Israel on Trial: A Legal and Historical Defense

[ROY ALTMAN] I was there with my father when I was eight, and it started to snow. And I grew up in three places-- Caracas, Israel, Miami. Not a lot of snow in my life. I'd never seen snow before.

And I turned to him, and I said, papi, this is so beautiful. This is so fun. And he turned very grave as like Israelis can get. And he said, fun? You think this is fun?

He goes, you don't understand at all why I'm bringing you to these places. He said, your mother and I bring you and your sister to all these places every year so that you understand the character of the country we brought you to. This is a nation where 600,000 men died so that part of the country who were enslaved could be free.

That's the level of devotion and dedication that a free and fair democracy requires of its citizens. And you know what? I've never forgotten that.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[ALAN KADISH] Welcome to Touro Talks. I'm Doctor Alan Kadish, President of Touro University, and I'm here at our Times Square campus with the Honorable Judge Roy Altman. It's a pleasure to have you here.

[ROY ALTMAN] Thank you for having me.

[ALAN KADISH] Judge Altman is a US district court judge, a nationally recognized voice whose work brings clarity and rigor to some of the most complicated legal issues of our day. He has presided over dozens of complex federal cases and earned a reputation for fairness, analytical precision, and intellectual discipline. A graduate of Yale Law School and a former editor of the Yale Law Review, he's an award-winning writer who's published in a variety of periodicals, journals, and has a strong command of both legal and historical doctrine.

Before taking the bench, Judge Altman served as a decorated federal prosecutor, trying complex cases involving international crime and human trafficking and twice received the Department of Justice's highest honor. He was named federal prosecutor of the year. Later, as the youngest partner in a prestigious litigation firm, he represented clients in some of the most high-profile cases in the world, including those whose families were killed in the Malaysian jet that disappeared over the Indian Ocean.

His writing draws on experience to confront the widespread misapplication of international law. And we're here today particularly to focus on his book, Israel on Trial-- Examining the History of Evidence-- the History, the Evidence, and the Law regarding Israel. So welcome, Judge Altman.

[ROY ALTMAN] Thank you. I'm honored to be here.

[ALAN KADISH] So why don't we start-- I've read the official background biography about you, but where'd you grow up? And how did you get interested in law?

[ROY ALTMAN] Yeah. So first of all, thank you all for being here. Thank you for being here, sir. I'll just tell you my family's story. It's a story that many of you maybe will be familiar with in your own lives.

My grandfather, my father's father, his name was Izu. He was from the kingdom of Romania. And he was part of that area of Transnistria, Eastern Europe, that was hit twice because, when Hitler and Stalin made their agreement, it went first to the Soviet Union and later was taken over in Operation Barbarossa by the Germans. When the Soviets came, they sent my great grandfather, my grandfather's father-- his name was Solomon-- and his wife Amalia to the gulags in Siberia. And my great grandfather was killed there, and my great grandmother was interned there for many years.

So my grandfather Izu became an orphan, and he was sent at 10 years old to live with his Uncle Max in Prague. But when Kristallnacht happened in Germany and it became clear that it was no longer safe there for the Jews, Max sent him on a train and then a boat headed for America. But we weren't taken as many Jews as maybe we should have back then. And he ended up in a place he never knew existed, Venezuela, a country he probably couldn't have spelled and certainly didn't speak the language.

But he was a brilliant man. He spoke seven languages, learned Spanish, took a job as a bellhop at a hotel in Caracas, and, by the end of the war, was the general manager of the hotel. And he went back to Europe to find his family, learned that his father had been killed, that his mother was interned in a camp in Siberia, that his sister Sylvia had been in a concentration camp put in by the Germans and had a baby there. Her name is Claudia, and she's my father's first cousin. She still lives in Caracas today.

And he found his family, and he said, look, there's nothing for us here in Europe anymore. But there's a whole new world out there where people don't hate Jews like they do here. It's called Venezuela. And you should come back with me.

And so they came West with him. And along the way, they met this beautiful French waitress in Paris. My grandfather was not a beautiful man, but he was a schmoozer. This is my grandmother, by the way. And her name was Jeanine.

[LAUGHTER]

Her name was Jeanine, and she had been hidden out by a non-Jewish family during the war. And she was there in 1943 or so. She was invited to a party in an abandoned warehouse, a violation of the curfew that was in place at that time.

And she was dancing at that party with a young man. She thought he was very cute, very handsome. But the man didn't tell her his name and didn't actually speak to her at all.

And then at some point, the Germans came into the party. All the kids ran in every which direction. My grandmother was held in a dumpster behind the-- she hid out in a dumpster behind the party until a dog pulled her out, and all the kids were taken to the jail and interrogated.

And everyone found out that it was my grandmother who was dancing with this young man who, it turned out, was in the French resistance, was a leader in the French resistance. So they took my grandmother to the interrogation room, and they started to ask her about this young man. And she said she didn't know him at all. She was afraid they would find out the truth about her, that she was Jewish.

But they were really concerned with this guy. So they beat her, and they kicked her. And they spit on her until her rib was broken and her eye was swollen shut. And then in the morning, she thought they were going to kill her. And they came to her, and they said, you're free to go.

And so she started to stumble home. And she was in Paris, and she recognizes in the reflection of a store window that one of these guys from the jail is following her, probably because they thought she would lead them to this guy, whoever he was. And so she recognizes what neighborhood of Paris she's in, and she remembers that she's got a friend there whose husband had a gun.

I don't know why that was a good idea, but that's the idea. And so she goes to this house. The friend is there, not the husband. And the German comes in behind her, and he takes the friend, locks her in the bathroom, takes my mother, my grandmother into the bedroom. She was just a teenage girl.

