The War on Israel

Historically, people have believed all kinds of crazy things about Jews—from the medieval blood libel to contemporary conspiracy stories about Israel training spy dolphins for military purposes. The latest entry in this genre came from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who lent a patina of respectability to Hamas propaganda by alleging that Israeli prison guards routinely perpetrate sexual violence against Palestinian detainees, including by training dogs to rape them. That lurid accusation traces back to the same propaganda ecosystem—one Hamas-affiliated NGO in particular—that accuses Jews of stealing Palestinians’ organs, drinking their blood, literally vaporizing their victims, and committing inexplicably inhumane acts. Whatever skepticism Kristof had developed in his long career as a world-traveling opinion writer failed to kick in, and he and his editors credulously shepherded the claims to publication.  

Perhaps the story was too good to check, or it served the purpose of evening the score between the obscenely evil terrorist group Hamas and an American ally. (A video accompanying the op-ed suggests it’s the latter.) Whatever the motivation, Kristof, like others who have fallen for similar tales in the past, did not subject what he heard to appropriate scrutiny. Is it possible that Jews, who believe it is a grave sin to consume blood, are mixing it into their matzah? Did former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert really corroborate the accusation of rape dogs? Scrutinizing proffered evidence like this can sound legalistic, which tends to make Kristof’s critics seem heartless. But determining the facts is logically prior to determining how we ought to feel about them. And it turns out that Kristof’s evidence—testimony from that conspiratorial NGO, Hamas affiliates, and anonymous purported victims—was unreliable, untested, and certainly inadequate to substantiate the accusation that Israel has a state policy of sexual violence against detainees.  

Certain questions, as this debacle reveals, are basic to finding the truth: whether witnesses were reputable or fabulists; whether the allegations rested on hearsay or firsthand knowledge; and whether any plausible burden of proof had been met. With his own indictment put on trial, Kristof did the opposite of what legal reasoning would counsel. The concept of a “movant’s burden” is ancient, as pithy Latin and Hebrew quotes attest: one who wishes to change the status quo bears the onus of proof. Yet having aired an extraordinary claim, Kristof sneered at skeptics and suggested that if they didn’t like hearing absurd allegations, they should urge Israel to prove its innocence.  

Many of our arguments about Israel and its conflict-ridden history sound like legal arguments, because legal arguments are attempts to articulate a proper standard for differentiating right from wrong, while trials are attempts to ascertain the truth about disputed facts. Anglo-American legal reasoning, moreover, represents a suite of tried-and-true methods for getting to the right answers. As federal judge Roy K. Altman writes in his introduction to Israel on Trial¸ “twelve complete strangers—nurses and mechanics, teachers and retirees—get together in the jury box” and almost always “come out with precisely the right answer.”  

There is no one better than a federal trial judge to guide us through Israel’s mock trial. Altman’s day job is ensuring that all parties litigating in the Southern District of Florida adhere to “a methodology that’s been tested over hundreds of years to assist everyday people in applying their common sense to seemingly intractable problems.” Just as the rules of evidence and argument “allow us to sift through the noise, cull what’s reasonable from what isn’t, and render a judgment” under American law “that’s based on reason and common sense,” we should be able to apply these tools to the “quintessentially legal” questions about Israel and its enemies. Such an exercise is necessary, Altman argues, because at the dozens of university campuses he has visited, most students are “ill-equipped” to separate truth from slander. Presumably that is because they do not know—or know how—to use these tools.  

Pulling from that toolbox, Altman summarizes the recurring claims against Israel and then refutes them in granular detail. He reminds his readers that claims about Israel’s wrongdoing—or wrong-being—are ultimately arguments about facts that amount to conclusions: about who the Jews are, how Israel came to be, and whether it conducts itself properly. The last of these, of course, would still not warrant anti-Zionism even in the worst of conclusions, since the usual and logical remedy for a nation’s bad behavior is not eliminating that nation and replacing it with one governed by a different ethnicity. Antizionism—the singular movement to destroy a sovereign state because it is led by the “wrong” ethnoreligious group—thus signals by its very nature that it is not a “criticism,” nor does it feel itself tethered to logic.  

Nevertheless, Altman offers a superabundance of facts and context. He first defends Israel against the obscene charge that Jews are colonizers in their ancient homeland. This is the most prominent contemporary claim about Israel’s illegitimacy, and it is ludicrous. Altman examines different types of colonialism and finds that Israel is neither “extractive” nor “settler-colonial,” for at least the very simple reason that Jews are not foreigners in Judea. Ancient steles, monoliths, and historical accounts—none of which Jews could have altered—testify to the fact that Jews were sovereign in the Levant well before Arabs left Arabia or Islam’s advent.  

The first way out of this bind is to employ a bespoke definition of colonization. (One anti-Israel academic seethes that “Israeli settler colonialism…lacks a conventional metropole,” in lieu of which it has “cultivat[ed] a profound and enduring alliance with the United States, effectively securing a proxy metropole.”) The second is denying that today’s Jews are the same Jews from millennia ago, a bizarre claim that flies in the face of unbroken cultural, familial, and religious practices—such as the undisputed chain of rabbinic ordination traceable from ancient Judea to the present day. Both practices are common today, relying on sheer volume to overcome the centrality of misdirection (not to mention outright lying) to each strategy.   

