Music
[upbeat music] [groans]
Music
Ladies and gentlemen, uh-
Music
Can I please have your attention? Can you dig it?
Judge Roy K. Altman
[cheering]
Jonah Goldberg
Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of The Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch Media. Very excited for today’s first-time guest. He’s not only first time on the, on The Remnant, he’s… I think he’s our first judge, never mind sitting judge, which is very exciting. Uh, Roy K. Altman is a United States district judge for the Southern District of Florida. In fact, at 36, he became the youngest federal district court judge in the country, and the youngest ever appointed to the Southern District. Um, he has a BA from Columbia University, where he played quarterback for the football team. I just want, for the record, he was born during the worst losing streak in Columbia’s football history, or in football history, period, so he cannot be held accountable for that.
Judge Roy K. Altman
100%. I’m glad you said that.
Jonah Goldberg
I know. I knew you would if I didn’t. Went to Yale Law School, uh, was on the Yale Law Review, and the reason he’s here today is he has a book called Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law. Judge Altman, uh, welcome to The Remnant.
Judge Roy K. Altman
Thanks, Jonah. Thanks for having me. That athletic career was two knee surgeries ago, by the way, so I don’t want people to think I can replicate that.
Jonah Goldberg
I understand. I, I don’t know if you know this about me, but I am the Rosa Parks of gender integration.
Judge Roy K. Altman
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
I went to an all-women’s college in Maryland. Uh-
Judge Roy K. Altman
I, I know that.
Jonah Goldberg
So I played college basketball. But again-
Judge Roy K. Altman
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
… it was a school with only-
Judge Roy K. Altman
You were ahead of your time.
Jonah Goldberg
That’s right. We only had 30-odd dudes and over 1,000 women, so, like, uh, the fact that I was six three automatically qualified me for the, uh, basketball team. All right. As listeners are expecting, first question is, as always, what’s your book about?
Judge Roy K. Altman
Well, after, uh, October 7th,
Judge Roy K. Altman
my wife and I were shocked by the frank Jew hatred all over the w- the world, but really on our Western campuses and in our Western media outlets. And so I started organizing trips, uh, to Israel, trips of federal judges. Took, I think, 14 or 15 with a friend of mine, Matt Solomon and Lee Rudofsky. We took, uh, about 15 judges to Israel from all over the country, mostly non-Jewish, who’d never been there before, at the beginning of the war, and then we started a program that would take judges a couple times a year. And now we’re taking federal judges every spring and state supreme court justices every, uh, fall, September, October. And, uh, it’s amazing to see the way these judges who really didn’t know that much about Israel, uh, didn’t know about- that much about the conflict, come back and, you know, totally transformed and feeling a real connection and an understanding about how important Israel is, not just religiously, spiritually, historically to Western culture, but also geo-strategically, uh, now in, in the world today. And, uh, what happened was, I would just then go around the country with our judges, back to their home states. I’ve been to almost all 50 states, hundreds of community centers, colleges, law schools, high schools, churches, and synagogues, giving speeches about Israel, about its ancient past, the history of the Jewish people in the land, Israel under international law, its desperate attempts to comply with international law norms, despite, uh, probably some of the most difficult circumstances any country, Western country in particular, has ever had to deal with. And in the course of that speaking tour, I’ve had thousands of conversations with people, many of whom see the world very differently than I do, especially on campus. And I came to understand, really, that there, when you boil it all down, there are really six main claims about Israel today, and, uh, it all comes down to those six claims. And, uh, actually, each of those six claims is a legal claim at its core. Is Israel committing genocide? That’s just, is it violating the laws of war? Is Israel an apartheid state? That’s just, does it discriminate under the law against its minority Arab population? Is it, uh, taking land that doesn’t belong to it, settler colonialism or occupation? Is it falsely imprisoning Ga- uh, Palestinians in Gaza? And so, so what I thought to myself was, “Why don’t we just peel back all the vitriol and all the emotion and all the diatribe, and apply the same legal methodology that we deploy, judges, lawyers, and juries, every single day in our country for 250 years now?” It’s a time-tested methodology that we know works and we know we trust it because we use it where truth-telling matters the most, when someone’s life is at stake in the courtroom, and apply it to each of these six claims and see what happens. That’s why it’s called Israel on Trial. We put Israel on trial. There’s six chapters, one for each claim. Each chapter deploys the relevant legal methodology, and at the end of the chapter, you get a judgment about whether Israel is in fact guilty of the charge that’s levied against it.
Jonah Goldberg
All right. So we’ll go through the different charges. It is… It’s sort of funny, though. Um, I, I give a lot of talks about journalism, and one of the points I’ll often make is that I think, in many ways, opinion journalism can be the highest form of journalism insofar as a really good long-form essay or argument is obviously biased. But if you don’t deal with the other side’s best arguments, if you don’t tell the truth, right, if you don’t, uh, deploy a serious, rigorous argument, you lose. And the analogy I always use, ’cause people say, “Oh, the media can’t… You know, opinion journalism is bad, and bias is bad.” And it’s like, well, the single most important institution in America for getting to the truth
Jonah Goldberg
are US courts. And in US courts, you have two very biased actors. You have prosecution, which is heavily biased towards conviction, and you have a defense attorney who’s very biased towards acquittal.But they have to tell the truth, and they have to bring– If they don’t deal with the other side’s best arguments, they’re gonna lose. And it’s through the adversarial process that you actually get at a better truth, rather than saying, “Oh, we all know what the truth is.” It’s better to have an argument, and I, I think there’s something particularly about Jews that like having arguments that this is very appealing to. [chuckles] So I agree with you about like, like this is a good method for how to get at the truth is to, is to just make an argument based on the evidence and the facts and see who comes back at you in good faith and, and who doesn’t. And I think that’s sort of what the best journalism does, and that’s sort of how our system is supposed to work. You know, democracy is about disagreement. So with that, why don’t we just sort of start with… and we’ll do our digressions as needed, but why don’t you sort of make the case why the Jews are not colonists in the land of Israel?
Judge Roy K. Altman
Yeah. So the, the first claim, and, and I think the most important claim of all is the, is the claim that Jews are, are stealing land that doesn’t belong to them or occupying land that doesn’t belong to them. The, the claim is, is, as the book reveals, utterly frivolous. Uh, the basic legal principle is that a man cannot trespass into his own house. Uh, but I say that it’s the most important claim because it actually informs all subsequent claims. Um, and, and I’ll give you one example, the genocide claim. You know, u- using an American legal norm that, that I think your listeners will appreciate. In most of our 50 states, if a man– If you’re sleeping in your house, Jonah’s sleeping in his house, and the lights are off, and the alarm sounds, and suddenly you open your eyes, and there’s a man in your bedroom, okay? Very scary situation. You don’t have to ask any questions about whether he’s looking for sugar-
Jonah Goldberg
Right
Judge Roy K. Altman
… or just got lost or maybe was being chased. You can shoot him dead, and there’s no civil liability for you. That’s the castle doctrine. It’s an offshoot of the self-defense doctrine that’s been around for hundreds of years. On the other hand, imagine that you are a woman who’s being, uh, u- attacked, assaulted, or a man who’s being attacked, assaulted, and you’re running away from your assaulter, and you, and again, in the middle of the night, you break into someone’s home to get them to call nine one one, and you’re in the home. A same situation. Alarm goes off. It’s dark. The man wakes up. He sees you in his bedroom. He shoots you dead.
Judge Roy K. Altman
He has no civil liability, and your family will have no recourse against him because of the same principle, okay?