And he starts asking her about this guy. She says she doesn't know. He starts beating her up again. He gets on top of her in the bed, and he starts to rape her.

And then she's on her back, 16, 17 years old, something like that. She pulls his-- I don't know why she thought this was a good idea, but she pulled his Luger out of its holster and she shot him in the ribs. And he fell back onto his back. And then she shot him a couple times in the chest or stomach, and she dropped the gun and went out the window and down the fire escape.

Now, I told this story at a commencement speech I gave a few years ago that she was there in the front row, 1,000 people. And I said, my grandmother killed a Nazi who tried to rape her. And she yelled out, I'm not sure that he died.

[LAUGHTER]

And I was like, abuela, that's not how firearms work. But she went back to this family that had taken her in. And they said, look, we love you, but you can't stay here anymore.

So they had family up in the North of France, near Normandy, and they sent her up there. And so she was there for a year, hiding out until, in 1944, D-day happens. And she gets hidden with a bunch of the villagers in a bunker underground, no radio, no idea who was winning or losing, bombs flying everywhere, eating sardines out of a can, until a soldier opened up the bunker door.

And she didn't know if it was a German or an American until he gave her a stick of Wrigley's chewing gum. And she knew she had been saved because she had heard on the radio that the Americans were giving chewing gum to all-- she would say, all the pretty girls, in Italy and North Africa.

And so she came down. She became a waitress. She met the schmoozy guy from Venezuela who wants to marry her all of a sudden. And she was very French. She was like, I don't think so. We're staying here.

But over time, she became a stewardess on Air France. And she would fly to Miami, to New York, to Venezuela, and she would stay over. And they fell in love. They got married, and they had three boys.

And the oldest was my father. And he was very Zionist. And they moved to Israel when he was 18, and he joined the Air Force. He became an officer. He went to engineering school, became an engineer in the Air Force.

And he met my mother at a hospital. She was a nurse. And he liked her because she spoke Spanish, too, because she was Mexican. She was a Jew from Mexico.

And her father, Kalman, you'll see in the book I always use my middle initial K. I'm named after him. His name was Kalman.

He had a wife and five children in Poland, in the town that they grew up in. And those five children, four boys and a little girl, their picture, black and white, is up in my chambers. It's one of the last things I see before I go into the courtroom to remind me where I come from and what really matters.

And so he had a wife and five children. And they were sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and they were murdered on the day that they arrived. But he built a new life for himself in Mexico. He married a woman in Mexico of Lithuanian descent, and he had four more children, so nine in total. And the youngest of the nine is my mother.

And when she was 10, they moved to Colombia, to Bogota. By the way, I should say that one of my favorite things to do as a federal judge is to naturalize our newest citizens from all over the world. Such a pleasure. I get to do it every few months, much bigger room than this, a few hundred people.

And they're from every country you can imagine. I always say, by the way, it's the only hearing we have in federal court where everybody goes home happy.

[LAUGHTER]

And then I get a list of all the countries that they're from. And I say to them at the beginning, hey, I'm from all those countries too. And they think I'm full of it. But by the end of this story, you see that I'm like from half the countries.

So they moved to Colombia, and so that's why we have Colombian accents when we speak at home because my mother was always talking. She's not going to watch this, is she?

[ALAN KADISH] Oh, no.

[ROY ALTMAN] So then, when they were 17, the family moved to Israel, and she became a nurse. And she met my father, and they married in Israel. And then they moved back to Venezuela to help my grandfather Izu with his business.

And when they had a son, they decided they would name the son after my father's commanding officer, who had been wounded in Israel and who was someone my father really admired. And his name was Roy, which in Hebrew means "my shepherd." The Lord is my shepherd, Psalm 23.

In America, you guys all call me Roy, which is a source of endless frustration to my parents. But that's where my name comes from. And then when my mother was held at gunpoint for the second time, the first time, it's just Venezuela. Second time, we got to go.

She said to my father, we're leaving, whether you like it or not. And we moved to America, to Miami. And we had nothing. And we knew no one.

But my parents always taught us that, in this country, we could be or do anything, so long as you worked hard and treated people with respect. And just about 30 years later, I was being nominated by the President of the United States to be a federal judge, what an incredible honor. And I'll just tell you two more stories, if I can, and then Doctor Kadish can chime in.

Two stories that I think really impacted me about the country, the first is, when I was a little boy, all of our family vacations were the same. Summers were in Israel, and winter break, what you call Christmas vacation or Hanukkah vacation, was all around the American South, going to Civil War battlefields.

And it must have been very strange for all these people to see these Mexican, Venezuelan, Colombian Jews traipsing about Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee in a Toyota Previa. You remember that car? Looked like a Buffalo.

But we loved it. And we've been to every battlefield of Gettysburg, Antietam, Chancellorsville, and 100 others you never knew existed. And when I was eight years old, we went to Chattanooga in Tennessee. Anybody been to Chattanooga before? One person. One person loves America, I guess.

[LAUGHTER]

But Chattanooga is a very important place in American history. And the Union had lost battle after battle, and at Chattanooga, the Union soldiers were arrayed at the bottom of Missionary Ridge, an elevated ground. And the Confederates were up at the top, 30,000 of them or so.

And the order came down. Hey, we're not going to get slaughtered and lose another battle, so you're not to charge up the hill. But it just shows you how one person can change the course of history.

There was a 17-year-old boy who had lied about his age to get into the Union Army because he cared so much about freeing the slaves. And his name was Arthur MacArthur. Ridiculous name, right? But he would become the father of Douglas MacArthur, the great general in World War II and Korea.

