In this episode of Get Real with David DesRosiers, Israel is put on trial. Judge Roy Altman, U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of Florida and author of “Israel on Trial,” explains why he argues that Israel is not committing genocide, why he believes apartheid exists elsewhere in the Middle East-but not in Israel-and why strong collaboration between the United States and Israel remains important.

DAVID DESROSIERS, ‘GET REAL’ HOST, REALCLEARPOLITICS PUBLISHER: Today’s topic, the Jews, and why they are disliked, not just in New York, but globally. Israel and the chosen people are not polling well. The president, the most Israeli Jewish loving president, is even grumbling about his stiff neck comrade, Bibi Netanyahu. Most concerning, the kids, the coming generation, are replacements, are not that into Israel at all. Indifference to the Jewish state would be an improvement. They look at October 7th attacks and the massacre on Israel, perpetrated by a terror group, Hamas, very differently from their boomer parents, parents of America. Our replacements are thinking much differently than we do. These students, these products of our education system think that October 7th was awful, but Israel deserved it. That Israel’s past sins and present sins justified it. You know, they look at us and they say, what did you expect to happen? Come on, put yourself in their shoes, the underdogs. So today, Israel is on trial, and it’s losing in the court of public opinion. With this said, let me bring in the judge and get his ruling. Welcome to Judge Roy Altman, United States District Judge from the Southern Florida District, and the author of Israel on Trial, examining the history, the evidence, and the law. Judge Altman, welcome to Get Real, The People’s Court. JUDGE ROY ALTMAN, THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF FLORIDA: Thanks for having me. DESROSIERS: Oh, it’s a real pleasure. If you haven’t seen the judge already, you’re gonna enjoy him today. I follow you on Instagram. It seems what the process is, you’ve taken all the caricatures that have been made and actually sold as gospel out there to the American people, and you just knock them down one by one. But it’s like, is this a fair depiction of the caricature that we’re starting about, that Israel is a colonial, apartheid, genocidal nation that does, it’s racist, it treats its neighbors poorly, it’s belligerent, and it’s the straw that stirs the drink in the United States in our politics, right? With that, I mean, I’d like to give up the biggest one that I find most awful, that reflects the use and abuse of language that’s characteristic of our kind of modern parlance. It’s like the idea that the Jews are genocidal. Would you take that one up and give it a pop? ALTMAN: It’s really important to understand that not only has there been no genocide in Gaza, it’s the opposite. It’s actually the most humane, the most precise urban warfare fight the world has ever known. It’s actually a war that was run, for the most part, by lawyers, international law scholars and lawyers, called MAGs, military advocate generals, who are deployed in the field with the commanders, thousands of them, and who evaluate every action, every strike, and unlike here in the United States, where JAG officers give advice to commanders and say, hey, this is a precatory piece of advice. You can disregard it if you want. In Israel, the MAGs advice is not precatory. It’s a mandatory order that must be followed by the commander, and here’s what your audience should know about it. Every single day in Gaza, strikes on legitimate military targets are canceled, and I’ve seen this with my own eyes, dozens and dozens and dozens of times because of the risk of collateral consequences to civilians in Gaza. That’s the very opposite of genocide. Think about real genocides in history, when you take the Nazis, for example, who pushed my mother’s half-brothers and sisters into the gas chambers. They weren’t looking to warn civilians to get out of the killing zone. They weren’t looking to cancel strikes, which is to say a gas chamber situation, because there were too many civilians near the gas chambers. The whole purpose, the whole architecture of a genocidal regime was to push the civilians into the killing zone. So the fact that Israel cancels strikes because of a fear of civilian casualties, because it actually employs the most sophisticated civilian warning system the world has ever seen to get civilians out of the killing zone, and then, by the way, to shepherd them to safety, to provide them with food purveyors, medical clinics, the polio vaccine for 98% of the children in al-Mawassi, given for free by the Israeli government and by Israeli doctors to children in Gaza. This is the very opposite of what we would expect if there were a genocide. DESROSIERS: No, exactly. We get about five minutes left, but I’d like you to kind of, I would like to throw another ball at you, because I think it gets to the soul of it. It’s like Israel’s an apartheid nation. ALTMAN: So again, this is a preposterous claim. With all these claims, Hitler and Goebbels always said, if you say something ludicrous but false long enough and loudly enough, over time, it will seed itself in the collective subconscious and people will start to believe it. This may be the most preposterous of all the claims. Israel is a country of 10 million people, 21% of whom are Arabs. 