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Judge Roy K. Altman
And so this is why the settler colonial claim is the foundation to all the other claims, and using the genocide claim as an example. You know, when we talk about genocide, what Israel has done in Gaza is the, is the furthest possible thing in the context of an urban war from what the genocide definition requires. It doesn’t meet any of the elements of a genocide definition, um, and, and I’m sure we’ll talk about all the reasons why. But the problem is when you start to debate this issue with people, and they start to realize, “Oh, wait, this doesn’t really meet the genocide definition,” ultimately what they’ll fall back on is a kind of argument based in this castle doctrine. They don’t say it that way, but they say, “What? You know what? But you’re in land that doesn’t belong to you. You’re the invader in someone else’s land. You– Not one Palestinian should have died.” So even if you took every precaution, even if you took every safety measure, even if you mitigated in precisely the way that international law demands and requires, which Israel does more than any other army in the world, and, and we’ll get into that, um, you shouldn’t have been there in the first place. And so these Palestinians, whether rightly or wrongly, shouldn’t have been f- freedom fighters or terrorists or whatever, and they shouldn’t have died. And that’s why I think it’s the foundational charge of all because it informs all the other claims. And, you know, s- the idea of colonialism, there really are two kinds of colonialism in, in the historical literature. One kind is the, the most common kind, the one, the kind that we know. Think of the Spanish Empire, the original British. It’s what we call the extractive model, where in order to help the economy of the home country, you send your people, colonists, off to a far-off land, and they extract minerals, materials, people, uh, from that land in order to, in like a mercantilist way, help the, uh, home, uh, uh, country’s economy. Whether that’s gold or tobacco or, again, slaves, that- that’s a, that’s a model that we understand. That’s South America all over the world. The, the second model is really what they call settler colonialism. It’s a, a more, uh, I think it’s a newer development in, in the literature but, but also well accepted. And that’s– think about the British later on. You know, people are being persecuted for their beliefs in Europe, especially in England, and so they go off to a far-off land. They displace the local population. They’re not necessarily there to extract mineral wealth to bring back to the home country, but they are offshoots of the home country. They do create outposts for the home country, and they, they subjugate the, the local population. Israel meets neither definition because as you can easily see, a- at its core, colonialism, whether extractive or settler colonialism, requires that there be a foreign population that comes and supplants and subjugates the indigenous population and then imposes all these foreign elements, a foreign culture, a foreign language, a foreign religion, foreign naming conventions. Think of America, right? We were so foreign that even h- over a hundred years after we came, we were giving our sons
Judge Roy K. Altman
fully English names like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, not Sacagawea and Pocahontas. You know, you then compare that to, to what you have in Israel, and, and, um, I go through in, in the book the entire archeological history of the Jewish people in the land of Israel. It’s completely beyond peradventure. I’ll just go to one, one very obvious, uh, piece of record. These are all black and white artifacts that are historical archeological pieces found in the earth long before the Zionist project was ever even created in the 19th century by non-Jewish archeologists who have no stakeIn this politic- modern-day political dispute, the Merneptah Stele from 1205 BC. That’s an Egyptian stele. It’s a giant basalt stone from over 3,200 years ago, found in Egypt by Egyptologists in the 19th century. It is, uh, the record of military and building exploits by Merneptah, who bec- was the 13th son of Ramses and became Pharaoh of all Egypt. And at the bottom of his stele, he writes that he brought his Egyptian army into Israel. Never mentions Palestine. There was no such thing as Palestine at the time, and we should talk about that. And he says he destroyed the King of Israel in battle and, and, uh, wiped their seed from the earth. Now, obviously, that was a little bit of, uh, a poetic, uh, liberty there because Jonah, you and I are still here.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Judge Roy K. Altman
But the point is that there are artifacts like that from all of Israel’s ancient enemies all the way around the country. So from Egypt in the southwest, the Moabites in the east, what’s now Jordan, the Assyrians in what’s now Syria and Turkey in the northeast, and Hazael, the, uh, king of Aram Damascus, the Ar- the Aramaeans in the north in what’s now, uh, what’s now Lebanon. And, and then it continues all throughout the Greek and Roman period. Point is, the Jews have been living and governing in the land of Israel for thousands of years. And if you go back to Merneptah Stele 3,000 years ago, and you analyze all of the kingdoms that existed all over the world at that time, in Asia, in the Americas, in the Middle East, in Africa, and you fast-forward to today, 3,200 years later, there is only one place, one people who still practice the same religion, who still speak the same language, and who still live and govern in precisely the same geographic land that they lived and governed in 3,200 years ago, and those are the Jews who live and govern the modern state of Israel. So if we care about the rights of indigenous people at all, then we have to recognize that the greatest decolonization struggle of the 20th century was the decolonization struggle to bring Jewish sovereignty back to the land of Israel. And by the way, as my book details, this is reflected in the late 19th century and early 20th century writings and speakings of even Muslim Arab leaders in the land, like King Hassan and his son, who became the first King of Iraq, King Faisal, who fought next to T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia fame, and who mentioned and were clear that the Jews were the original sons of that land, and that they should be welcomed back to that land if Arab nationalists like them wanted to have any credibility with British colonialists in getting their own Arab lands back, by which they meant places like Iraq and Saudi Arabia, modern-day Yemen and Oman.
Jonah Goldberg
So o- obviously, I’m sympathetic to all of this. People know my priors. At the same time, the more sophisticated argument in response to some of, some of that is that sort of the keyword you used there was sovereignty, right? So I probably don’t get as exhausted as you do, but I get exhausted with people saying, “Look, the Romans called it Palestine. It was a country of Pales-” No, they called it a Palestine because they were so pissed off at the Jews for constantly rebelling that they renamed it to say, “Screw you,” to the Jews. [chuckles] But it was the Jewish, Jewi- Jewi- Judea was Judea, right? You know.
Judge Roy K. Altman
They renamed it a, a, after a people, the Phil- the Philistines.
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
Judge Roy K. Altman
By the way, that is a name that comes from the Jewish word for that land, Peleset, the Hebrew word. They named it for the Philistines, that’s King Hadrian, Emperor Hadrian, precisely because in the archeological and Roman documentary record, those people, the Philistines, who by the way, have nothing to do with modern Arab Muslims, they were a Greek people from the Mediterranean, um, not a Semitic people from the Levant, precisely because they had died out in the archeological record about 1,000 years before the Romans even arrived. So there was no danger that those people would suddenly come back and reclaim the land.
Jonah Goldberg
But the, the response you’ll get from some people, that all may well be true, that there was a handful of Middle Eastern Jews, Sephardic Jews, whatever, living in the area. But the settler colonial part kicks in because it’s all of these poles and hail of the settlement, Ashkenazi Jews from Europe coming in. Most of the fo- they’ll, they’ll say most of the founders of modern Israel were essentially refugees from the Holocaust. It, it was a European project that was just using the color of authority of, of the historical project of Israel as a, as a cover, as a, you know, as a, as a Trojan horse for essentially an attempt to Europeanify what they call Palestine. You know, what is your response to that? ‘Cause it’s, it’s very difficult to get straight numbers about how many indigenous Jews were there versus how many were imported, as it were.