And he was standing at the bottom of Missionary Ridge when one of the soldiers who was the standard bearer holding the flag was shot and killed. And the flag of America hit the ground. And he just couldn't bear it. So he took the flag, and he charged up the hill by himself. Those of you who have teenage boys know where this is coming from.

And he charged up the hill by himself with the flag. And all the American soldiers below saw the flag running up the hill. They figured, I guess the orders must have changed. And 50,000 Americans charged up the hill behind him. And the Confederates fled, and they won the day.

And he was pinned with the Medal of Honor on top of Missionary Ridge, the youngest American at the time ever to win the Medal of Honor. And there's a plaque commemorating all this up on Missionary Ridge. And I was there with my father when I was eight. And it started to snow.

And I grew up in three places, Caracas, Israel, Miami. Not a lot of snow in my life. I'd never seen snow before. And I turned to him, and I said, papi, this is so beautiful. This is so fun.

And he turned very grave as like Israelis can get. And he said, fun? You think this is fun? He goes, you don't understand at all why I'm bringing you to these places.

He said, your mother and I bring you and your sister to all these places every year so that you understand the character of the country we brought you to. This is a nation where 600,000 men died so that part of the country who were enslaved could be free. That's the level of devotion and dedication that a free and fair democracy requires of its citizens.

And you know what? I've never forgotten that. And so when I was 34 years old and the president intended to nominate me to be a federal judge, people said, you're crazy. You got your whole life ahead of you to make money. You got two kids coming.

I was representing the passengers on the Malaysian jet that disappeared, which you probably know about, a horrible case, in federal court in front of Ketanji Brown Jackson, who's a friend and became a friend and is a wonderful judge, now on the Supreme Court of the United States. You probably know that. Amazing, amazing experience.

And for me, it was a no brainer. This is what we require of our citizens, is to devote themselves completely to the country. And the second and final story I'll tell you is I started this story by telling you about Izu, my grandfather from Romania. So I want to tell you about the last time I saw him.

It was 2003, and he was dying of cancer in Caracas. And my father called me and said that he was very ill. And I was playing football and baseball at Columbia at the time, not very Jewish of me. I understand.

And he said, look, I know you're very busy. But if you ever want to see him again, this is your last chance. So I talked to the coaches, and I worked things out. And I came down to Venezuela for the last time to see my grandfather with my father.

And if you know anything-- now everybody on the internet is an expert in Venezuelan and Israeli history. But if you know anything about Venezuelan history, I get people all the time telling me what's best for Venezuelans. I don't know how they know what's best for Venezuelans.

But if you know anything about Venezuelan history, Hugo Chávez, the dictator who now on TikTok is the good guy in the story-- I'm not sure how that happened. Him and the Palestinians, they're the good guys.

So in 1998, he comes to power, and he gets one five-year term. And the constitution is clear. You can only have one five-year term. So he comes in 2003. But he's a self-respecting autocrat. He's not going to take that lying down.

So he petitions to run again. And the Supreme Court, to their credit, says no, the Constitution is clear. You can run for only one five-year term. So what does he do? He packs the court with all of his buddies. He petitions for reconsideration. And what do you know? The Supreme Court at this time says, not only did we get it wrong, you can run again. But actually you can run as many times as you like until the day that you die.

And by the way, that's what he did. He destroyed the country. He was president until 2013 when he was finally taken from us and died of cancer in 2013. Anyway, after this decision from the Supreme Court comes down, a million Venezuelans take to the streets to protest. Now, you should know that when we Venezuelans say a million, we mean like 100,000. But it was a lot of people.

And those protests happened to coincide with my visit back to Venezuela. And I remember-- I'm just a teenager. I'm in college. And we're in the apartment with my grandfather, and he's in a wheelchair. He was a giant of a man, by the way, as you may have assumed. But he weighed now 85 pounds. If you've ever seen somebody get eaten apart by cancer, you know what that's like. He was pale. He was weak. He was in a wheelchair.

And my father was dealing with his affairs as a lawyer or accountant or something. And my grandfather said to me, take me out onto the balcony. So I wheeled him out. We went out to the balcony and all the protests were there below. And he said, let's play chess. He had taught me to play chess as a little boy. And so I set up the pieces, and he was too weak to move them. So I had to move them for him. I didn't cheat, though. But I was winning, I'll let you know.

And he says, your father tells me you're going to law school. And I said, I am. He said, what law school do you want to go to? I said, well, I want to go to Yale. It's the best law school in the country other than Touro. But I don't know that I'll get in. It's very hard to get in. And we talked about other things. I remember he said to me, what kind of lawyer do you want to be?

And I said, I don't know. I'm just a kid. I'm just playing-- I care about football a lot. And then he lifted his arm like this. He had a really-- I just remember it was like a really bony finger. And he pointed it out at the crowd and he said, oh, but always remember, this is what happens to a country when good people don't serve it. And then he got started to cough, and we brought him inside. And the next day, we went home. I never spoke to him again. He died a week or two after that. It was the last thing this guy who had saved our family would ever say to me.

And so again, I'll just tell you that this opportunity to serve my country as a judge, which was the precipitating factor bad judges in the collapse of the Venezuelan civil society, has been the great honor and privilege of my life. And I'm just pinching myself every day that I get the chance to serve you all in this really special and blessed way. I know that was a very long answer to your question.

[ALAN KADISH] That was a great American story. It really was, and it was just unbelievable.

[ROY ALTMAN] Thank you all. Thank you all for being here.

[ALAN KADISH] The only part that I wasn't crazy about is you made a big deal about the fact that you were a college athlete, which was very impressive, actually. Except then you said it was at Columbia.

[LAUGHTER]

And I went to Columbia. When I got to Northwestern, the president and I used to fight about who had the worst football team. Northwestern has turned it around since then, but I'm not sure about Columbia.

