Chapter two of my new book, Israel on Trial, discusses the legitimacy of the State of Israel. The first thing to understand is that Israel is actually an old country in the world—not ancient Israel, not the Kingdom of Judea—but the modern State of Israel, founded on May 14th, 1948. It was the 59th state accepted into the United Nations. There are now 193 countries, which makes Israel older than 67% of all the countries in the world. It really was created at this moment in time very much like, and not in an aberrational way, all the other countries that were being created in this period of decolonization in the Middle East, Africa, and in Asia when colonists were leaving their colonies behind and drawing lines on a map. And so, in that sense, Israel’s creation was not all that different from the creation of Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, or even Cameroon. But the point here is that the claim that Israel is illegitimate can be analyzed very simply because although our anthropologists and linguists have identified over 7,000 distinct ethnic groups, different peoples around the world, the reality is that over 98% of them don't have states of their own. What makes it possible for a group to gain independence, sovereignty, and have their own legitimate nation-state? There is a legal test for statehood, and it comes from the Montevideo Convention, signed in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1933. It's called the Montevideo Convention and it has four simple elements: 1. Do you have defined borders? 2. Do you have a defined population? 3. Do you have the capacity to engage in foreign relations? 4. Do you have a single effective government? Israel has had all of those things from the moment it was founded until today, and every second in between. By contrast, the supposed State of Palestine does not meet—and in fact fails—the four-factor Montevideo test. It lacks defined borders and is not governed by a single effective government, but rather by three separate authorities, none of which exercises legitimate governing authority over the whole population.

One of the claims I address in my new book, Israel on Trial, is the allegation that Israel has committed genocide. Genocide has a clear legal definition. It means that a country, not individual soldiers, a country has the specific intent to destroy an entire people in whole or in part as such, because they are that people, by killing their members or because of their racial, religious, or ethnic origins. The proponents of the genocide claim have to show that the Israeli government had the specific intent to wipe out the Palestinians of Gaza because they are Palestinians, not because there's Hamas fighters embedded within them, not because they're trying to release the hostages. That's why when you read, for example, the briefing book that the legal team from South Africa submitted at the International Court of Justice, there's no mention of Hamas really. There's barely a mention of October 7th. There's no hostages. It's a fictional world in which there are no hostages, there was no October 7th, there is no Hamas, and there's just Israeli war planes and an innocent civilian population. That starts to look a lot more like genocide if you remove all of the essential elements that are the reality on the ground. How do we begin to analyze this question? The first is historically. We know for example from the Nuremberg trials that this argument that Hamas and its supporters are advancing was already rejected by the original people who tried the original war crimes trial at Nuremberg. The German defense team wanted to advance the defense that you shouldn't be too angry with our people, and you shouldn't think that the prosecution has any moral right to be prosecuting and trying our defendants, because the pilots who were flying over Dresden and Berlin and Tokyo and Hiroshima are equally guilty of these war crimes. And the Nuremberg trials resoundingly rejected that theory and said, "You're not guilty of these war crimes when you're fighting a war of existential survival against a genocidal regime in a war that is defensive in origin, that you didn't start, and never wanted and frankly never expected." But it's much more than that. Israel has fought the most precise, and in some respects the most humane, urban warfare conflict the world has ever seen. And you don't have to take my word for it. Take the HLMG, the High Level Military Group. The HLMG is a collection of high-level officers and generals from almost every Western army in the world. Not Jews. Not Mossad agents. These are generals from America, from Canada, from New Zealand, who all went to Gaza, went to Israel, looked at the evidence, looked at Israel's strike packages, realized that Israel is fighting a war that is essentially run by lawyers. This doesn't appear in the newspapers, but as I can tell you when I lead these judges' trips to Israel, Israel is fighting an almost preposterously Jewish war, where all of the calls of strikes that are not emergent are made by lawyers in the field. This is a reality that must be understood. Israel has a corps of military advocate generals. They're called MAGs. Think about our JAGs, for example, and many of our judges were JAGs, and so the context and the contrast is stark. Military advocate generals are deployed in the field with the commanders all over Gaza and on the Gazan border, and one of the things that you should remember about the military advocate generals isn't just their deployment. It's also that their advice is not precatory. So in the United States, a JAG says to a commander, "You shouldn't strike. That's my advice." But the commander can always override the strike because the advice is precatory. In Israel, the MAG's advice is not precatory. It's mandatory. It's an order that must be followed. Of course, if the commander disagrees, there's a whole appellate mechanism that goes to senior commanders that ultimately could end up in front of an IDF judge. I mean, this is the ridiculously legalistic way in which these Jews fight these wars. And frankly, we have seen, as judges, dozens and dozens and dozens of videos where this plays out in real time. Videos, which somehow don't make it into The New York Times, where pilots are in their planes or flying their drones over clear Hamas targets— terrorists shooting out of a mosque or out of a hospital or out of a UN car. Yes, that happens in Gaza every single day. And the pilot says, "I'm ready to fire." And then something amazing happens, something our American JAG officers are like, "What is happening here?" A nerdy Jewish lawyer comes over the air, the airwave and says, "Hey, what's that 50 yards away on the top right of the screen? Scan over to the top right of the screen." And it's two children playing soccer or three women holding a loaf of bread having a conversation. And instantly it's "Strike canceled. Strike canceled. Strike canceled." Over and over again in Gaza and in Lebanon, legitimate strikes on legitimate military targets that almost any other Western army in the world would take are canceled by Israeli lawyers, international law scholars, because of a concern for the preservation of innocent Palestinian civilian life.