Judge Roy K. Altman
Well, uh, you know, again, u- u- using basic legal principles or my favorite sport, baseball, i- if the shortstop pushes the sec- the, the runner off of second base, he can’t then tag the runner and, and have the umpire call the person out, okay? So by the same token, in th- there’s really no Arab Muslim presence in the land of Israel until 636 AD, after the Jews had been living there for thousands of years, and an Arab Muslim empire came in, conquered not just Israel, by the way, most of the Middle East and North, North Africa, displaced dozens of indigenous populations. Again, not just the Jews, like the Amazigh in, uh, in Morocco, the Berbers in, uh, Libya, Algeria, the Zoroastrians in Iran and Persians, and pushed them off of second base and now wanna say, “You’re out.” Uh, it, it, it doesn’t really work that way. It doesn’t work that way under the law, right? You can’t have a person who kills his parents and says, “Oh, I deserve the insurance payments because I’m now an orphan.” Um, the second thing to say about that is that Jews never really left, as you mentioned. I mean, there, the numbers vary, uh, but there, there’s, I don’t think, any dispute that there is a continuous chain of JewishPresence in the land, thousands of Jews, all the way up to modern times. In fact, when Napoleon comes in 1798 after the Battle of the Pyramids, he marches his army from Egypt through what’s now Gaza, which by the way, he wri- he has a whole army, basically, of historians and cartographers and geologists and physicians and scientists, and they are documenting everything they see-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah
Judge Roy K. Altman
… the flora, the fauna, the topography, the people.
Jonah Goldberg
That was the enlightenment part of Napoleon at work.
Judge Roy K. Altman
Right.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Judge Roy K. Altman
He comes in 1798, he passes right through Gaza. Guess what he never mentions? He never mentions any Palestinian Arab Muslim presence in that land. He w- goes all the way through, uh, the land of Israel. He comes up to Lebanon and fights an indecisive batter up near, battle up near Tyre. And basically what he sees is, uh, some Bedouins, Ottomans who are mismanaging the land, f- a foreign colonial empire nobody claims is indigenous to the land. They’re, they’re from Turkey. Some Christian monks, uh, living in monasteries on their own, and then a bunch of Jews, especially around Jerusalem, but also in Gaza. About, uh, 70 years later, 60 or 70 years later, Mark Twain comes on his, uh, trip to Israel and he writes a book, The Innocents Abroad, about what he found there. Again, no mention of a Palestinian Arab Muslim presence there. He again finds a land that’s totally mismanaged, mostly barren and empty, desert, uh, with some Bedouins around, Christian monasteries with some monks, Ottoman Turks who are corrupt and mismanaging the land from abroad, and then Jews, especially in Jerusalem, again in Gaza, in the north, in Tiberias and Safed. And by the way, if you go back further, uh, through the Ottoman Empire, you see all kinds of census data and laws specifically passed targeting the Jewish population. For example, there was an old law that said in the cave of Machpelah, where the ancient patriarchs and matriarchs are buried, that Jews could not walk past the seventh step into the cave. And we know that Jew- Jewish scholars would write about what it looked like from the seventh step and how much they yearned to go all the way to the bottom. The point is that, uh, there were Jews governing and living in the land for thousands of years. They were displaced. They always yearned to come back in a decolonization project. Many of them remained. And in the middle of the 20th century when decolonization truly was in, in vogue, the Jewish sovereignty in the land was reclaimed. So I, I f- I find that argument relatively unpersuasive. The, the argument we’re seeing now really from the, from some people on the internet is, is a different argument that I find bizarre, which is that we modern-day Jews, you and I, Jonah, we’re actually not Jews at all. We are descendants of the Khazars from 805.
Jonah Goldberg
As I was telling you before we started rolling, as a early recipient of crazy online internet antisemitism, I’ve been getting the Khazar, “You filthy Khazar” thing for 30 years [laughs]
Judge Roy K. Altman
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
From, from total randos. And, um, so I’ve looked into it more than a few times. I mean, there’s interesting history there to be sure, but it’s, that, that is a direction we don’t need to g- maybe we’ll do a whole episode on the Khazar myth. I’d s- but, you know, more seriously though, I mean, we’ll g- we’ll, we’ll, we’ll get back to the six claims in a second. One objection one might have is that while I entirely endorse your desire to use facts and logic and the legal method for adjudicating these claims, law is not necessarily,
Jonah Goldberg
certainly the American judicial system or American legal system, is not necessarily the best prism for looking at, of all things, the sweeping history of the Middle East, right? And as a historical matter, you can make a different legal argument, which is that possession is nine-tenths of the law, that ultimately a lot of this, you know, the, the Palestinians and their, their sympathizers, it’s an asymmetric fight, right? And so, so th- they can’t beat Israel militarily, so they’re using these arguments in ways to undermine the will of Israelis or the Israelis’ allies to defend Israel. But it’s sort of an all fair in love and war thing, and just as you as a Jew are very proud and reliant o- and happy to rely on arguments about,
Jonah Goldberg
you know, steeles from 32 BC,
Jonah Goldberg
it’s really a competition of myths and narratives. You’re certainly not gonna persuade members of Hamas with legal arguments, and you’re really not gonna persuade anyone who’s willing to condone what Hamas is doing with legal arguments. And so I, I guess part of the question is, who’s the target audience here? Is it, is it to win the argument with the Palestinians, or is it to win the argument with the sort of median American who really just doesn’t know how to think about this?
Judge Roy K. Altman
I think that’s a very fair question. I, h- here’s what I would say. Uh, uh, the, in my speaking tour around the country, and especially on col- even on college campuses like Columbia, uh, my alma mater, where I would say the epicenter of this thing hol- the whole thing went down, I would say that, uh, there’s about 10% of America and 10% of these campuses, not, not more than that really, that are dead set, anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist, will not be persuaded, you know, it’s genocide no matter what you say, all, all that, okay? The book’s probably not written for them. You’re right. Then there’s probably 30% of America, I would say, that is, uh, is fully pro-Jewish, see Jews as an intimate aspect of the fabric of America. Understand, I think viscerally, historically, that culturally that, uh, societies that allow Jewish flourishing, allow Jews to thrive, are societies that, uh, thrive themselves. Believe in, in Lincoln’s message, which is that America is an almost chosen people because of how much he understood that, uh, Jewish history and Jewish cultureWith its belief in religious pluralism, tolerance, freedom of speech, the rule of law, is exactly the kind of meritocracy, the kind of place that America aspired to be. And, and those people also don’t need convincing, although they do need ammunition.
Judge Roy K. Altman
Uh, they are involved in these debates, uh, on an almost weekly basis, many of them, if not more, and they often just viscerally feel like they side with Jews, with Israel, with the West, but don’t know all the stuff about, that we’ve just been discussing about settler colonialism. They don’t know the elements of a genocide claim, and can’t really explain why Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza is the furthest possible thing in the context of urban warfare, and definitionl- definitionally cannot be genocide under the, under international law. And so, I think the book is written for them, to provide them with ammunition. But then, you know, that still leaves 60% of the country, and 60% of our students on college campuses and in our high schools, who really don’t know that much about it. They’re not in the pro-Hamas wing. By the way, the pro-Hamas wing, also the pro-Iranian terror ring, uh, that, that didn’t protest the killing of 30,000 Iranian civilians in just a couple of weeks. They’re also not in the 30% who love Israel and necessarily love Jews, and feel like Jews are an intimate project in America. They just wanna go to class. If they’re in college, they wanna meet girls, they wanna go to parties, they wanna drink beer, they want their sports team to win. If they’re not in college, they wanna put food on the table for their family, have their kids go to safe and secure and above grade schools. Um, and they’re open to being persuaded, and I’ve met them all over the country. I’ve met them in churches, and in their community centers, and at their schools. And, you know, one of the things that struck me from these speeches that I’ve been giving, and that I hope will be true of the book is, how many people would just come up to me after these speeches, or write me, or call my chambers days after I’d been to their towns and say, “You know what? I didn’t know any of the things that you mentioned, and, um, I’ll, I’ll make sure never to post about Gaza again or, uh, never, you know, never to call it genocide again,” or, or, or whatever it is. And so my hope really is that with the book, every person of good faith in America can say, can go to a dinner party or a barbecue or a kid’s birthday party and if somebody mentions one of these things about Israel, genocide, apartheid, colonialism, they might say, “You know what? I don’t really know that much about it, but there’s this guy in Florida who wrote a pretty good book about it, and, you know, maybe you look at chapter three. I’ll loan it to you, and you come back and we can chat about it over a glass of wine.” And if that happens, I think, I think the book will have been a tremendous success.