[ROY ALTMAN] Actually, you should know that Columbia's football team has been OK. But the baseball team, since I've left-- I don't know if you guys have followed-- has won the Ivy League Championship in like three or four years in a row. Nothing to do with me. I had to leave for them to become good.

[LAUGHTER]

[ALAN KADISH] Well, you did better than I did, and I never played anything. But we're here to actually-- that story really provides a backdrop for trying to understand why you wrote this book and what this incredible book tries to do. And although maybe this is oversimplifying the book, I'd like to suggest that there's four or five themes which you raise in the book that I wanted to try to let our audience, both in person and on the web, hear about. So if it's OK with you, let me try to go through each of those in order.

So the first point you make is what I would classify, to summarize, is Jews are an Indigenous people to the land of Israel. Now that should be obvious to a lot of people. But of course it hasn't been obvious lately, has it? So tell me a little bit about-- you're obviously an attorney, a very successful one, great judge. But you did a bit of a history lesson there. So just tell us a little bit in just a few short points about what the evidence is that Jews are an Indigenous people to Israel.

[ROY ALTMAN] Yeah, so just to say, I didn't write the book as a judge, OK? I wrote the book-- I think the story I told you is important because it is the prism through which I wrote the book. I wrote the book as an American who loves this country and is just so deeply grateful for the rule of law-based system that we have here, which is a system that's based on the truth.

And I think nowhere is the truth so missing, as in the claim pervasive everywhere, that Jews somehow Stole the land of Palestinians when the Jews are the Indigenous people of that land. The Palestinian Muslim Arabs are the ones who invaded the land in 639, not just Israel, by the way. They invaded and displaced hundreds of other peoples, you should know-- the Amazighs of Morocco. Nobody protests about the Amazighs on Columbia's campus, they there are displaced Indigenous population displaced by the Muslim Arabs in North Africa.

Obviously the Zoroastrians and the Yazidis and the Rohingyas, the Kurds, I mean, there are dozens and dozens of peoples like this. The Jews were just one of these peoples. But how do we begin to address the claim that Jews are colonists in their own land? Well, first of all, there's the legal principle, which is a man cannot trespass into his own home.

Second of all, there's the definitional principle. In the law, a word or phrase or concept must mean the same thing with respect to the Jews or Blacks or gays or whites, as it means with respect to everybody else. That's the baseline principle of the law, right? It must mean the same thing to everybody. You can't have a speed limit that says 35 miles an hour. And when a Black person drives through it at 34 miles an hour, he gets pulled over, right? That's an unjust system.

So we can't have a word that says colonization means x for everybody else and y for the Jews. So what does colonization mean? Well, we have a definition. Much scholarship has been written on it. And we have obvious examples. There are two kinds of colonization in the world. There's extractive colonization. That's an empire that comes in extracts people, like slaves, or gold, minerals, or other resources like tobacco and cotton in order to enrich the economy and the empire of the home country.

Second, there's settler colonialism. A people flees some kind of oppression or whatever, or they're sent by their government and they come and displace the local population, again, in order to build out the empire of the home country. Both kinds of colonization have one essential ingredient, and that is the foreignness of the colonizing population. The colonizing population doesn't speak the same language. They don't practice the same religion. They don't have the same culture, and they don't have the same naming conventions for their children as the Indigenous population.

Some examples. When the English come to America, they're practicing a religion, Christianity, that had never been practiced in America before. They're speaking a religion-- excuse me, a language, English, that had never been spoken in America before. And they're passing on to their children names, like John Winthrop, for example, that are purely foreign English names, even 100 years later, in fact. They were giving their children names like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, which are not Indigenous to the land at all, right?

Look at Spain. You come to America. You practice the Catholic religion. You speak the Spanish language. You name your children Simon Bolivar. This is what colonization looks like. There is obviously no ancient lineage of British kings and queens ruling Virginia and North Carolina, who practiced Christianity and spoke English and named their kids George and John and Thomas thousands of years ago.

There's obviously no ancient lineage of Spanish kings and queens who ruled Peru and Colombia and Mexico thousands of years ago and spoke Spanish and practiced the Catholic religion. That didn't exist, right? But when you look at the objective evidence about Israel, and I say objective is important, because so often we get some guy who comes in and says, oh, Israel did this or the Palestinians did this.

We have to remember, people have all kinds of incentive structures to say things on TikTok. And we're not doing a good enough job of scrutinizing those incentives. And I hope we'll talk about this later. But I'll just preview it by saying, when you come into a courtroom and you point your finger at the defendant and you say he did it, we don't just end the trial there.

We let the other side's lawyer come in and say, hey, isn't it true that the government gave you immunity for your testimony? Isn't it true that your wife, who was illegally here, was given a visa to be able to remain in the country so long as you testified for the government? You may still believe the witness, but it's important to know that he has these incentives. We're not doing that with people who are coming on the internet and saying x, y, or z, or about Israel or Venezuela or the Palestinians.

So here's the point. 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 from 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. Comes up a lot in the hearsay exceptions, where if you say something that comes about long before the dispute in question arose, you said something 10, 20 years ago-- the dispute happened last month-- well, we give that extra reliability points. Because you wouldn't have expected to say something 20 years ago that only became salient when the dispute arose.

And this evidence, there's three buckets of evidence I'm going to 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 the Palestinian. So we give it special reliability. The last rule of the law that I want to tell you about is that when an 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, right? All of these factors are at play here. What are the three buckets of neutral, objective, independent evidence? I like to summarize them by saying that there are rocks in the ground, words on the page, blood in the veins. Let's go through each briefly.