One of the driving themes of my new book, Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law, is something I only came to understand after investigating each of the six claims made against Israel. That theme is this: none of these claims exists ex nihilo. They do not come out of thin air. Each of the six claims is carefully calibrated to invert the Jewish narrative. In other words, each claim takes something that has historically been done to the Jews—or is actively being done to the Jews—and turns it upside down. It says: actually, the Jews are not the victims of this crime. They are its perpetrators. And in that way, each of the claims actually is a very sharp, double-sided sword. On one side, Jews are accused of the ultimate crime of crimes: genocide. On the other, Jewish suffering, Jewish history, and the Jewish narrative are cheapened. The argument becomes: you should not worry too much about the Holocaust; you should not treat it as uniquely important; you should not teach it as a singular warning to humanity—because the Jews, we are told, have become Holocaust perpetrators themselves.

Coming soon: the audiobook for Israel on Trial—read by the author!

Professor Ruth Wisse has always said, “You never get into a discussion about Israel without a map of the Middle East.” And I think there's a lot to say about that because if the focus is always, Israeli F-35s against the population of Gaza, you're going to lose that argument every time. But that's not the reality. That's not what the world really looks like. We know that the Palestinians are just one in a huge collection of enormous armies that are deployed all across the Muslim world against Israel. Israel is a teeny-tiny state that's basically a little bit smaller than New Jersey and has only seven million Jews. The real geostrategic conflict here isn't seven million Jews against six million Palestinians. It's seven million Jews surrounded by two billion Muslims—hundreds of millions of whom have been raised to believe that divine providence requires them to devote their lives to the destruction of that teeny, tiny Jewish state that just wants to live as a free and peaceful neighbor along with its Arab neighbors. When you look at a map, the magnitude of the threat Israel faces becomes clear. Syria is massive. Lebanon is home to Hezbollah, the largest terror army the world has ever known—so powerful that some military analysts said before October 7 that it could rival the militaries of certain Eastern European countries. There are thousands of Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Iraq hosts Iranian-backed Shiite militias with missiles pointed at Israel. The Houthis in Yemen, another large country, are armed with ballistic missiles. And then there is Iran: a nation of nearly 100 million people, roughly 2.5 times the size of Texas, that has fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel and was actively trying to build a nuclear weapon. So it's important to understand always the scale of this because otherwise you're never gonna win that fight.

