Roy K. Altman

Father. Husband. Judge. Passionate defender of the West. Yale Law School. Former federal prosecutor. NYT bestselling author of "Israel on Trial."

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

Hamas committed the crime of kinocide during the October 7 attacks. They forced men at gunpoint to have sex with their sisters and daughters, something we really haven’t seen in the world since Rwanda.

And yet in our Western media outlets and on our Western campuses, we Jews became the aggressors and oppressors.

1,200 Jews were butchered and burned alive, mutilated and beheaded in their homes, in their kitchens, at their dance parties for peace. They raped dozens and dozens of Israeli women and girls. They took 251 people hostage, stolen from their homes, and kept them in dark, dank holes, deep underground.

And yet at the United Nations—which was created in many ways to ensure that never again would anything like this happen to the Jewish people or to any people in the world—we Jews became the violators of human rights.

It's preposterous.

Where does it come from—this moral inversion, this moral distortion of everything we have always believed in, everything we have ever cared about?

How do we fix it?

And that is really the question I started trying to answer, the question that led me on this journey of giving speeches all over the country, in almost all 50 states over the last three years, at hundreds of schools, colleges, law schools, and churches of every denomination.

Along the way, I have had thousands of conversations with people about Israel, many of whom see the world very differently than I do.

And what I came to realize is each of these people who is chanting about Israel, they've come to believe one or more of these six main claims about Israel. The good news is, each of the six claims is totally false.

The other good news is that all of these claims are, at their core, legal claims. We do not have to shout at each other about politics. The problem with politics is that two people just shout at each other and they're never going to find common ground, because they're looking at different things that they're interested in and that they care about, and they're playing by different rules. They’re not playing on the same field.

In the law, there's only one set of rules. It applies to everybody, whether you're black, brown, or white, whether you're a man or a woman, whether you're Jewish, Muslim, or Christian. Everybody has to comply with the law.

So I thought, why not apply the same legal methodology that we have been applying for hundreds of years in courtrooms all across this country—a methodology that we know and trust because we use it where truth-telling matters most?

That is the methodology I apply to each of these six claims in the book.

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

Snowmass rodeo. God bless America. 🇺🇸

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

In the 1960s and '70s, there was a judicial philosophy that had taken hold of the Supreme Court of the United States. I think all nine justices subscribed to it, the most powerful court in the land, maybe on the planet.

And there were three or four students at Yale Law School who said, "No, that's wrong, and we're on the wrong path, and we're on the wrong trajectory."

And they formed something called the Federalist Society. And now there's a Federalist Society chapter in just about every law school in the country, every city and state in this country.

It's the most prominent conservative legal organization in the history of the country. And all nine of our Supreme Court justices have, in one way or another, on the record and under oath, subscribed to the Federalist Society's central principle and tenet, which is that you look first and foremost to the text of a statute or constitutional provision when you interpret it.

And for the most part, most federal judges in the country have had to say the same in order to be confirmed. Think about what that means. That means that just forty years ago, three or four law students in New Haven, Connecticut looked up at the most powerful body in the entire country, the Supreme Court of the United States, and said, "What you're doing is wrong. You're taking us on the wrong trajectory. You're taking us on the wrong path, and we're gonna do something about it."

And in just forty years, they've completely turned that entire worldview on its head.

And we can do it, too. We just have to get every single American to understand that we were asleep before this cataclysm began; that it is no longer appropriate—or acceptable—to go back to sleep; and that our geostrategic enemies—China, Russia, Iran, and especially the Muslim Brotherhood—are doing everything they can to defeat America and Western civilization.

And it's time for us to wake up, and for every American who cares to be counted, and to change the minds and voices of their neighbors, friends, and family members before it's too late.

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

I'm inspired by one of my heroes, Martin Luther King, who by the way was an ardent Zionist until the day that he died. He loved and understood the value of the Jewish people and how important the one Jewish state in the world was, and who frankly loved America, too.

And he always said, "The moral arc of history bends towards justice."

Well, I would say this: the cause of America, the cause of Western civilization more broadly, and the cause of the Jewish people — who brought to Western civilization monotheism, Jesus Christ, the Bible, and many of the political underpinnings of modern democracy, including religious tolerance, pluralism, freedom of expression, and the rule of law — is the most just and righteous cause the world has ever known. And we will prevail.

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

There was no such thing as Palestine in 1000 BC. In fact, "Palestine" is a word that's made up, and there is some suggestion that Herodotus used the term as a play on words in the Greek period to refer to the Philistine people.