Rocks in the ground. This is archeological evidence going back thousands of years, oftentimes created by Israel's ancient adversaries, detailing and documenting that the people who lived and were Indigenous to the land of Israel were Jews who spoke Hebrew, practiced the Jewish religion, didn't eat pork, for example, kept the Sabbath. There's an ancient papyrus scroll from 400 BC that says that you shall not eat of the leaven between the 15th and 21st of Nisan.

That's obviously a reference to the fact that Jews do not eat leavened bread on Passover, which comes about between the 15th and 21st of Nisan. That's 2,500 years ago. Just as reference, Muhammad isn't born until 570 AD. That's over 1,000 years later. Islam isn't a thing in the world until 610 AD. Arab Muslims don't invade Israel until 639 AD. That means that Jews were practicing the Jewish religion, speaking the Hebrew language with Jewish kings and queens thousands of years before Islam was even a thing in the world.

So that's the first bucket. Second bucket is words on the page. Documentary proof going back thousands of years. This isn't just the Romans, the Babylonians, the Assyrians. This is all the way up into modern times. The invading Muslims, who occupied the land of Israel for hundreds of years and subjugated the local Jewish population, passed dozens of laws about their Jewish subjects, detailing who they were, what they practiced, what their names were, and guess what.

Again, for thousands of years, these Jews who lived in Israel practiced the Jewish religion. They spoke the Hebrew language, and they gave their children the same names that we pass on to our children today-- Eliyahu and Yaakov and David and Benjamin. And then third, blood in the veins. This is a really important one, because we're hearing now that this conspiracy theory that the Jews of today are not descended from the Jews of ancient times.

There have been dozens of genetic tests conducted on all the major Jewish populations in the world over the last few decades. In fact, I just gave a talk in San Antonio. One of the major scientists doing these examinations was a doctor named Dr. Gil Atzmon. And I was giving the talk in San Antonio. And a guy comes up to me, he goes, Judge, I really want to meet you. On his name tag, it says Gil Atzmon.

And I said, Dr. Atzmon, I'm so honored to meet you. You're a hero. And he said he was shocked. And I said, you're the one who did all these genetic studies. He was like, well, no, I'm actually in investments here in Texas, but I just happen to have the same name. And I was like, this is the most disappointing introduction I've ever had to make.

But the point is these genetic studies conducted by Jewish and non-Jewish scientists on different genetic markers over many years on different genetic-- excuse me, Jewish populations around the world confirmed several things. The first is that all the major Jewish populations of the world, the Syrian Jews, Iraqi Jews, European Jews, South American Jews are all intimately and genetically closely related to one another.

And second, and very importantly, that we split off from one another 2,000 years ago, according to the DNA evidence. And why is that important? Because the last rule of law I want to talk to you about is that one piece of evidence is good. Two piece of evidence is great. But when different and disparate and disconnected pieces of evidence corroborate one another without having talked to one another, without having gotten in the same room and planned it together, you know that it has to be true.

And the documentary evidence, the words on the page, and the archeological evidence, the rocks in the ground, fully corroborate that genetic story, the blood and the veins, because they tell us that in 70 AD-- I know you guys are law students mostly. And so you're not very good at math, neither am I. But my law clerks tell me that's 2,000 years ago.

Titus of Rome, the son of Vespasian, the emperor of all Rome, entered Jerusalem, burned down the temple, and pushed out and exiled most of the Jewish population of Judea at that time, which then formed the diaspora communities around the world, which the split began 2,000 years ago. That's how we have to begin to address with reason and logic and common sense, not emotion or diatribe or vitriol, the claims that are made.

They're preposterous claims. They're false on every level. But people on TikTok believe them, because on TikTok you don't get an analysis. You just get some guy telling you what he thinks you want to hear. And that's what you believe. And so we need to be armed with the ammunition we need to be able to use reason, evidence, and common sense to rebut these claims.

[ALAN KADISH] That was great. But I'll tell you, it's not always a guy on TikTok. It's often a bot on TikTok. And we're all familiar with the TikTok controversy. Because of some of the concerns you raised, we actually banned TikTok about 2 and 1/2 years ago. We're close to bringing it back on, but we were concerned about exactly what you described, that people on TikTok can say anything to influence people who don't know better and create a false impression. So with that tremendous historical argument that you provided, as a lawyer, by the way, despite the fact you claim you didn't write the book as a lawyer.

[ROY ALTMAN] Well, I just said I didn't write it as a judge. I wrote it as a lawyer and as a person who loves the country.

[ALAN KADISH] Which is great. So the next point you make in the book is debunking the claim that Israel is not a legitimate country. So tell us a little bit about international law and custom about what defines a country and why Israel is a country par excellence.

[ROY ALTMAN] So there's a well accepted test for how a nation becomes a state. One of the things that we should, by the way, that gets lost in the discussion is that anthropologists and linguists have actually identified over 7,000 different nations, separate nations in the world. Our Native American nations, for example. I mentioned some of them before. Tibetans and Yazidis and Rohingyas and Kurds and Amazighs, none of whom have their own state.

In fact, there are only 193 states represented at the United Nations in the world. That means that-- again, math, a little bit of math-- over 98% of the nations of the world are not represented in their own state. So when people say, How come the Palestinians are the only people who don't have their own state? there's a Lot of answers to that, which we'll get to. They do have a state. It's called Jordan. We'll get to that.

But the point is that the vast majority of the nations on Earth don't have a state. The Jews used to not have a state. 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, all right? And the four elements are, do you have a defined population? Do you have defined borders? Do you have the capacity to conduct foreign relations? And do you have a single effective government?

Now, there's a couple of things to understand about this. The first thing, and what the book is really about, 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-- more math, I'm so sorry-- than 67% 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, with no protests about them being legitimate on Columbia's campus. Most of the Arab countries, by the way, 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.