Jonah Goldberg
All right. Fair enough. So I wanna husband our time here. Um, let’s try to combine two of the claims, that Israel’s founding was illegitimate or aberrational, and that Israel has prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state, ’cause they’re kind of, they’re kind of linked in the origin story at the least, and then they play out, you know, they relate to each other.
Judge Roy K. Altman
Yeah. We, we have a framework under international law for, uh, basically determining whether a nation has become, has met the criteria, let’s say, the elements for becoming a state, and there, there are four elements, and I lay out the elements in the book. They’re from a conference in Montevideo in 1933, and, and the elements are simple, you know. D- does the country have defined borders? Does it have a set population? Does it have the capacity to conduct international relations? All, all four of the elements were easily met, uh, by Israel at the time of its founding in 1948, and are, uh, and are plainly, uh, met today. By the way, n- not, not for purposes of, of the book, I think this, this idea of a Palestinian state, whether it’s viable, whether it’s appropriate, is beyond the scope of the book. The book is about charges against Israel, about whether Israel should exist as a state. But I do mention the irony that, um, as with so many of the claims, the claims are not created ex nihilo. They’re not, they don’t stand in a vacuum. They are purposefully created to, to shine a mirror up against Jewish suffering, and Jewish charges, and Jewish history and say, “Hey, this thing that happened to you, the Jews, is now happening to us, the Palestinians.” This is a great example, because when you look at the, this claim about the creation of a Palestinian state, the Palestinian state plainly doesn’t meet two of the four elements. It, it, uh, it doesn’t have defined borders at all. In fact, um, those borders are very much subject to dispute, especially in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank. Uh, but second and most importantly, even if you granted that they had defined borders, they absolutely do not have a single legitimate governing authority, like Israel did in 1948. In fact, no one would suggest that they do, not even the Palestinians. Most Palestinians, even today, support Hamas, but Hamas only governs now, uh, less than 40%, uh, maybe 42% of Gaza. Uh, the rest of Gaza is governed by Israel, uh, which nobody believes is the legitimate governing authority of the Palestinians. And then the Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, is governed partly by Israel, and partly by a corrupt and very unpopular Palestinian authority that was created in the wake of the Oslo Accords, signed by the Palestinians in 1993, but which lost the election in 2006 after the Gaza disengagement. So the Palestinians are actually governed by three authorities, the Israeli military security blanket, Hamas and Gaza, or parts of Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria. It meets… It fails the Montevideo test for a Palestinian state, and yet you have over 140 countries in the world arguing that the Palestinian state is a legitimate state, and many of those same states arguing that the Israeli state is an illegitimate state, despite the fact that it plainly has always met all four elements of the Montevideo test. And then as for the, the third claim that Israel has been the impediment to the creation of a Palestinian state, again, has it completely backwards. Israel, the West, and America have offered the Palestinians their own state.At least six different times, as I detail in chapter three, I think it is, of the book. And each of those times, the Palestinians have rejected their own state. And there’s actually a seventh opportunity where in 2005, Ariel Sharon, at the prodding of President Bush, second President Bush, withdrew unilaterally from Gaza. There were no requirements. It’s nothing like the Oslo Accords of 1993. There was no requirement for de-radicalization in schools. There was no requirement for disarmament in Gaza. There was no requirement for giving up terrorist activities. It was just we, the Jews, are leaving Gaza to you to build your own state here. Do with it what you want. Israel actually had greenhouses there and an airport strip, a landing strip, that they offered to build into an airport so that Gaza could trade with the rest of the world. The Hamas prompt The people of Gaza promptly elected Hamas, a terrorist organization bent on Israel’s destruction in 2006, which completed a purge of all the opposition by murdering most of the Palestinian Authority opposition figures by 2007, 2008, destroyed most of those greenhouses, blew up the landing strip and said no thank you to building an airport and a seaport, and of course turned Gaza into the most sophisticated terror tunnel network the world has ever known. And the reason is simple, because if you look at Hamas’s charter and you listen to what students have been regurgitating on Western campuses, the Palestinians since the 1930s, since the first Peel Commission offered the Palestinians their own state in the Levant, which they rejected since the 1930s, and like Hamas says in its charter, the Palestinian claim has always been an Arab Muslim state from the river to the sea with either Jews as second-class citizens, as they were in most of the Arab Muslim world until their expulsion in the years after 1967, or with no Jews in it at all. And of course, that’s not something Jews are going to happily live with. So if anyone has rejected a Palestinian state, if anyone has been an impediment to the creation of a Palestinian state over the last 70 or 80 years, it’s been the Palestinians themselves, not the Jews.
Jonah Goldberg
I can grant all of that. At the same time, just a couple of points. One, there’s a difference. I agree with you about how we legally recognize a state, right? And there’s a difference between a state or a nation state and a nation. So like, I actually believe there’s such a thing as the Kurdish nation. Unfortunately, it’s spread out over four states and none of them want them to have their own state. And I think the Kurds, I think the Jews have better gripes going back a couple thousand years. But in the 20th century, you know, in terms of this kind of thing, the Kurds have a pretty good gripe about how they got screwed by the imperial powers and how they designed the Middle East. And, you know, as Walter Russell Mead pointed out to me or argued when I had him on here about nationhood. Nationhood is, again, one of these things that is less subject to a legal definition than a mythopoetic one. And so like the Ukrainians, you can make a case that in 2014,
Jonah Goldberg
a lot of Ukrainians were pretty ambivalent about, you know, the Ukrainian nation, certainly in the eastern parts of Ukraine. Turns out you get invaded by a brutal dictator neighbor and it brings out the nationalist in you. And so like there’s a certain sort of national self-determination thing that kicks in.
Jonah Goldberg
Walter would make the case that the Palestinians, even if you want to stipulate all of the legal things that are the points that you’re making, which, again, I’m happy to stipulate, the Palestinians now
Jonah Goldberg
do consider them, see themselves as a nation of a sort, as a specific ethnicity. That’s one of the reasons why like the Jordanians and a lot of these other countries actually don’t want Palestinians to be assimilated into their own societies is because they think the Egyptians and the Jordanians, they think of Palestinians as incredible troublemakers. They would rather have them as sort of like Sudeten Germans as a sort of a political prop to use against Israel, at least for a lot of the 20th century. So anyway, my point is there are people who would make a colorable claim that one of the main reasons why the Palestinian quote-unquote nation does not have defined borders or defined state is that Israel has not wanted that. Part of the strategy they would claim is that Gaza was given independence because it was a way to divide, you know, the two Palestinian entities on either side of it. You have, you certainly have forces within the Israeli government that don’t, that definitely do not want a full-fledged Palestinian state. I don’t know if that’s a majority. I don’t think it’s a majority opinion. I think most Israelis, if you could convince them that Palestinians just wanted to do business and live peaceful lives, there would have been a Palestinian state from the get-go. You know, I mean, I used to talk to Norman Podhorts about this and it’s like if the Palestinians had a Martin Luther King, the Israelis would have climbed out of their tanks and refused to fight, right? It’s like it takes a lot of rape and murder of Jews for Jews to say, all right, we got to have a fight. But regardless, there are people in Israel who
Jonah Goldberg
have a political strategy of
Jonah Goldberg
keeping the Palestinians off balance, of keeping the borders under dispute because either they believe in greater Israel or they just think that the status quo of a sort of legal limbo for Palestinians is in their national interest. I’m not saying this is necessarily my position, but it is the argument that you’ll hear. How do you respond to all that?