It's really important to remember, none of this is about convincing Nicholas Kristof or the people who read what he writes and believe it all hook, line, and sinker. Those people are not going to be convinced. Sure, there are some who will change their mind over time. But the vast majority of those people are gone. That struggle is over. The reality is that there is a huge proportion of the electorate, not just in the United States, but around the globe, who are in the middle. It's shocking for us to think of that and conceive of that because we all live it. But that's the reality. I've spent the last three years traveling across this country to most of the 50 states, to dozens and dozens of colleges and law schools, high schools and churches of every denomination. The vast majority of Americans, they really don't care about this that much. They care—and all the polling data shows this—about putting food on the table. They care about oil prices maybe. They care about sending their kids to safe and secure schools. They care what the rest of us care about. And the issue here is that those people are out there and they are reading this stuff. And if we are not clear on what the truth is, and if we are not providing them with the methodology, the toolbox that's necessary in order to help them sift through the garbage and get to the truth, then more and more people will fall into the bucket of people who have been convinced against us. It's like a virus. It's spreading through the population, and we need to inoculate the people who are healthy and in the middle to be able to withstand and resist it. And one of the ways to inoculate those people is to revert them back to the way Americans have always been taught to make decisions, which is to make decisions based on this methodology, this toolbox that made us a virtuous citizenry at the time of de Tocqueville and can make us a virtuous citizenry that's good at assessing contested claims yet again.

I was a sexual violence and human trafficking prosecutor for many years. There are really three buckets of evidence that go into a successful sexual violence or human trafficking prosecution. As an evidentiary matter, Israel checked all three buckets given the overwhelming proof from Hamas’ October 7 attacks. What are those three buckets? 1. Victims We see this in cases that come on TV or appear in the news. If there is one victim, it is hard to win a case because it becomes a “he said, she said.” Nobody was there. There were no cameras, etc. But here we don't have one victim. We have dozens and dozens of victims. People that have never met one another. People that don't know each other. They don't work together. They're not family members. What does that tell you? In the law, we always tell our jurors, when disconnected people who have no affiliation with one another tell you the same story about their interaction with a series of men, that is extremely probative as to whether they're telling you the truth. And these victims, they're not speaking anonymously. They have come forward on the record. They have done so in person at the United Nations, for example. They've done so in person to Israeli and American investigators. They've done it on camera for all the world to see. It's there for all time. One of the reasons why we think it's really important in our justice system not to rely on anonymous sources is because we want to test the reliability of the claim through cross-examination, background investigation of the person, and their history. But there's a separate reason. We believe that the mere process of declaring something publicly and on the record that's unfavorable to you evinces some degree of credibility. 2. Independent investigators We have these medical examiners who have come to the scene and investigated these victims' bodies. Some of the victims were alive, and their genitalia had to be investigated and tested. And some of them were dead. Many of the women who were abused sexually were then murdered by the Hamas terrorists. We know this. It's extremely painful to talk about, and I'd rather not talk about it, but we have to talk about it because the world doesn't understand the compare and contrast game. 3. Defendants This is the crown jewel. This is the cherry on top. You can go on YouTube right now and watch the videotaped confessions of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists to the mass sexual violence they perpetrated on October 7th. There are videotaped confessions of these men on the record for all the world to see. *********** Why is it important to compare and contrast? Because The New York Times op-ed story has none of those three buckets. First bucket, they rely on anonymous sources. They won't tell you who these people are. These people won't come on video to tell you what they suffered. It's important to ask why they won't go on the record with their allegations. Second bucket, they don't have independent medical examiners. The NYT article tries to tell you that they have these independent medical examiners and NGOs. They claim that Euromed is an independent organization, no affiliation, sometimes critical of Israel, they say. But we know that the CEO, the director of this organization, has called for a million October 7s. There were 1,200 Jews murdered on October 7th. A million October 7s, that's way more Jews than there are on the planet, if you're scoring at home. This is the kind of person that they're pitching as the independent third party. Third bucket, on the back end, there's no confession by anyone. There's no secret recording confessing to mass systemic sexual violence as a state policy against Palestinians. Of course, there have been individuals who have done wrong. That's not the question. No one denies that. In any society where there are prison guards and there are prisoners—including our own—there are prison guards who are bad and do bad things to individual prisoners. That's not the point of the Kristof piece. The point, he is clear, is that there is a systemic policy of perpetrating mass sexual violence against Palestinians in these prisons, and there is simply no evidence of that, not from the victims, not from the independent third parties, and not from the the so-called defendants themselves.

