them. When I suggested that perhaps Jews had become so alert to danger we had “lost our alertness to the love around us”, he agreed – with a qualification. “I would say that’s true,” he replied, “but I would say it’s good to have a healthy balance.”

Reality, he says, lies “somewhere between the Holocaust and where we were at the apogee of Seinfeld”. It is a characteristically Altman line: funny, Jewish, historically conscious and unexpectedly hopeful.

His book begins with Israel on trial. But by its end – and by the end of our conversation – another defendant has quietly entered the courtroom: us. The question is whether Western societies still possess sufficient patience, confidence and intellectual discipline to hear evidence before delivering a verdict.

Altman believes we do. And after October 7, he has decided that remaining silent while the jury deliberates is no longer an option.

Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law by Judge Roy K. Altman, is published by Simon & Schuster