Judge Roy K. Altman
Yeah, I would say two things. First, as to the nationhood point, the book lays out that there are about 10,000 nations in the world that most linguists and anthropologists have identified. But there are only, depending on how you count, between 193 and 201… states in the world. Uh, so-
Jonah Goldberg
And Israel is like older than like 40% of them, by the way. [laughs]
Judge Roy K. Altman
Right. Right. Yeah, that was, yeah, that, that was an interesting discovery. Israel’s actually quite an old state, modern-day Israel is. But it’s, it’s actually older than two-thirds of all the states in the world.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, if you go into Wikipedia and you just go through like the origin of when they became states, it’s because of all that 1960s anti-colonialism stuff-
Judge Roy K. Altman
Correct
Jonah Goldberg
… in Africa and Asia. Like, all of those African countries that, if you can name an African country, with very few exceptions, it’s a country that was founded somewhere between like ’62 and ’68. And so Israel is 20 years older than almost all of those supposedly, you know, you know, ancient indigenous nations. Anyway, I’m sorry, go on.
Judge Roy K. Altman
Correct. No, and, and that, that’s, that’s absolutely true. My, my only point is e- even granting that the Palestinians are, uh, uh, view themselves as a nation today, I’m not sure that’s true, by the way, but, uh, even granting that, they’re, that just puts them in the same camp as thousands of other peoples and nations that don’t have a state. The Druze, the, the Tibetans, the Kurds, I mean, there’s, there’s thousands of them. And so the, the question of whether they are a state really depends on, on historical forces, as you pointed out when, when you were talking about the Kurds. And that’s why in my book I say, “Look, this is the Montevideo Framework. This is the legal framework.” And the argument that Israel is an illegitimate state, which you hear all the time, it, it just fails, uh, because Israel meets all four of the elements. As to the, the Palestinian state and, and Israel’s legitimacy, there are other historical factors that we can look, look to about how countries have moved from becoming a people to a full-fledged legitimate state, and I, I compare us to America in, in that regard. You know, and this isn’t the Montevideo legal framework, but it is reality, you know? And, and there are really three that I think people have identified, and I go, I go into them, and the, and the three factors are, you know, did you win, did you win it in a war? Did your people fight for it and win for it with blood, sweat, and toil? That, that’s one, and Israel unquestionably has, just like the United States did in 1775 to 1783. Second, do you, do you have a, a legitimate presence in the land, a long-standing presence that people are willing to recognize? That was maybe true of the Americans, right? We got here in 1607 to Jamestown. Even in the 1750s during the French and Indian War, uh, most Americans, including George Washington and John Adams, really viewed themselves as Englishmen. It wasn’t, uh, at least my professor Akhil Amar says until 1761 at a trial in Boston, Massachusetts, uh, where James Otis was famously the lawyer for the aggrieved American plaintiffs. Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, was the judge. These four men were being accused of, uh… Anywho, they were bringing a claim because their homes were searched without warrants, which later became the precursor to our Fourth Amendment. Uh, and he was saying very patriotic things, and Sam Adams and John Adams were in the gallery, and John Adams would say at the end of his life many years later that it was, quote, “then and there in that courtroom in Boston, Massachusetts, that the child revolution was born.” That was in the 1760s, um, so just 15 years really before the, the revolution began. Uh, but no one claims that we’re not legitimate sovereigns, or no one legitimate claims that we’re not legitimate sovereigns over the lands that we govern. And then third, did an international body or a series of international, uh, legitimate international, uh, entities recognize our existence? You know, we didn’t have a treaty with another government recognizing our existence until we signed one with, uh, France, um, that Benjam- that Benjamin Franklin negotiated, and one with, uh, the Netherlands. But Israel had not one but two votes at the United Nations, uh, one in 1947 that partitioned the land, uh, by a vote of 33 to 13 with, by the way, both Soviet and Americans voting for, for the creation of the state of Israel. America and the Soviet Union both agreed, right and left, east and west, that this was a good idea. And then after the War of Independence in 1949, everybody wanted a redo, and Israel said famously, “No, we don’t want a redo. We already had our vote. No motions for reconsideration. No, no instant review.” And, uh, the, Truman said, “Nope, go back and get it ratified and see if you can win again.” And they won again, this time by an even bigger margin, 37 to 12. So however you slice it, whether under the Montevideo factors or under these, like, historical factors that other countries have used to gain legitimacy, Israel’s unquestionably a legitimate state. So, you know, as to your question about the Palestinian nationhood, I think, I think your point is, is a valid one. I think if you look at polling data in the Palestinian territories by the Palestinian pol- the well-known, well-regarded Palestinian pollsters themselves, before October 7th and even after October 7th, it’s never less than 75 or over 80% of Palestinians who want no Jewish state at all. Uh, they, they don’t wanna live in a two-state solution. They want either one state controlled by Palestinians. Some wanna be melded into Jordan or Egypt or, or Syria, which by the way was the plan before, uh, 1936, was for them to be part of Syria. There was no separate Palestinian nation at that time. But in Israel, you see the opposite. You see that every poll that has ever been conducted shows that if the Palestinians would lay down their arms, de-radicalize their schools, and profess to live side by side with their Jewish neighbors, like, by the way, the two million Arab Muslims who are full-fledged citizens of Israel do, uh, without war, without terrorism, that the vast, mass, vast majority of Israelis would lay down their arms and accept a Palestinian state. That’s been the historical truth. That continues to be the polling truth. This idea that, um, you know, these settlers who, uh, like you say, they, they believe in a biblical land of Israel that should encompass, uh, the, g- what they call Greater Israel is, is anywhere near a, a consensus view or even a majority view is just preposterous. N- no poll has shown that. And, and the reason the Palestinians don’t have their own state as a historical matter, again, to go back to my original point, is because they have refusedTo live side by side with their Jewish neighbors in peace. And I just, I just wanna highlight the, the one point I, I made obliquely, but I think it’s really important. You know, in the law we talk always about, you’ve heard of this anecdotally, the dog that didn’t bark, right? You know, the, there’s a murderer in the house, and nobody knows who the killer was. The wife is dead, and the neighbors all note that the- there was this, you know, aggressive dog in the house, but for some reason that night when the intruder was there, the dog did not bark, right? That- that’s a very telling sign. Well, what’s the dog that… And, and, and the idea being, well, maybe it was somebody that the dog knew, right? It was the, it was the husband, the ex-husband or, or whatever. There’s a dog that didn’t bark here, and that’s the two million plus Arab Muslim citizens of Israel who have, for the most part, lived with equal rights and in peace with their Jewish neighbors for the last 75 years. Um-
Jonah Goldberg
Well, let me cut you off there, ’cause that way we can… You’re naturally segueing into the next claim, which is that Israel is an apartheid state.