By the way, 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. But here's the point. The point is that Israel met in 1947/48 and has met every second of every day since until today, all four of the Montevideo factors.

It has a defined population. It has defined borders. It certainly has the capacity of conducting foreign relations, and it has a single effective government. Now, sometimes the Israelis don't like their own government. Neither do we sometimes, right? But that doesn't mean it's not a single effective governing coalition.

By the way, one of the things about the six claims they make about Israel in the book, what I realized in writing the book, is that the claims don't exist ex nihilo. The claims don't just arise out of nothing. Each of the claims is strategically created to put a mirror up against Jewish suffering. What do I mean by that? They claim that Jews are engaging in genocide in Gaza. Hopefully, we'll get to that. A preposterous claim by any definition. Jews are the people against whom a real genocide has taken place.

They claim that Jews colonized the land of Israel. We've already talked about that. There has been colonization in the land of Israel. It just wasn't the Jews who were doing any of the colonizing. It was the Muslim Arabs themselves who colonized it in the seventh century and ever since. They claim that Israel is an apartheid state. We may talk about that. Another preposterous claim, as we'll discuss, but there is apartheid being practiced every single day in the Levant and in the Middle East.

850,000 Jews were ethnically cleansed from their homes, communities that existed for thousands of years all across the Arab world in the 20th century. No protests about that ethnic cleansing anywhere in the world. In the Palestinian territories, it would be absurd to have anything resembling what you have in Israel today. Remember, in Israel, we have Muslim political parties, Muslim citizens with free and equal rights, a Muslim Supreme Court justice.

In fact, we're about to begin, you're going to see, the October 7 trials-- trials of hundreds of October 7 terrorists, Muslim Arabs who killed Jews in their homes and at their dance parties. And many of the judges who will preside will be Arab judges presiding in the Jewish state of Israel. Of course, it would be inconceivable to think of a Jewish judge, Supreme Court justice or political party in Ramallah or Gaza City, right? It's absurd even to conceive of it. So there is apartheid being practiced every day in the Levant, the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It's just not the Jews.

[ALAN KADISH] So since you brought it up, let's spend a moment talking about apartheid. What's the practical and legal definition of apartheid? And let's drill down on what you just said about apartheid, and why it's absurd to suggest that it's happening in Israel.

[ROY ALTMAN] I just want to finish one thought, if I could, about the supposed Palestinian state, which over 140 countries in the world have recognized. It fails, unquestionably fails two of the four Montevideo factors. It doesn't have defined borders. In fact, no country that's recently recognized the Palestinian state has been willing to say what the borders are because everybody knows it doesn't have them.

But second, even if it did, it doesn't have a single government, much less an effective one. Gaza is ruled partly by Hamas, a terrorist organization that no government in the world, other than maybe Iran, wants to recognize as the legitimate government of the Palestinians. The rest of Gaza is run by the Israelis, which no one, including the Israelis, wants to recognize as the legitimate government of the Palestinians.

In Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, part of it's ruled by the Palestinian Authority, a corrupt and ineffectual government that loses every election that's ever been done among the Palestinians, and which polls show is deeply unpopular among the Palestinians even today. And the rest, again, is ruled by Israelis, which, again, no one wants to see in charge. So the Palestinians are ruled by three governments, not one, and not one of them is legitimate or effective.

So as for apartheid state, "apartheid" is an Afrikaans word that comes from the Afrikaans word for separateness, "apart hood." And South Africa, in fact, was marked by tremendous and toxic and evil separateness. Blacks couldn't vote with the same rights as whites. They couldn't serve in the government on equal terms with whites. They couldn't become judges and justices like whites could.

They couldn't go to the same beaches or eat at the same restaurants, or ride in the same rail cars, et cetera, et cetera. Sounds familiar, right? It's a lot like Jim Crow South here in America. Israel is a country of 10 million citizens, 21% of whom are Arab Muslim citizens who have free and equal rights in the Jewish state of Israel. In fact, as I said to you before, there are four major Arab political parties represented in the Knesset. That means they get over 3.4%, I think, of the popular vote, each of them.

And in 2022, those four Arab parties were invited to join the governing coalition of Israel. That means that the country was actually run and governed by Muslim Arabs in part. Think of that for a second. Was there ever a time in apartheid South Africa where anyone would have allowed Blacks to govern the country? Imagine a time in Jim Crow America. Would there ever have been a Black governor or Senator or Supreme Court justice in Alabama or Mississippi?

The question is absurd, even to ask, OK? But there's more, because it's also religious rights. In the National Library of Israel, which I don't know if anybody has been. It's just built, beautiful building. They built three sanctuaries, equal size. A Jewish synagogue in the building. Next to it, a Christian church, a sanctuary room. And next to it, a Muslim prayer room. In the Jewish state of Israel in the National Library. Muslims and Christians pray side by side and on equal terms with their Jewish citizens.

Any Muslim in Israel can become a doctor, dentist, lawyer, nurse on equal terms with their Jewish citizens. And in fact, as the book details, if you look at matriculation and graduation rates at some of the best universities in the country, you see that the affirmative action programs Israel has implemented over many years have begun to bear tremendous fruit in the country.

In fact, the rates of graduation among Arab Muslims in schools like nursing and dentistry are about 40%, 47%, sometimes up to 50% of the graduation classes, even though Muslims only comprise about 20% or 21% of the country. If Israel is practicing apartheid, it is doing a real bad job of it.

[ALAN KADISH] So you talked a little bit about the healthcare system in Israel. I did some work in the healthcare system in Israel. And when Lancet had a series of articles criticizing Israel essentially for being an apartheid state, my old mentor, Karl Skorecki, actually invited the editor to visit and showed him exactly what you suggested. That in the healthcare system in Israel, everyone is treated equally to the extent that anyone is treated equally in a healthcare nihilism system.