17% of whom are Arab Muslims. And they have the exact same civil, commercial and political rights as their Jewish neighbors. They can open a restaurant, become dentists, lawyers, and doctors. There is a Supreme Court justice sitting on the court, Supreme Court of Israel, who is an Arab Muslim. And by the way, almost always has been. There are Muslim judges all throughout the court system. And if you see the rate of matriculation and graduation at some of the most elite universities in all of Israel, the engines of socioeconomic mobility, you’ll see that Muslim Arabs comprise sometimes almost 50% of the graduates, say in, for example, dentistry schools and nursing schools, even though they’re only 20 or so percent of the population. Again, that’s the very opposite of an apartheid state. But there is apartheid being practiced every single day all across the Middle East, but it’s not in Israel. It’s in the Arab states that are pushing the apartheid claim against Israel. Think about whether there would ever be a Jewish or Christian Supreme Court justice on the Supreme Court of Tehran. Would there ever be a Jewish or Christian general in Damascus or a Jewish and Christian head of a hospital in Ramallah or Gaza City? Those are obviously preposterous things even to conceive of, but the opposite happens every single day in Israel. Here’s the last point. What is the state of New Mexico and the city of Louisville, Kentucky and Birmingham, Alabama have in common? Each of them has more Jews in them than there are living in the entire Arab world. 22 countries with hundreds of millions of Arabs have fewer Jews living in them than live in the city of Birmingham, Alabama or the state of New Mexico. There is apartheid all over the Middle East. It’s just not happening in Israel. DESROSIERS: What are the questions? Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whom I love, had this beautiful quote. He says, we’re all entitled to our own opinions, not our own facts. What I love about your book is that you actually take the caricatures, the opinions that put out there and you give the historical evidence and you try it like a great lawyer and a great judge. One of the things I’d like you to do in the last minute we have is, I mean, I think you’re a living, breathing, walking example of how you can be a Republican, American first, but also be a Zionist. Is there any advice that you would give to your fellow citizens on how they can be like you, Judge, quite frankly? ALTMAN: We’re now seeing that Israel wants to get down to zero aid from America, okay, over the course of the next few years. Bibi Netanyahu has been talking about it. It’s something that the Israeli government wants to do. As a Zionist, I think that’s a good idea because I think Israel should be free to transact with everybody. But as an American, that would be a terrible disaster for us, okay? The amount that we get back in free R&D on cybersecurity, AI, quantum computing, machine learning, and obviously military technology and equipment far exceeds, probably by over an order of magnitude or more, the amount of aid that we provide to that country on a yearly basis. And if we’re not getting all of that back from Israel, you better believe they’re gonna be selling all of that stuff to other countries, maybe even to China, to Russia, to India, because that country is gonna survive whether we’re there to help it or not. As an America first person, as a federal judge in this community who loves this country and who accepts that it has given us every single blessing and is the greatest force for good in the world, we must recognize, as Justice Brandeis often said, to be an American is to be a Zionist. DESROSIERS: Judge Altman, thank you. I mean, and everyone out there, Israel on Trial, buy the book, follow him on Instagrams. It’s daily installments of him actually lighting straw men on fire. I mean, you’re a great American, and I hope everybody reads the book because I think there’s a problem out there that needs to be prescribed to, not with other opinion, but with fact, history, and evidence. So thank you, Judge.

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