The Philistines, by the way, have nothing to do with modern Palestinians, modern Muslim Arabs. They are a non-Semitic people. They are an Indo-European people. They're a Greek people who spoke an Indo-European language, derivative of Greek, and who invaded, not just northern Egypt, but also southwestern Israel, the land we now know as Gaza, at around that time, about 1,000 years before the Romans arrived.

The Philistines fought, and this plays out in the Bible, they fought many wars against their rivals. Not just on the western side with the Egyptians, but also on the eastern side with the Jews. And of course, the famous battle with Goliath and David is a battle between the Jews and the Philistines.

The point is that by the time of the Greeks, the Philistines had already died out. And Herodotus was playfully making a play on words with the name Israel. The name Israel, as you know, is Hebrew for "He who wrestles with God." And so the Greek word, the ancient Greek word for wrestler, he who wrestles, is "Palaistine."

And so since the Philistines were in that land, he had called it Palaistine as a play, a transliteration of the Jewish word or the Hebrew word Israel, He who wrestles with God. The word then disappears from the lexicon, and then there is the Roman conquest of Judea, the land of Israel.

Judea, by the way, in Hebrew is just Yehudia. Jew is Yehudi. Yehudia is therefore land of the Jews, the place where the Jews are from. That's the land that the Romans conquered in 63 BC, and the Jews didn't like being conquered by the Romans for a variety of reasons, and they revolted three times.

In the third and final revolt of 132 to 135 AD, which we know as the Bar Kokhba revolt, after its leader Simon Bar Kokhba, Simon being the name Shimon, an ancient Jewish name and the second tribe of Israel, but also Bar Kokhba meaning son of the star in Hebrew.

In 135 AD, Hadrian, the emperor of Rome, says, "We're done with these Jews. They have rebelled not once, not twice, not three now three times. They do not accept our magnanimity. We have to wipe out any memory of the Jewish presence on this land."

And so he does two big things. He first destroys Jerusalem, and he renames it. The Romans like to rename things in order to erase their history. So he changes the name from Yerushalayim, Jerusalem, to Aelia Capitolina. Aelia for his family, the Aelia clan from Spain, and Capitolina for Jupiter Capitolinus, who's the sky god of the Romans.

And then he renames the land Judea after the Philistines again and calls it Palestina. And he did that both to punish the Jews and erase any connection between the Jews and their land, but also because he knew that if he named it after a people who had been dead and extinct in the archeological record for a thousand years, there was no risk that they would show up and say, "Hey, the land is our land. You named it after us."

So it was a safe way to rename the land. He named it Palestina.

I don't think he ever could have imagined just how brilliant the idea would play with young college students in American campuses 2,000 years later.

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

My thoughts and prayers are with the amazing people of Venezuela.

[Daniel Di Martino @DanielDiMartino]

What happened in Venezuela today is the worst natural disaster in memory. Multiple 7+ magnitude earthquakes in a nation already ravaged by socialism.

Pray for the thousands of victims.

Thank you to the U.S. government for their aid at this critical time.

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

I was an ancient history major at Columbia and I wrote my dissertation on Josephus and his writings—in particular the extent to which they can be believed and the extent to which they're corroborated.

This is a lifelong passion for me goes all the way back to grade school when I was at a very Orthodox Jewish day school and found the stories from our Bible classes, which we took in Hebrew, to be quite stirring.

And the notion now that archeology has proven so many of those stories to be historically accurate is quite a revelation. And I don't think enough people know that.

One of the things that shocks people is the assumption that this is just “fantasy from the Bible,” when, in fact, that isn’t true.

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

Dr. Laura Kohn-Wood, Professor and Dean of the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Miami, on what she is reading this summer:

“Having recently met Judge Roy Altman, and in a desire to always be in continuous conversation about contentious issues, I have his new book, ‘Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law,’ next up in my queue.”

You can order your copy today: https://t.co/1kFOnwFHbV

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

Israel on Trial
https://t.co/1uiMNwjJEs

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

I'm first and foremost an American. I think that's true of all Jews in this country.

I think of it very much like Catholics. In England, Catholics were legally barred from the throne because of fears that a Catholic monarch would owe loyalty to the Pope over the English crown. In America, for much of our history anti-Catholic prejudice made having a Catholic president impossible.