And that so many of the providers, so many of the patients, so many of the nurses are Arabs, Arab Muslims, Christians. And it really is an integrated healthcare system which does its best to try to take care of everyone. And parenthetically, Karl actually was the first one who did DNA studies actually on priests. And the story of how he came up with that study is a story of Karl's creativity.

Karl is a priest. And so on holidays in the United States or outside of Israel, and every week in Israel, the priests go up to bless the people. And so Karl was up blessing the people with Ethiopians people, Chinese Jews, African Jews, and said something seems strange here. We all look so different. But Carl, of course, had the techniques to do the DNA analysis. And he found out that the priests who were up there with him all had a series of genetic markers which had greater than 95% fidelity, as saying that they were all related to each other.

[ROY ALTMAN] Amazing.

[ALAN KADISH] And so he was one of those that championed the cause of the fact that the healthcare system in Israel is actually truly integrated and is about as far from apartheid as one could possibly imagine.

[ROY ALTMAN] I'm glad you mentioned the Ethiopians, too, because there are Black people who are fighting and dying in this war in Gaza, but they're just on one side of the struggle. And that's the Israeli side. Because starting in the 1980s and then into the 1990s, Israel spent an enormous amount of money and effort, endangered the lives of its soldiers and pilots to go into a real genocidal area, the conflict in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Southern Sudan, to rescue ultimately hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians whom they brought to Israel and fully integrated into Israeli society.

And so you now have Black Jews who are represented in every hierarchy in Israeli society. They're generals in the military. They're judges in the courts. They're doctors in the clinics. They're represented in the Knesset. And in fact, I recently brought judges to Israel. And one of the judges was a Black American from Virginia. And he came back, and he said-- on the airport on the way back, he said, I expected to learn a lot of things. He said, the thing I never expected to learn was that this was the most diverse place I had ever been to in my life.

And he is right. Anybody who's ever been to Israel-- it's absurd that now we hear people call it a white supremacist state. Anybody who's ever been to Israel knows that everywhere you see intermarriage, brown Jews, Black Jews, white Jews, in fact white Jews, Ashkenazi Jews only comprise between 20% and 25%. Recent estimates suggest 23% of the population as a whole, so I'm glad you raised that issue as well.

[ALAN KADISH] So let's pivot from there to the genocide issue, which you just talked about. You mentioned that if Israel was practicing apartheid, it's doing a really bad job. So one point, which you alluded to in the book was that Israel has been accused of genocide in Gaza for about three decades, but the population in Gaza has skyrocketed. So if Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza, they're doing a really bad job as well.

[ROY ALTMAN] Yeah. I mean, we should always, again, start with the principle that we should start with a historical analog, right? Let's look at real genocides in history. And the genocide in Rwanda, for example, 30 days after the genocide began, there were 800,000 fewer Rwandans than there were when the genocide began, right? There's a delta there-- 800,000 people are missing. That's what a genocide looks like.

In the Holocaust in Europe, there were 18 million Jews in Europe before the war. Six or seven years later, there are 12 million Jews. Again, I know you guys aren't that good at math, but that's a delta of 6 million missing Jews. This is what genocides look like. This is a telltale sign. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, there were Palestinians in Gaza at that time.

Now, it's important, again, when you're judging a legal claim or assessing a legal claim as a lawyer or a juror in a courtroom to say, do I believe this person? And one of the things that we always tell jurors is, ask yourself, has the person told you a lie before? Well, it's important to remember that the Palestinians and their advocates on campus don't just think there's been one genocide against the Palestinians since 2023.

They claim if you go back to the record as the book details, citing articles and college campuses all over this country, that there have been five genocides against the Palestinians of Gaza since the 2005 withdrawal. Each of those supposed "genocides," by the way, occurred when Israel was attacked and Israel reciprocated in a war it didn't want and hadn't started.

Some of them involved just the killing of a couple dozen Hamas terrorists. But the point is that despite having supposedly five genocides perpetrated against it in just the last 21 years, the population of Gaza has gone in that same time frame from 1 million to 2.3 million today, according to the most recent CIA survey. Again, that's just not what genocides look like in history. And we need to apply the same rules to Israel as we apply to everybody else.

But that's a little bit facetious, to be honest and superficial. Why do I say that? Because Israel has more people today than it did on October 7. In fact, there's a population boom in Israel, which is healthy and good to know. But that doesn't mean that there wasn't genocide in Israel on October 7. Remember, we have to stick to the legal definition that takes place. The legal definition is, does your government have, the governing authority, have the specific intent to eliminate an entire people as such, in whole or in part, because of their religion, their race, their ethnicity, et cetera?

In other words, we have to show that the Israeli government intended to eliminate the Palestinian people of Gaza as such as Palestinians, not to kill Hamas terrorists among them. Not that there were collateral consequences to legitimate military strikes. Not that there weren't accidents. Not that there aren't Israeli soldiers who are bad and do bad things. Every army in the world has bad soldiers that do bad things, including our Army, the American Army.

Every army in the world makes mistakes in the field. We killed Pat Tillman, we now know, an Arizona Cardinals football player. We didn't kill him because we were genocidal in Afghanistan. We killed him by accident because in the fog of war, especially in asymmetric war where the enemy hides within and underneath the civilian population.

These decisions are difficult and they're dangerous in real time. Israel accidentally killed three of its escaped hostages, very painful stuff, by accident, not because it's genocide, but because even the best armies in the field aren't perfect all the time. So what do we mean by genocide? Genocide is actually a word created by a Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin in the wake of the Holocaust, to try to encapsulate the cataclysmic events of the last decade, the real genocide, the ultimate crime of crimes against the Jews.