The middle chapters demolish some common arguments that show, more than anything else, that Israel-haters aren’t really putting their heart into it. They may claim that Israel is illegitimate; do they really know anything about the Montevideo factors for constituting a legitimate state? They sometimes accuse Israel of preventing the formation of a Palestinian state, though Israel has offered plans for a two-state solution at least twice this century, both of which were rejected by Palestinian leadership that seems less interested in statehood than their so-called champions in the West let on.  

Gallingly, they accuse Israel of occupying Gaza despite the Jewish state’s forcible withdrawal of all Jews from there two decades ago, redefining the term to mean a partial military blockade—effected in conjunction with Egypt. (What is the term for a political movement calling to eradicate Egypt?) From incoherent to indecent, they sometimes claim that Israel turned Gaza into a “concentration camp,” using the storied tactic of appropriating Jewish suffering to legitimize more of it. Needless to say—yet Altman says it with patience—Israel does not enslave Gazans or deprive them of their liberty within their own sovereign territory. It is a rare concentration camp indeed that encourages foreign states to accept the “inmates” as refugees in wartime. Frequently, antizionists accuse Israel of apartheid. This would come as a surprise to Tel Aviv’s new deputy mayor or the several million of his fellow Arab Israelis who are overrepresented in prestigious fields and enjoy significant representation in the Knesset.  

The slander that seems to be gaining traction, though, is that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.  

I am not an angry person, but I must admit I find it hard to write about this vile absurdity—which Altman exposes in full, perhaps underselling the evil behind it by dismantling it so clinically—without feeling some rage. Altman coolly notes that genocide is a legal term requiring specific intent to destroy an ethnic group as such, whereas Israel repeatedly explains in words and demonstrates in actions its legitimate aim to destroy Hamas. As corroborated by independent military experts, Israel takes steps above and beyond what is required in urban warfare to minimize civilian harm—which is why its rate of combatants-per-civilian killed in Gaza is significantly higher than that of any other military.  

In legal terms, we need not even reach the question of intent because the accusers have not made a prima facie showing. Israel is acting wholly inconsistently with a nation trying to eradicate an ethnic group. Israeli soldiers die because their elected officials, and Jews worldwide, want so badly for the rest of the world to see that Israel is a moral paragon. Rather than bomb Hamas into submission, the Israel Defense Forces invade, time and again, walking into a giant booby trap and scouring a vast underground tunnel complex for fighters, to keep that other ethnic group’s civilians safe. As things stand right now, those soldiers are dying in vain. The absurd accusations only grow louder. 

At several points in the book, one is tempted to borrow the immortal line from the Simpsons: “Stop, stop! He’s already dead!” (In the Jewish tradition: Dayenu! It’s enough!) Altman’s marshaled evidence is so thorough (and at times so obvious) that halfway through each chapter Altman’s rebuttal begins to look like overkill. The reader is forced to detach himself from the Judge’s proffered evidence and think at a meta-level about the inescapable story unfolding before him: A growing international movement has thrown out all epistemic, moral, and logical standards developed over millennia because those would not license the destruction of the Jewish state. It pre-accused Israel of genocide before the October 7 massacres were over, and in every skirmish before, and has only seen the libel catch on. Major international organizations redefine genocide, or loosen their evidentiary standards, just to play ‘gotcha’ with the Jewish state, thus throwing its enemies lifelines and laying the groundwork for a campaign to drive Jews out of public life around the world. It is insanity in the service of bloodlust.  

If there is any hope of reaching anti-Israel types, it won’t be like this. Detailed lessons in history and archeology are wonderful, but they are fundamentally not responsive to what the prosecution in Israel’s trial is doing. The campaign to delegitimize and demonize Israel is predicated upon a different epistemology. Antizionism is a Romantic non-argument, based on nothing but the feeling that Jews cannot possibly be the rulers over that tiny territory. That is antizionism’s premise and its conclusion. It needs no arguments to get from beginning to end, and counterpoints punching holes in whatever justifications the antizionists have come up with this time are grasping the wind.  

That doesn’t mean Judge Altman’s book isn’t valuable. It is extremely so, for two reasons. One is that it should steel the resolve of Israel’s beleaguered defenders. Just because hatred of Israel has increased since October 7 does not mean Israel’s legitimacy has diminished one iota. Impressionable young people from pro-Israel backgrounds could be forgiven for thinking they’ve missed something if Israel’s victimization could lead to further isolation. Not so.  

Two is more important still. By its very design, Israel on Trial forces Westerners to confront the fact that our tradition of trials —the contestation of fact within a shared general framework of right and wrong—is fraying, and faster than we may realize. Altman shows that the Israel-haters have no excuse to continue parroting frivolous arguments if they accept the traditional tools of fact-finding and applying the law. Their excuse, it turns out, is that they do not accept those tools if the methodology does not license wild anti-Israel sentiment.   

And that isn’t even the most worrisome part. The worst part is that college and law students are falling for it. If they are willing to throw out our system of rational deliberation in favor of Romantic anti-rationality, future jurors—even our future advocates and judges—cannot be trusted to steward American institutions. The whole system Altman reveres is at risk if young people cannot muster the courage and intellectual honesty to set aside prejudices and deal in objective facts, unchanging standards, and follow the evidence where it leads. Israel isn’t on trial—we are.  

This is yet one more reason why Jews continue to insist that resurgent Jew-hatred and obsessive anti-Israel sentiment are not really about the Jews or Israel. It is a manifestation of a sickness that will kill its host civilization if it is not treated.   

Tal Fortgang is a contributing editor to Civitas Outlook and Legal Policy Fellow and Advisor to the President at the Manhattan Institute.