Judge Roy K. Altman
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
So we’ll just pick up from there.
Judge Roy K. Altman
And, and, you know, i- apartheid is an Afrikaans word, uh, that, that, uh, refers to the state of separateness. It means separatehood or separateness that, uh, that was manifested in law, both in places like South Africa for most of the 20th century, but also, you know, in the Jim Crow and Antebellum South, uh, here in America and, and by the way, in many other places around the world. Apartheid is practiced, was practiced against Jewish citizens all over the Muslim world, and frankly, Europe for, for centuries. And apartheid is, is, is marked by tremendous and divisive separateness. Black South Africans, although comprising a majority of the population, couldn’t eat at the same restaurants, go to the same beaches, drink at the same water fountains, um, attend the same schools, use the same rail cars. Um, they couldn’t, uh, get licenses to practice law or become doctors under the same terms as their, as their white neighbors. None of that, of course, is true of Israel. Uh, Israel is a s- a country of about 10 million people, 2.1 million of whom, about 20%, of whom are Arab Muslims, who from the foundation of the state, who from May 14th, 1948, in the, uh, foundational document, the Declaration of Independence, which by the way, for all the feminist listeners out there, was signed by two women, the first Declaration of Independence ever to be signed by women, including one, Golda Meyerson, who would become as Golda Meir, the first female prime minister of Israel. We still haven’t done that in America yet. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that, Jonah. But, uh, anyway, uh, I digress. Uh, those 2.1 million Arab citizens have every single right that their Jewish neighbors have. They can buy land under the same terms. They become lawyers, doctors, nurses, accountants, and bankers under the same terms. In fact, my book lays out the percentages of medical students, medical professionals, whether doctors, dentists, uh, psychiatrists, and nurses, are far in excess of the population as a whole, uh, are Arabs. So for example, if you go to Israeli, uh, medical schools now, nursing schools, dentistry schools, almost 50, between 40% and 50% are, uh, Arab Muslims, even though they only comprise 20% of the population. Uh, when we the judges go to Israel, we meet with the Supreme Court of Israel. One of the justices is traditionally and is now an Arab Muslim Supreme Court justice. Uh, if you go to the army, you see officers, in fact, the highest ranking officer who was killed in the war in Gaza, and the highest ranking officer who was killed in the war in Lebanon, this latest war in Lebanon, are both Arab Druze minority officers who, uh, served in the IDF. And that’s true in every aspect of living. They can eat at the same restaurants. Uh, they can go to the same schools if they want. They don’t have to, because if they wanna go to an Islamic school, Israel also provides, uh, that. They have in the National Library of Israel, by the way, a beautiful new building, I don’t know if you’ve been, right off the main gallery, there’s a l- mini synagogue in the building, and right next to it a Muslim prayer room. Beautiful, by the way, paid for by the state of Israel. Um, so far from participating in apartheid, if, if the Jews are engaging in apartheid in, uh, in Israel, they’re doing just a terrible, terrible job of it, and that’s the reality.
Jonah Goldberg
So I have a theory about this. I have not studied this closely, but it feels to me like when I first started hearing this Israel is a apartheid state stuff,
Jonah Goldberg
the argument was an, an analogy to like the Bantu stands in South Africa, where there are these, like,
Jonah Goldberg
ethnic enclaves under the authority of law, where they, they sort of corralled people and said, “You can only live here,” to Black people in South Africa, and they were making that analogy to the Palestinians in the West Bank or in Gaza or whatever. And I’m not saying that the analogy works, but it works a hell of a lot better than saying that Israel proper has Jim Crow, and it feels to me like so many people just heard other people say this thing about apartheid, that they thought it meant something different. And so now you get like the Candace Owen types who [laughs] like she goes and visits Israel, and she hears about the, the Muslim quarter in Jerusalem and thinks-
Judge Roy K. Altman
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
… it’s, it’s like a Bantu stand or something, because w- well, she’s not very bright, but you get the point is I, I think-
Judge Roy K. Altman
But that’s the inverse. That’s becau- and by the way, the Muslim quarter of, as you know, is half of the old city, and the Jewish quarter is less than a quarter because the Muslims forced all the Jews when they governed, uh, Jerusalem into a tiny part, a little ghetto community in Jerusalem, as, as you probably well know.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. So I mean, it’s, it, it feels to me like this is one of these talking points where people who don’t know what they’re talking about hear other people who are… And it just, it kind of metastasizes into something that is just sort of ridiculous. My own view about this, by the way, and I’ve written this column for the LA Times three or four times, I wrote about it because it drives me crazy. I have this view that, that-The United Nations is essentially structurally anti-Semitic. And what I mean by that is if you… I mean, you know this stuff better than I do as a matter of law, but, you know, a lot of the arguments about institutional racism, critical race theory, critical feminist theory, is that when you stopped being able to find evidence of actual deliberate discrimination and prejudice and malice and whatnot, and you just simply looked at outcomes regardless of what the intent was, right? It was a ghost in the machine kinda argument, that for the Ibram Kendi type crowd, their argument is, is that if there are disparate outcomes that reflect poorly on a group, that’s prima facie evidence of discrimination. Well, if that’s your standard, which I don’t… It’s not mine, right? I, I, I… Like I, I disagree with that whole approach to things. But if that’s your standard, how the UN cannot be structurally anti-Semitic when the standard they hold for Israel is completely different than the one they hold for any other nation. If you look at the number of time… I mean, I’m, I’m a Hel- Hillel Neuer fan. You know, the number of times that Israel’s been condemned for human rights violations compared to Syria, to North Korea [laughs], you know, to Russia, it’s stagger-
Judge Roy K. Altman
Iran.
Jonah Goldberg
Iran. It’s staggering. And as for the apartheid thing, the column I’ve written a bunch of times is that, um, China is a Jim Crow country. If you’re not ethnic Han, you’re a second-class citizen in that country. In fact, you know, The Economist, which is not exactly some sort of rabid, you know, anti-China outlet, you know, they call it Han supremacy. And if you’re from one of the non-Han ethnic groups, particularly if you’re a Uyghur or something, you don’t get the same internal passport, you’re not allowed to have the same jobs, you can’t get into the same schools, and no one says boo about it. And you brought up Tibet earlier. Well, I mean, Tibet is a much better example of settler colonialism than anything that Israel is doing. I mean, it’s, was a distinct ethnic group with a long history as a nation, and China just decided to sort of culturally erase it as a matter of state policy. And liberals used to complain about it in the ’90s, but I haven’t seen a free Tibet bumper sticker in a while.
Judge Roy K. Altman
Brett Schaefer at AEI does some great work on this. And, and he basically looks at the numbers and, and he’s looked at the mechanism by which the UN votes, and, and it shows that, you know, basically what happens is there’s 57 Muslim countries in the world, many of them united in their… in, at least formerly, uh, hopefully that will change now in the future now that they see Iran as the true threat in the Middle East. But formerly, you know, they comprised a majority of the states in A- in Africa and in Asia. And since so much of the voting at the UN is in continental blocks, if you were in, like, Congo or Rwanda, and you had, like, a really smart lawyer that you wanted one day to prep to be on the International Court of Justice, or you had a really good scientist that you wanted to put on some international UN body, you need votes from your block. You need your blo- your, uh, block to vote for you. And so, uh, Brett Schaefer’s, has shown, uh, ov- over the course of the last few decades, what these countries who own the majority in both Africa and Asia, which by the way are the two biggest voting blocks at the UN, obviously, and the most powerful, what they’ll say to you is, “Okay, you, you want your Congolese lawyer to be on the ICJ one day? You want your doctor to be on this, uh, panel on vaccines from the UN? Uh, that’s great. Y- you just have to vote against Israel on, on these measures.” And the, and the countries… I mean, Congo doesn’t care. You know? The Rwanda doesn’t care. They, they’re, they’re rightfully looking after their own. And so that’s how, that’s how the, the, the structure, the architecture of the voting block system at the UN produces the kind of totally absurd voting record that, that you’ve just highlighted.
