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Roy K. Altman

@roykaltman

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Father. Husband. Judge. Passionate defender of the West. Yale Law School. Former federal prosecutor. NYT bestselling author of "Israel on Trial."

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Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law is available now: https://www.amazon.com/Israel-Trial-Examining-History-Evidence/dp/B0G8Y2XN1X

I wrote the book to address the six false claims about Israel that have fueled the explosion of antisemitism we’ve seen since the October 7 terrorist attacks.

The book applies courtroom standards—evidence, burdens of proof, and reasoned judgment—to the world’s most polarizing accusations against Israel.

Drawing from archaeology, international law, DNA research, and centuries of history, Israel on Trial investigates claims of colonialism, apartheid, and genocide with clarity and precision.

At a time when slogans replace substance and misinformation spreads faster than facts, Israel on Trial offers a disciplined method for separating outrage from evidence. Readers will come away not with talking points, but with a framework for understanding the reality on the ground—and the tools to evaluate any claim rigorously, regardless of their politics.

Israel on Trial is a call for intellectual integrity in a debate where too much is assumed and far too little is examined. by @roykaltman

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6 months ago

If someone had asked me before October 7th what I wanted to be remembered for, I would have said that I wanted people to know that I was a good father, husband, and friend; a fair judge; and a model American citizen.

But October 7th was a watershed moment in the history of Western civilization—not because of what happened thousands of miles away, but because of what happened here in our supposedly sacred institutions.

Hamas killed 1,200 innocent people. They butchered them in their bedrooms. They beheaded them at their dance parties. They blew them up clutching their families in their bomb shelters.

And yet, at my alma maters, in our universities, we Jews became the oppressors. Hamas raped dozens and dozens of Jewish women and girls, mothers together with their daughters. That's now clear beyond peradventure. You can go home tonight and watch the videotaped confessions of Hamas terrorists admitting to these unspeakable acts. They committed the crime of kinocide.

This was just announced in a recent report by an international NGO on May 12th of this year. It is the first documented use of kinocide as a weapon of war anywhere on the planet since Rwanda in the 1990s.

And yet, in our Western media outlets, we Jews became the aggressors. by @roykaltman

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3 months ago

When I was a little boy, all of our family vacations were the same.

We would travel around the southern United States to Civil War battlefields—to places like Alabama, Georgia, and Virginia. We’ve been to all the battlefields you’ve heard of, and a hundred you never knew existed.

And one day, we were at Chattanooga. A very important battlefield in the Civil War.

The entire Union Army was arrayed at the bottom of a ridge called Missionary Ridge. The Union had lost battle after battle, and the command came down not to charge up the hill at the Confederates. But there was a young man—to show you how one man can change the world—a 17-year-old boy named Arthur MacArthur, who later became the father of Douglas MacArthur, the great general from World War II.

And he saw the standard bearer in front of him get shot, and the flag hit the earth. And he couldn't bear the American flag on the ground, so he picked it up and charged up the hill. And the entire American army charged after him and won the day. He got the Medal of Honor pinned on his lapel on top of that ridge.

I was standing there with my father when I was eight years old, looking out over the battlefield, and it started to snow. Now, I grew up in Miami, Israel, and Venezuela, not a lot of snow in my life. So, I turned to my dad, and I said, "Papi, this is beautiful. This is so fun."

And he turned to me, very stern, and said, "Fun? You think this is fun? You don't understand why we bring you to these places. We bring you here so that you and your sister can understand the soul of the country we brought you to. This is a country where 600,000 men died so that a part of the country who were enslaved could be free. That is the level of devotion and dedication that a free and fair democracy demands." by @roykaltman

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5 months ago

My grandfather’s final lesson for me came during the the last conversation I ever had with him.

My grandfather, Izu, was dying of cancer. I was a junior or senior in college and my father told me that if I ever wanted to see him again that this was my last chance.

So, I came back to Venezuela.

If you know Venezuelan history, you know that in 1998, we had a dictator, Hugo Chavez, who came to power. And the Constitution said, you could run for one five-year term.

As a self-respecting autocrat, what did he do? He packed the Supreme Court with a bunch of his buddies and they ruled that he could run again as many times as he wanted, which is exactly what happened.

The day after that ruling came down, a hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets to protest the dictatorship and that happened to coincide with my last trip to Venezuela to visit my grandfather.

He was very ill. He was in a wheelchair.

My grandfather said, “Take me out onto the balcony.”

And the people were all below us protesting on the street below.

And he said, “Your father tells me you want to go to law school.”

I said, “I do.”

He asked me, “What kind of lawyer do you want to be?”

I said, “Well, I don't know. I'm just in college.”