We now know from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Israel that The New York Times was made aware weeks before publishing Nicholas Kristof’s explosive op-ed that the independent commission, an NGO, was investigating and going to report on Hamas’ systemic use of sexual violence against Israeli women, girls, and men. Remember, initially, we all thought it was just women and girls, and that was horrible enough. We now know Hamas at gunpoint forced men to have sexual relations with family members in their homes, something we really haven’t seen in the world much since Rwanda. Horrible stuff. And The New York Times, according to Israel and the NGO, was made aware that this report was going come out May 12th. The NGO, independent from the government of Israel, asked for permission to run an article detailing its findings in The New York Times. The New York Times responded that they were not interested in running an article on Hamas’ use of sexual violence against Israelis. And then the day before—not a week before, not a month before, not a week after—the day before, on May 11th, The New York Times runs this explosive Kristof piece. Remember, The New York Times had said it was not interested in this subject. Then, the day before the NGO released its report, the paper ran an explosive piece that blamed the victims. Now, the Israelis are the perpetrators of mass systemic sexual violence against Palestinians. It flips everything on its head.

The Honorable @RoyKAltman is in New York City discussing his incredible book “Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law.”

I'm optimistic because I believe in Martin Luther King's admonition to the world, which is that the moral arc of history bends towards justice. King was, until the day he died, an ardent Zionist, and he understood what I think all of us understand, which is that the project of America, which is intimately tied in with the Judeo-Christian value system that forms its core, is the greatest force for good the world has ever known. It's the most just and righteous project the world has ever created. And so I am optimistic about the future of America, and optimistic about its closest and most important ally in the world, the one Jewish state in the world, the land of Israel.

There is a legal test that international law sets that determines whether a people has become a legitimate nation state. It comes from the Montevideo Convention of 1933 and it has four elements: 1. Does it have defined borders? 2. Does it have a defined population? 3. Does it have the capacity of conducting foreign relations? 4. Does it have a single effective government? And the fact of the matter is that Israel satisfies all four factors of that test today. It has defined borders, it has a defined people, it has a foreign ministry with the capacity to conduct foreign relations, and it is governed by a single effective government with a prime minister, a Knesset, and a Supreme Court and judicial system. Israel has met all four elements of that test every single second of every single day of every year since it was founded in 1948. There's no dispute that in 1948 there were defined borders, there was a defined population, there was a single effective government headed by David Ben-Gurion, and that there was a full foreign ministry headed by Moshe Sharett. One thing to note though is that although 140-odd countries around the world have recognized a supposed State of Palestine—and even though a lot of those 140 countries are the ones who are claiming that Israel's founding was illegitimate—that there is also no dispute that the State of Palestine, which doesn't exist, fails the Montevideo test because it fails two out of the four elements. What are those two elements? First, it absolutely does not have defined borders, and by the way, all of the states, the European states that recognized the supposed State of Palestine in 2025, notably in their press releases and thereafter, failed to tell us what the supposed State of Palestine's borders look like because everybody knows that whatever borders the Europeans would be willing to live with, the Palestinians themselves would outright reject. We know that from history where they have rejected any two-state solution at any time when it was offered to them. But second, and more importantly, even if we did create defined borders for them, which we don't, we know that the supposed State of Palestine is not governed by a single government, much less an effective one. Gaza is split in two. Part of it's ruled by the Israeli government, which no one would like to see in charge, and the other part is ruled by Hamas, a US designated terror organization that all of the 140 states that have recognized the State of Palestine have said it can never be in charge of the Palestinian people. And then Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, is also part of it ruled by Israel, and part of it is ruled by a Palestinian authority that is corrupt.