Jonah Goldberg
Um, all right. We- we’re running out of time here, but we should get to the… I, w- best for last is the wrong phrase. The most widely discussed, most frequently hurled charge against Israel is that it’s committing genocide. So why don’t you just sort of take it in any direction you want?
Judge Roy K. Altman
Yeah. You know, the, the, the definition of genocide under international law is, is quite straightforward. It is the ultimate crime of crimes, okay? It doesn’t mean that you killed people. It doesn’t mean that you killed a lot of people. The, the reality is that war is horrible. All war is horrible, whether it’s in Iran or Ukraine or Gaza, and people die. People have always died in war. They’ve been dying in war for thousands of years. And when they’re civilians, whether they’re Muslim or Christian or Jewish or any other religion, it’s tragic and sad. But that doesn’t mean it’s genocide. Uh, otherwise every war in history would have been genocide. Um, and so urban warfare in particular is even more horrible, uh, because you have an enemy that has embedded itself within the civilian population, Hamas, and underneath the civilian population in order to increase rather than decrease the number of civilians who are killed in order to get Western media outlets to publish those figures and have Western students protest so that Western governments will make Israel stop, so that Hamas can live to fight another day, which is really all that they care about. And so the definition of genocide, recognizing all of this and, uh, trying to encapsulate the ultimate crime of crimes, requires proof that the state itself… So again, if one soldier goes crazy in Vietnam and kills a bunch of civilians on purpose, that is also not evidence of genocide. The state itself must direct its army or its forces to try to eradicate, uh, an entire people in whole or in part as such because of their ethnicity, their race, their religion. What does as such mean? Well, the international courts have told us, as such means because they’re Palestinian and for no other reason. Must try to eradicate them from the face of the earth because they’re Palestinian. Well, we know that that’s not what Israel has done. We know it in many ways, and the book lays out a, a, many of those ways. I’ll just list a couple of them in the interest of brevity here. First, Israel has the most sophisticated civilian warning system the world has ever known.You don’t have to take my word for it. Many of our own most preeminent urban warfare experts, like John Spencer in America, Richard Kemp in Britain, the High Level Military Group, which is, uh, short-named the HLMG acronym, uh, which has submitted a brief to the International Criminal Court, has written that Israel’s warning system is the most sophisticated civilian warning system in the world. And they say it’s not only definitionally inconsistent with genocide. Why do they say that? Because, as I said, think about real genocides in history. Think about the Nazis. Would they ever have warned Jewish children and Jewish civilians against going into Auschwitz? The question is absurd just to ask it. The whole purpose of the Holocaust was to get the Jews into Auschwitz, not to warn them out of Auschwitz. Israel’s warning system, which moves civilians out of harm’s way, by the way, in huge numbers. You remember the Rafah campaign, where the whole world had all eyes on Rafah. It was going to be a massacre of civilians. Israel moved one point one or one point two million Palestinian civilians out of Rafah in ten days. They moved them to a, a site called Al Mawasi near the coast, where they had built housing, medical facilities, food purveyors, and vaccination clinics for, uh, all of their children. In fact, during the war, there was a claim that, uh, there had been a polio outbreak in Gaza. And so Israel went in and vaccinated, I think something like ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent of all of the Palestinian children in Al Mawasi for free during the Rafah campaign. Again, that’s not something a genocidal entity has any interest in doing. But the point is, the HLMG and John Spencer and others have said, not only is it the most sophisticated warning system in the world that’s definitionally incompatible with the claim of genocide, it’s also a warning system that our own populations in America and Japan, in Russia and other places in the West, would never agree to have our armies abide by. Because the warning system means that instead of indiscriminately and more safely bombing from the air, we are going to send our own sons and daughters house to house to house, fighting in the booby-trapped homes of Rafah and Khan Yunis and Gaza City in order to make sure that Gazan civilians are protected. And guess what? We’re going to warn them in advance of the exact housing blocks we’re going to send the soldiers to in the day or two before we send the soldiers there, thus allowing, of course, not just the civilian population to flee, but also Hamas to prepare its booby traps and its RPGs and its traps. So the claim is that, that Israel is, is engaging in genocide is also inconsistent with two other facts that I’ll point out. One is that as soon as Israel achieved its war aims, which it has been saying from the beginning of the war, which was that Hamas would no longer present a strategic threat to Israel and that it would get all of its hostages back. As soon as Israel had Hamas fully surrounded in about forty percent of Gaza, Israel now controls between fifty-eight and sixty percent of Gaza, totally demilitarized in that part that Israel controls, adjoining and abutting the Israeli communities. And as soon as Israel got all of its hostages back, guess what? Israel stopped bombing in Gaza and stopped the war in Gaza, showing again that Israel wasn’t trying to eradicate the Palestinian people as such. Israel was trying to get its hostages back and to end the strategic threat that Hamas posed to its country. And then lastly, as John Spencer and Richard Kemp and others have written, uh, they have studied the history of urban wars going back centuries. And even in modern times, the average militant-to-civilian kill ratio in the context of urban war is one to nine. One militant for every nine or so civilians. And that’s because, again, not every war that’s ever been fought in an urban environment is a genocide. It’s because urban wars are horrible. And by the way, Israel and its military officers have been clear. They would have much preferred to have Hamas come out into southern Israel and fight a war out in the open. Hamas would have been destroyed in just a couple of days, and everybody could have moved on. Hamas is the one who chose to fight in and underneath civilian in- infrastructure. We, the Americans, set the gold standard in Iraq and Afghanistan. We had a militant-to-civilian kill ratio of one to four or so, four and a half, depending on how you look at it. And, uh, by the way, hundreds of thousands of civilians died in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one was protesting on campus saying that this was a genocide. No, er, uh, genocide scholars are legitimately claiming that this was a genocide. Well, Israel has slashed even our gold standard in, frankly, much more difficult conditions as I’ve laid out, with an enemy that, uh, purposefully hides itself in and underneath the civilian architecture of its population to about one to one or one to one and a half, and that’s even if you believe Hamas’ numbers. The, by the way, the other day I saw a sign that said Israel killed eighty-one thousand babies in Gaza. Let’s just be clear about the numbers. Even Hamas, who is lying, the number is… Whatever the number is, it has to be less than what Hamas said, or at most, it could be whatever Hamas has said. Even Hamas is saying that about sixty-something thousand total people were killed, and that includes not just all adults, but it includes all Hamas fighters, all Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters, all fighters for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. So I think those three factors make it definitionally incompatible with any claim of genocide.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, and also, I mean, the, the point I always make, and I’m sure it’s in the book, but the charge of genocide has been around for a long time and predates, you know, ten seven by decades. And if you go back and you look at the population growth in the Palestinian, Palestinian [chuckles] territory since, I don’t know, nineteen sixty-five, I don’t know, it’s quadrupled, it’s sixfold or something like that.