Even in 1960 when John F. Kennedy was running, if you look at the papers, even in Boston, it was all about his dual loyalty to the Pope in Rome. We now know that was a gross heresy and that that was totally frivolous, and that people who are Catholic are just as American or more so than anybody else, and that can be true also of any other religion in the country, any other people including and especially our Jews.

Jewish patriots have been part and parcel of the building of America from the very beginning. Take for example Haym Salomon, who bankrolled the American Revolution. He was one of the wealthiest men in the colonies and died totally penniless and poor because he refused to be paid back by the early nascent American Army because he wanted them to be able to pay it forward to the future prosperity of the country.

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

Professor Ruth Wisse always famously said you should never talk to people about Israel without a map.

And that's because if you just look at it in the prism that the Palestinians and their supporters want you to look at it through, you see an army with F-35 jets and tanks, and you see the Palestinians in Gaza without those things, and you say, "Okay, one is the more powerful, the other is the underdog. We'll root for the underdog."

That's a common theme in Western society.

But when you look at a map, you can see the reality: Israel is a teeny, tiny country surrounded not just by some of the largest countries in the world—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Iraq—huge land masses filled with hundreds of millions of people, but also by some of the wealthiest countries in the world, with hundreds of billions, and sometimes trillions, of dollars in oil and natural gas resources that Israel does not possess.

So you have some of the largest countries in the world, some of the most populous countries in the world, and hundreds of millions of Muslim Arabs, many of whom have been raised from childhood to hate the Jewish state and to see its very existence as a deep wound in the substructure of their souls—one that must be corrected if they are to fulfill their mission on this earth—all arrayed against the one tiny Jewish state in the world.

When you see it in that prism, I think the lens is very different.

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

Shani Louk—a 23-year-old German woman who was at the Nova dance party—was raped, butchered, murdered, and her body was dragged back to Gaza behind a car.

Thousands of Palestinians are on video fighting with one another—regular people in Gaza, not dressed as Hamas—just for the chance to get at her body, spit on her, beat her, and kick her.

And then they take her lifeless, broken body, and they dump it into the back of one of these pickup trucks. It's 6:37 in the morning, and there are all these guys chanting Allahu Akbar in the back of the truck.

And there was an AP photographer present who snapped that famous photo of her broken body among these huge men chanting.

How did that photographer know to be there?

He won essentially what amounts to the Pulitzer Prize of photography for that photograph that he was only able to take because, of course, he was in league with the terrorists who told him to be there.

That's the kind of moral distortion that I think we, as members of Western society, need to be deeply concerned about.

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

Appreciate the kind words from @EVKontorovich in this new @FreeBeacon piece about Israel on Trial: https://t.co/lO8ASbFh7M

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

Over hundreds of thousands of years, the human brain has evolved in very peculiar circumstances.

We lived on the plain in small bands of human beings, maybe 20 to 50 people. And in that environment, it became essential for each person and the group as a whole to be able to discern what's true from what isn't.

If a person said that they tested the water well and they did not, and it was poisoned, they could all die of poisoning. They would not get to propagate their genes to the next generation.

If the person said they were not too tired to be on watch and then they fell asleep while on duty, they could be eaten by a Saber-tooth tiger. Again, they would not get to propagate their genes to the next generation.

Our ancestors who were able to propagate their genes, were people who were able, on the whole, to discern truth from fiction.

We developed certain techniques that we've used for hundreds of thousands of years to discern whether we think somebody is telling the truth. A lot of that has to do with the context in which we analyze a contested claim.

One way they did it was as a group. Because a single person analyzing a claim alone could be in love with the speaker or could have a vendetta against the speaker. But across the group, those personal feelings are diffused. Second, we did it face-to-face. Third, we did it one issue at a time.

And lastly, we developed this toolbox. Something that you said before you knew there was a dispute, we credit that more, because at the time that you said it, you didn't know it would become an important issue in the dispute that arose. Something that your personal enemy said that favors your side, we give that special care, because we typically wouldn't expect that your adversary would say something that would help you. Rules like that.

In modern times, we violate all of those rules every day. We don't make the decisions as a group. We do it one by one. We don't do it in person. We do it across the screen of our phone. Third, we don't do it issue by issue, but we do it by hundreds of thousands of bits of information provided to us in an overwhelming tidal wave at one time, manipulated and sourced by the largest corporations and the most sophisticated computer scientists the world has ever known.