And he had in mind, and the definition that's been codified, has in mind, a purposeful attempt to eradicate an entire people. Well, let's look at the facts. Israel has the most sophisticated civilian warning system the world has ever known. Don't just take my word for it. The High Level Military Group, the HLMG, a collection of high-level officers and generals in almost every Western army in the world-- not Jews, not Israeli, not paid by Israelis, although the Qataris are trying to prove that they are-- has submitted a brief to the ICC, the International Criminal Court, detailing the extent to which Israel goes to preserve and protect the lives of the enemy's civilian population.

That includes, of course, providing more humanitarian aid-- food, water, fuel, and medicine that any army has ever provided to an enemy civilian population in warfare before. That includes when Israel heard that there may have been a polio outbreak in parts of the Southwest of Gaza in Al-Mawasi, bringing their doctors into Al-Mawasi and vaccinating-- I think it's two shots. I'm not a doctor, but as I understand it, it's two shots, polio, 98% or 99% of the children of Al-Mawasi.

By the way, Israel is not submitting an invoice. They're not going to be reimbursed for the polio vaccines they provided. And that includes, of course, the tremendous efforts they have undergone sending 20 million text messages, 20 million flyers, phone calls, and social media posts warning the civilian population of Gaza, exactly where the next days and the days after that offensive will be.

The HLMG says not only is it the most pervasive and sophisticated civilian warning system the world has ever known. Not only, they say, is it completely incompatible with genocide. Again, let's think of the story I told you at the beginning-- my mother's half brothers and sisters being pushed into the gas chamber of Auschwitz. Were the Germans trying to warn those little boys and girls not to get into the gas chamber?

Of course not. The question is absurd, even to conceive of it. The whole point of a genocide is to induce the civilians into harm's way. That's why they gave them bars of soap and had them take their clothes off and built fake showerheads in the ceilings, so that the children and civilians would go in willingly thinking it was a shower, not a death camp, right?

So not only is it the most sophisticated warning system the world has ever known, not only is it completely incompatible with any claim of genocide, but the HLMG says this. It's very important. Our armies, they say, our own Western armies would never be able to implement such a system, because our civilian populations would never tolerate it. What do they mean?

I was a football player, as you heard. Not a particularly good one, but I do love football. The most important thing in war, as in football, is offensive surprise, right? If the other side knows your plays, you're going to lose. Israel every day in Gaza gives up offensive surprise. It tells not just the Palestinian civilians, but Hamas, where it is going to send its soldiers tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.

And in doing so, it endangers the lives of its own sons and daughters. Remember, Israel has nuclear weapons. It has complete air superiority over Gaza. The Gazans don't have F-35s. It could have easily killed every person in Gaza, a true genocide on October 8, if it wanted to. Instead, it warns the civilian population to get out of harm's way. It builds them whole camps with food purveyors, medical providers, vaccination clinics, and, of course, fuel for over 1.2 million Palestinians.

And then, even though it knows that Hamas has been lying in wait, that it's been laying in ambush, that it's been booby trapping the buildings it knew Israel was entering, it sends its sons and daughters door to door, thereby killing over 800 Israeli boys and girls, all in the name of protecting and preserving the enemy civilian population. No other army the world has ever done that. No other army in the world will ever do that.

And here's the last point I'll make. It's really important that as a society who cares about truth and the law and fairness and justice, that we reserve the actual crime of crimes labels for real genocides, for armies that really violate the laws of war. Why? Because in the future, armies might say to themselves, hey, Israel did all this stuff. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of the lives of their soldiers in order to preserve the Palestinian civilian population. And they still got hailed before the ICJ and ICC on false and preposterous claims of genocide.

Why are we going to do that? Let's just blow everybody up. Save a lot of money. Save the lives of our soldiers. And yeah, we'll be accused of genocide maybe, but we're going to be accused of genocide anyway. So why not just limit the deaths of our soldiers and the outpouring of money and get it all done with? This is why it's really dangerous to claim that genocides are happening when they are not.

[ALAN KADISH] Well, you make a really important point because there are two countries right now that seem to be indiscriminately firing missiles into civilian areas, not worrying about the harm that they may cause, at least to Russia and Iran. And that's caused tremendous damage to civilian populations and infrastructure.

[ROY ALTMAN] Have you seen protests on campuses about those, have you?

[ALAN KADISH] Only here. No, we don't have protests on campus. But I think the fundamental point he made throughout this book is a very important one, both legally, practically, and morally, which is the point that a lot of us have tried to make, but never as eloquently as you did in the book, which is that Israel's been treated unequally, unfairly, and actually, I would suggest, is a victim of racism, because of that.

And so it's not only the rules of law, but it's the definition of racism and how people ought to be treated fairly and equally under the law. And in society that's at risk for allowing this demonization of Israel to continue. So I want to thank you for writing this incredible book to try to counteract those claims and in a way that I don't think I've ever read before. You've really managed to do it in a straightforward, logical way, as you have throughout your entire career-- pervasively, persuasively, carefully, and very readably.

And so I think this is a book that I hope a lot of people will read, including a lot of my colleagues and a lot of people on college campuses throughout the country. Because I think it can make a real difference in trying to counteract the destructive influences, not just on Jews, but on the fabric of American society, that this hatred of Jews and hatred of Israel has produced. So congratulations on the book.

[ROY ALTMAN] Thank you so much, Dr. Kadish.

[ALAN KADISH] And thank you so much.

[ROY ALTMAN] Thank you for having me. Thank you all for being here.

[APPLAUSE]

[MUSIC PLAYING]