For thousands of years of Jewish history in the Levant, in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the people who lived and governed that land were Jews, who spoke the Hebrew language and who practiced the Jewish religion. There are three buckets of independent evidence that prove this. I like to call them: 1. Rocks in the ground —archeological evidence. 2. Words on the page—documentary evidence. 3. Blood in the veins—DNA evidence. In the law, one piece of evidence is good, two pieces of evidence is great, but when three fully independent pieces of evidence corroborate one another, when they didn't get together and get their stories straight, but they still confirm what one another is saying, that's dispositive proof.

My latest in @TheFP: A Jewish History Heist at the British Museum thefp.com/p/british-museum-i…

Museums shouldn’t postpone talks because “a few miscreants might break the rules.” “We don’t close our banks just because some people might rob them. The solution to rule violators is to punish and deter them, not encourage them with victory.” @RoyKAltman thefp.com/p/british-museum-i…

To have a state, there's a simple test. It's called the Montevideo test. It comes from the Montevideo Convention in 1933, and it's a four-part, four-element test. The four elements are: 1. Do you have a defined population? 2. Do you have defined borders? 3. Do you have the capacity to conduct foreign relations? 4. Do you have a single effective government? There's a couple things to understand about this. The first thing is that Israel, despite being called an illegitimate state, is actually a very old country. I don't mean ancient Israel. I mean, the Israel that was founded in 1948 was founded at a time when there were only 58 countries in the world. It became the 59th state. So people always say, "Oh, this newfangled creation, Israel." No, no, no. Israel's older than roughly two-thirds of all the countries in the world. And in fact, it was created in precisely the same way and at about the same time as many of the decolonized states in the world that were just drawn as lines on the map by European colonialist powers. It's the same thing with many of the Arab countries. Iraq was drawn up that way. Lebanon was definitely drawn up that way. Syria was drawn up that way with no regard for their indigenous, in many cases, local minority populations. Lots of countries in Africa were created this way. Cameroon was created this way. Part of South Africa and Botswana were split off this way. We could talk forever about the dozens of countries that were created just the same way Israel was, and nobody ever protests them because there's no Jews there, right? So there's nothing to protest. The point here is that Israel met in 1948, and has met every second of every day since then until today, all four of the Montevideo Factors.

We need to look at objective, neutral, independent evidence, so long as we can find it. And the good thing is that in the colonization claim, we have three major buckets of objective, neutral, independent evidence that hasn't been tampered with, doesn't have incentive structures, isn't receiving immunity for its testimony, and here's the best thing. It goes back thousands of years. Why is that important? Because we have another rule in the law—it comes up a lot in the hearsay exceptions—where, if you say something that comes about long before the dispute in question arose, we give that extra reliability points because you wouldn’t have expected someone to say something twenty years ago that only became salient when the dispute arose. And this evidence, these three buckets of evidence I'm going tell you about, it goes back thousands of years, long before there was ever such a thing called "Zionism," long before there was ever such a thing called a "Palestinian." The last rule of the law that I want to tell you about is that when adverse party says something favorable about you, again, we give it special credibility. Why? Because we don't expect generally that your adversary should say things that help your cause. So when the adversary says things that help you, again, we pay careful attention to it. All of these factors are at play here. What are the three buckets of neutral, objective, independent evidence? 1. Rocks in the ground 2. Words on the page 3. Blood in the veins Let's go through each briefly:

The biggest and most important ally in this struggle to defeat Hezbollah will be Syria, and we'll learn a lot about whether Hezbollah can survive by whether the Lebanese government is willing to do what it has promised. For the first time in 40 years, the Lebanese government has gathered the strength to be able to stand up for itself and say, "Hezbollah is illegal in the country. We want to have a monopoly on military weapons in the country, and we want to expel the man who used to run the country for 40 years, which is the ambassador from Tehran." So the question is: Will the Lebanese government, working with the new Syrian government, have the willingness, strength, and ability to stop arms transfers from continuing to move through the land corridor across Syria and into Lebanon? If they can do it, then that'll be a sea change for peace in the Middle East for both Arab and Jew alike.