There is one place where we revert hundreds of thousands of years in evolutionary time, and that's the jury box. Remember, you can't use your phones to make decisions in the jury box. Every decision must be unanimous, so they must all do it together. We do it face-to-face, one issue at a time, and the judge and lawyers give the juries that toolbox, that legal methodology, we call them jury instructions, that teaches them how human beings have evolved to tell truth from fiction using some of these simple rules that I've articulated here and many, many others that I outline in the book.

And that's why we give these jurors, who are not experts in the law—they're nurses and teachers and mechanics and retirees—we give them the most complicated disputes in our society: antitrust cases, class actions, trademark and copyright disputes. And then they go back into the jury box with our methodology, and they come out with precisely the right answer.

It's not because they're smarter. It's because we give them the methodology we've developed to tell truth from fiction.

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

For a long time most Jewish organizations and Jewish leaders in the world treated these false claims against Israel and the Jewish people as absurd, and on their face, ridiculous.

And so we ignored the claims, and we let them sort of lie and fester for a long time. And one of the big criticisms that I've heard about my book, Israel on Trial, especially from Jewish organizations, is, "Well, we shouldn't give these these allegations the time of day. We should ignore them. We shouldn't put Israel on trial, we should put Hamas on trial."

All of that, I think, is fair. Hamas should be on trial. But the opposite is not necessarily true either. And I think the strategy we have taken over the last 20 or 30 years—of ignoring these claims—has proven to be a fatal mistake.

And the reason for that is whether in the law or in sports or in politics, when you ignore the other side's argument, you lose. That's just how it is. No matter how flagrantly absurd the argument is.

In the law, if the other side files a motion, it's an adversarial system, if you don't respond to it, the judge isn't going to delve deeply into the correctness of the motion. They've got 300 other motions to deal with. If there's an unobjected to motion, that motion is granted by what we call default.

The same thing happens in sports. If one football team arrives on the field and the other team doesn't show up, they win by forfeit.

And so in either case, not rebutting the arguments that you believe are frivolous has allowed these arguments really to spread like wildfire across our population, both in our young people and even now bleeding into people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s.

It's a very dangerous game we've been playing, and we were wrong to play it.

The point of my book is to be patient with these arguments, show people that we can engage these arguments, and that on the merits they are totally false and frivolous as a matter of fact and law.

[Yael Bar tur @yaelbt]

Genocide? Apartheid? It’s easy to crush those lies when the facts are on your side - and the vast majority of Americans get it.

Thank you Judge @RoyKAltman for coming on Ask A Jew! Full episode on YouTube or wherever you get your Podcasts.

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

For a long time most Jewish organizations and Jewish leaders in the world treated these false claims against Israel and the Jewish people as absurd, and on their face, ridiculous.

And so we ignored the claims, and we let them sort of lie and fester for a long time. And one of the big criticisms that I've heard about my book, Israel on Trial, especially from Jewish organizations, is, "Well, we shouldn't give these these allegations the time of day. We should ignore them. We shouldn't put Israel on trial, we should put Hamas on trial."

All of that, I think, is fair. Hamas should be on trial. But the opposite is not necessarily true either. And I think the strategy we have taken over the last 20 or 30 years—of ignoring these claims—has proven to be a fatal mistake.

And the reason for that is whether in the law or in sports or in politics, when you ignore the other side's argument, you lose. That's just how it is. No matter how flagrantly absurd the argument is.

In the law, if the other side files a motion, it's an adversarial system, if you don't respond to it, the judge isn't going to delve deeply into the correctness of the motion. They've got 300 other motions to deal with. If there's an unobjected to motion, that motion is granted by what we call default.

The same thing happens in sports. If one football team arrives on the field and the other team doesn't show up, they win by forfeit.

And so in either case, not rebutting the arguments that you believe are frivolous has allowed these arguments really to spread like wildfire across our population, both in our young people and even now bleeding into people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s.

It's a very dangerous game we've been playing, and we were wrong to play it.

The point of my book is to be patient with these arguments, show people that we can engage these arguments, and that on the merits they are totally false and frivolous as a matter of fact and law.

[Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism @InstituteCSA]

Judge Roy Altman's new book, Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law, is a must-read.

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

The claim that Israel is an apartheid state is one of the most preposterous of all the claims made against Israel.

Hitler and Goebbels always said, “If you say something ludicrous but false long enough and loudly enough, over time, it will seed itself in the collective subconscious, and people will start to believe it.”