Judge Roy K. Altman
Well, since two thousand and five, since the disengagement, it’s gone from one million to two point two million. It’s more than doubled.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, and like, you can’t simultaneously talk about Israelis as having these-… magical, mystical, superhuman powers and, and abilities, and at the same time say that they are dedicated to genocide while the population of the pop- of the group that they want to keep, erase has doubled. I mean, it just,
Jonah Goldberg
there’s, there’s, there’s, there’s a trout in the milk somewhere in there. I do have to ask, I know we’re running up on time, and I’m sure this is a little more difficult given that you’re a judge and whatnot, so if you want to dodge it, I understand. We’re recording this on April 8th in, at around 11:10 in the morning. Last night there was a deal, so to speak, for a ceasefire. For all I know, it’s come apart while we’ve been talking. [laughs] But I’m just kind of curious, how do you see the
Jonah Goldberg
Iran war with the fully cognizant that by the time this airs, events and facts can change, so this can only be sort of a retrospective question, but like
Jonah Goldberg
h- how are you feeling about it in, in the broadest terms?
Judge Roy K. Altman
Uh, so I, I’ll just say that I, I should say I wrote the book not as a judge, but, but as a American who, who cares about the law and, and the rule of law in the West. And I’ll comment on this, uh, u- under the same auspices, um, and with full understanding, as you just said, that everything I say now may be obsolete in about one hour. That I’m, I’m extremely bullish about the consequences of this war, and I’m extremely bullish about Israel’s and America’s persistence during the course of the last, uh, two or three years. You know, putting aside the, the likelihood that Iran will become a, a docile and peaceful neighbor, and, and I certainly hope that it will be, at the very least a neighbor that’s deterred either from building a nuclear program or, um, funding terror proxies all over the Middle East. I think that the future for the Middle East is brighter because of the wars that Israel has fought and won a- against tremendous, not just military pressure, but diplomatic and political pressure around the country. And I, I just think, you know, the idea that Israel invaded southern Lebanon, and the Lebanese and Syrian governments in their statements blamed not Israel, but Hezbollah for the war. And, uh, that the Lebanese government has now gone to the extent of not only, uh, saying that, uh, Hezbollah will be disarmed and that it’s an illegal organization in the country, but that the Iranian ambassador in Lebanon, who essentially for all intents and purposes has governed the country for the last twenty or so years, was persona non grata and had to leave the country, I think is a tremendous achievement. The idea that Syria, which for decades would shell Israeli farmers and cattle herders in the Golan from its perch atop Mount Hermon, um, and presented, I believe, for many years the greatest geostrategic threat to Israel, uh, that the president of Syria said just last week that in secret communiques he had expressed his desire to sign a full-on armistice deal with Israel, but that it was Israel who was distracted by other things. We now know that was the war in Iran. Hopefully that’ll come, by the way, in the next, uh, year or so, is an almost inconceivable reality even a year ago. And then when you look at the, the Gulf States, and this is, I think, where the biggest reason for optimism lies, you look at the Gulf States, not just the UAE, which had long and strong ties with Israel even before this war began, but even the Saudis, the Omanis, the Bahrainis and the Kuwaitis, who uniformly have been outraged by Iran’s bombing efforts in those countries, and who have made clear not just that they now viscerally understand who the real, uh, nefarious entity in the Middle East is Iran, not Israel, but that they’re truly contemplating, and I, I think there have been discussions about sending their oil instead of allowing Iran to tax it in the future or to hold the strait hostage again, ever again, to start building pipelines that will, will, will send their oil, uh, northwest through the port of Ashdod and maybe even the port of Haifa and onto the Mediterranean and, and to Europe from there, a project that admittedly could be derailed and will take a year or two, maybe more to, to see, to come into fruition. But just the idea that these countries throughout this war, even Qatar, was criticizing another Muslim country, Iran, rather than Israel, that they were standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel, and that they’re now seeing the benefits of a geostrategic economic partnership with Israel, much, by the way, as India has done over the last couple of years, I think is astonishing. And for people who lived in Israel, um, in the ’60s and ’70s, just the idea of talking about having an oil pipeline from Saudi Arabia, having, um, an, an, an armistice deal with Syria, and having a, a, an ally in Beirut who’s willing to fight hand-in-hand with Israel to get rid– may- maybe not as effectively as we would like, to get rid of a terrorist entity at north, at Israel’s northern border, to my mind is, is a, is great cause for optimism all around. And I think for the most part, a lot of that would have happened because of Israel, the force Israel used in Gaza and in Lebanon, but it wouldn’t have come as far as it has but for the tremendous, I think, bravery, the tremendous capability and capacity, and I, and I think, uh, the tremendous success that, that we probably don’t even really understand yet of our attacks, Israel and the US’ attacks, uh, in Iran.
Jonah Goldberg
Judge Alden, it’s been a pleasure. Uh, thank you so much for doing this. Again, the book is Israel on Trial, available pretty much everywhere fine books are available. Um, subtitle is Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law. Thanks again.
Judge Roy K. Altman
Thanks, Jono.
Jonah Goldberg
All right. Judge Alden has left the studio. I found that very useful. Like I, I know I’m gonna get grief. I was just telling Victoria, I know I’m gonna get grief from people who have all sorts of bones to pick with Israel. There has been some good analysis, I have to say, or I should say some persuasive analysisThat the, look, let me put it this way. I think Altman is directionally absolutely correct about how
Jonah Goldberg
the standard applied to Israel in terms of the fighting in Gaza is unfair and unjustified to Israel if you’re going to have any kind of similar standards to any other country around the world. But we’ll put a link in the show notes. There was this piece in War on the Rocks that our friend sent me a while ago that
Jonah Goldberg
paints some of the picture a little grayer. But at a 30,000 foot level, I still love the school that says you launch a pogrom, a barbarian raid on
Jonah Goldberg
kisniks dancing in concerts and go on a campaign of hostage shaking and raping and murdering families and murdering kids in front of their parents and parents in front of their kids and all that kind of stuff.
Jonah Goldberg
The reprisals are going to be ugly and you can point to specific things and say Israelis should have shown more restraint here or there. And I’m willing to entertain the argument. But if your argument is that the real oppressors, the real criminals, bad actors, villains in the story are the Israelis, you just kind of lose me. The simple fact is Israelis hold themselves up to a much higher standard than most other countries. And bad things happen in wars. And when you
Jonah Goldberg
have a policy of using civilians as shields and you orchestrate your military around that practice, bad things are going to happen that are really regrettable. And I just don’t assign the blame in the way that a lot of other people do. It’s sort of like, you know, in this Iran stuff, which again, by the time this airs, who knows what’s going on in Iran. But, you know, in the days leading up to the civilization must die, it will die. Iranian civilization will die thing from Trump, which I thought was grotesque and not good. I just don’t think that language suits the United States of America. I also thought it was kind of dumb on the merits. If you think about what he was actually saying, even though it wasn’t directed at American audiences. Anyway, plenty of time to talk about all that. My point is, is that they started to run these Iranians started to put these rings of these human rings of civilians around some of these power plants and other installations. And you would think from the reaction from some people that all you have to do to turn a military target into a civilian target is wrap it around is is is surrounded by civilians. That’s just not how the laws of war work. Doesn’t mean, you know, you can’t take some of this stuff into account and all that. But the Iranian regime is perfectly happy to sacrifice its own people. And it’s a matter of
Jonah Goldberg
theological ideology. And they’ve demonstrated that. And Hamas was certainly willing to do that. Anyway, too much of a rabbit hole. Much to be done, discussed. I’ll pick up on more of this probably next week. But thanks to Judge Altman. Thank you for listening. And I will see you next time.
Judge Roy K. Altman
No, you won’t. This is a podcast. Yeah.