Israel is the most free and diverse country in the entire region. You don’t have to take my word for it. Talk to Israeli Arabs, as I do when I visit Israel, and they will tell you that their socioeconomic mobility, health, life expectancy, and child mortality rates are all better than they would be in any of the 22 Arab countries in the Middle East—or, for that matter, in any of the 57 Muslim-majority countries in the world. Israel is a country of 10 million people, 21% of whom—2.1 million people—are Arab Muslims who share in the same free commercial, civil, and political rights as their Jewish neighbors. There is apartheid being practiced all over the Middle East today. Think for example, of how inconceivable it would be to have a Jewish justice on the Supreme Court in Tehran, or a Jewish general in Damascus, or Jewish lawyers, doctors, or judges in Ramallah or Gaza City. These things are absurd even to consider. But there are Arab Muslim Supreme Court justices in Israel. There are Arab Muslim and Druze and Christian judges, lawyers, and doctors all over the country. There are four major Arab political parties in the Knesset in Israel, who by the way, were part of the governing coalition of the country just four years ago in 2022. If Israel's practicing apartheid, it's doing a real bad job of it.

There’s no doubt that Israel’s war in Gaza was not genocide. It is the least likely urban conflict in modern history to meet the standard legal definition of genocide. And you don't have to take my word for it. Take the word of the High Level Military Group, the HLMG, which is a collection of all the of high level officers and generals from almost all the Western democracies in the world, not just the United States. These people aren't Jews. They have no connection with Israel. They're just generals in militaries around the world. They wrote a report and a brief to the International Criminal Court, the ICC, saying that Israel’s civilian warning system is completely unlike anything any other country has ever been willing to do for the civilian population of an enemy in wartime. Under this system, Israel tells the civilian population of Gaza exactly where it will be striking the next day and then provides humanitarian corridors for them to leave those zones. They also say it is something our own democracies would never be able to do, because our civilian populations would never stomach endangering the lives of our own soldiers by warning the enemy where our sons and daughters will be. Israel's unprecedented efforts to protect the lives of civilians in Gaza has taken a very heavy toll on the IDF. Over 800 Israelis have been killed in Gaza precisely because they warned the civilian population to get out of harm's way.

It's really important to understand a baseline legal principle. A man cannot trespass, a man cannot illegally occupy his own home. The land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has been the home of the Jewish people for thousands of years. We know it because of three buckets of totally independent and objective neutral evidence going back thousands of years. The first bucket is what we call rocks in the ground. This is archeological evidence, black and white stones going back thousands of years, found in many different layers in the geological earth, showing that the people who lived in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea were Jews who practiced the Jewish religion, who spoke the Hebrew language, and who passed on to their children and grandchildren Jewish Hebrew naming conventions, just like the Jews of Israel do today. Second is words on the page. This is documentary proof going back thousands of years, oftentimes written by Israel's ancient enemies. Why is that important? Because it's important to remember that in the law, we always care about what a party says about itself, but we care a lot more about what a party's adversary says about it, because we don't expect a party's adversary to say things that are beneficial to the party. So when an adversary says things that help your cause, we pay special attention. And here, for thousands of years, Israel's ancient enemies, the Romans, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, even the Ottomans and the occupying, invading Muslim forces, took very detailed notes about the people they were ruling in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And guess what? Those were Jews who spoke Hebrew, practiced the Hebrew Jewish religion, and passed on Hebrew names like Eliyahu, David, and Benjamin onto their children and grandchildren. And then third, we have blood in the veins. This is DNA evidence. These are genetic studies, dozens of genetic studies that have been conducted on all the major Jewish populations around the world over the last few decades along many different genetic markers, all confirming not just that Jews all over the world are genetically and intimately connected one to another, but that we all come from a common source, from the Levant, the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and that we broke off from there into our separate diaspora populations 2,000 years ago. And why is that important? Because it corroborates the other two buckets, which tell us that in 70 AD, 2,000 years ago, Titus of Rome, the son of Vespasian the emperor, conquered Jerusalem, burned the temple to the ground, and exiled a huge proportion of the Jewish populations, which then became the diaspora communities around the world, and the blood DNA evidence has proven that too.