Israel is a country of 10 million people, 21% of whom are Arabs, 17% of whom are Arab Muslims, and they have the exact same civil, commercial, and political rights as their Jewish neighbors.

They can open a restaurant, become dentists, lawyers, and doctors. There is a Supreme Court justice sitting on the court, Supreme Court of Israel, who is an Arab Muslim, and by the way, almost always has been. There are Muslim judges all throughout the court system.

If you see the rate of matriculation and graduation at some of the most elite universities in all of Israel, the engines of socioeconomic mobility, you'll see that Muslim Arabs comprise sometimes almost 50% of the graduates in dentistry schools and nursing schools, even though they're only 20 or so percent of the population.

That’s the very opposite of an apartheid state.

But there is apartheid being practiced every single day all across the Middle East, but it's not in Israel. It's in the Arab states that are pushing the apartheid claim against Israel.

Think about whether there would ever be a Jewish or Christian Supreme Court justice on the Supreme Court of Tehran. Would there ever be a Jewish or Christian general in Damascus, or a Jewish and Christian head of a hospital in Ramallah or Gaza City? Those are obviously preposterous things even to conceive of, but the opposite happens every single day in Israel.

What does the state of New Mexico, the city of Louisville, Kentucky, and Birmingham, Alabama, have in common?

Each of them has more Jews in them than there are living in the entire Arab world. 22 countries with hundreds of millions of Arabs have fewer Jews living in them than live in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, or the state of New Mexico. There is apartheid all over the Middle East, it's just not happening in Israel.

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

It's really important to understand that not only has there been no genocide in Gaza, it's the opposite.

It's actually the most humane, the most precise urban warfare fight the world has ever known. It's a war that was run, for the most part, by lawyers, international law scholars and lawyers called MAGs, military advocate generals, who are deployed in the field with the commanders, thousands of them, and who evaluate every action, every strike.

And unlike here in the United States, where JAG officers give advice to commanders and say, "Hey, this is a precatory piece of advice. You can disregard it if you want," in Israel, the MAG's advice is not precatory. It's a mandatory order that must be followed by the commander.

Every single day in Gaza, strikes on legitimate military targets are canceled, and I've seen this with my own eyes dozens and dozens and dozens of times, because of the risk of collateral consequences to civilians in Gaza. That's the very opposite of genocide.

Think about real genocides in history. When you take the Nazis, for example, who pushed my mother's half-brothers and sisters into the gas chambers, they weren't looking to warn civilians to get out of the killing zone. They weren't looking to cancel strikes, which is to say a gas chamber, because there were too many civilians near the gas chambers. The whole purpose, the whole architecture of a genocidal regime was to push the civilians into the killing zone.

Israel cancels strikes because of a fear of civilian casualties. It employs the most sophisticated civilian warning system the world has ever seen that gets civilians out of the killing zone in the war. Israel then shepherds them to safety, provides them with food purveyors, medical clinics, and the polio vaccine for 98% of the children in Al Mawasi—given for free by the Israeli government and by Israeli doctors to children in Gaza—this is the very opposite of what we would expect if there were a genocide.

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

The word "genocide" requires a specific intent to destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part as such.

In other words, as we've seen from real genocides in history—the Holocaust, the Hutus against the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Armenian Genocide—you have a top-down architecture from the governing regime to destroy, eliminate from the face of the earth, the people in question.

In the Holocaust there were 12 million Jews remaining after the six or seven years of the Holocaust. Before the Holocaust, there were 18 million Jews. That's 6 million Jews that were murdered in six or seven years.

In Gaza, it's important to remember that the proponents of the genocide myth don't believe that there's only been one genocide since October 7th.

They have claimed on five separate occasions that Israel has perpetrated five separate genocides against the Palestinians of Gaza to wipe them off the face of the earth since Israel withdrew in 2005.

Some of these involved situations where Hamas attacked Israel, killed a few Jews. Israel did a reprisal. Maybe a few Palestinians were killed. That was called a genocide.

But here's the number discrepancy. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, there were 1 million Palestinians there. Despite having five supposed separate genocides perpetrated against them in the 20 years since, I think most of the numbers from the CIA, the Israelis, and even the Gaza Health Ministry agree the population has more than doubled. There is over 2.2 million Gazans in the area today.

Either Israel hasn't committed any genocide, or we're to believe that the country with F-35s, nuclear weapons, and one of the most sophisticated armies and air forces the world has ever known has been the most inept genocidal regime in the history of the planet.