And then he lifted his very bony finger, and he pointed it out at the crowd and he said, “Always remember, this is what happens to a country when good people don't serve.”

Maybe a week or two later, he was dead.

So, for me when I was 34, and the President was going to nominate me to be a federal judge, and all these people came and said, “Oh, you’re way too young, you got your whole life ahead of you to make money,” I remembered my last conversation with my grandfather and all the wonderful blessings that have been provided to us in this country that welcomed us with open arms.

It has been the great honor of my life to serve and it was a no brainer from the start. by @roykaltman

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8 days ago

Because I am an American who loves this country with all my heart and who understands that, throughout history, time and again, societies that allow the conspiracy theory of Jew-hatred to metastasize are societies that are sick and dying.

Look at the Russia of Kishinev in 1903. It had been around for hundreds of years. Fourteen years later, it was gone.

Look at the Germany of Kristallnacht in 1938. The thousand-year Reich. Seven years later, it was dead.

Again, not because I’m a Jew, but because I’m an American, I recognize that we have an obligation to root out this nonsense now. Because if we are not careful, it will bring the entire house tumbling down on all of us, not just your Jews.

And that’s why I spend all of my free time fighting this fight.

People say, “Well, how do you do any judging?” You know, all the extra minutes in your day when you do things that aren’t work? Those are lovely moments, I’m sure. I have none of them.

I have given it all up. And I’m happy to do it because I want to see a country for my children and his children and my grandchildren that’s like the one I grew up in—a country that knows what’s right and what’s wrong. A country that knows what’s true and what’s false.

A country that knows that the bad guys are the terror army that invades peaceful border communities in our closest regional ally and beheads, burns alive, and mutilates women, children, and the elderly; that rapes—violently rapes—dozens of women and little girls, mothers on the same bed as their daughters; that takes 251 innocent people hostage, stolen from their homes—not soldiers (some soldiers, yes), but mostly septuagenarians, octogenarians, Holocaust survivors, and two dozen infants and toddlers stolen from their cribs—brings them into deep, dark dungeons in Gaza, and holds them there for hundreds of days without food, without medicine, without water. by @roykaltman

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9 days ago

In this country, we have to remember who our friends are and who they aren't.

Who shares our values and who doesn't.

Who the real monsters are and who the good guys are.

Remember the 'There's a famine in Gaza' myth?

We now know it was all complete bogus—not because Roy Altman said it—UNICEF just wrote a report.

UNICEF is not big fans of the Israelis. This was a begrudging report.

The children of Gaza today, the report says, are better nutritioned than they were before the war started when they were being governed by their Hamas overlords.

The children of Gaza today are better nutritioned than their Muslim Arab compatriots in the two adjoining countries, Egypt and Jordan.

Why?

Because Israel did something no army in the world has ever done or would ever do again: It brought more food, medicine, and fuel— 3.9 million tons—into Gaza to feed, supply, and keep healthy the enemy's civilian population even though it knew that 251 of its own citizens were actively being held hostage after they were kidnapped on October 7.

The hostages were dragged into dungeons.

They were not being fed.

They were not being clothed.

They were not being given medicine.

We know that the girls were being sexually abused almost on a daily basis.

Men were being tortured and electrocuted.

Each hostage lost 30, 50, some of them 70 pounds in captivity.

We met one hostage, an American, who told us that despite all the torture, all the horrible things she went through in there, that she could think only of one thing: If there would be enough oxygen deep underground for her next breath.

Think about doing that for one hour.

Think about doing that for 24 hours.

Think about doing that for 400 days. by @roykaltman

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10 days ago

My grandmother killed a Nazi who tried to rape her when she was 16.

She pulled his gun out of its holster and shot him in the side. Then he fell onto his back, and she shot him two or three times in the chest. She dropped the gun, went out the window, and down the fire escape.

She had gone to this dance party in Paris and met this young, handsome, dashing young man—not my grandfather—and they danced all through the night.

At some point during the party, the Germans come in, the Vichy Police, and everyone went running.

My grandmother hid in a dumpster behind the warehouse. She got pulled out by a dog and taken to jail.

The Nazis asked all the kids about this young, handsome, dashing man and all of them said, “Look, I don't know who he is, but Janine was dancing with him all night.”

So, the Nazis questioned my grandmother and she said, “Look, I don’t even know who he is. He never told me his name.”

They didn’t believe her.

So, they beat her, kicked her and spat on her.

By the end of the night, she had a broken rib and her eyes swollen shut. She thought they were going to kill her.

But in the morning, they came in and said, “You’re free to go.”

She leaves the jail and quickly notices that one of the Nazis from the jail is following her.

She then remembers that a friend’s husband who lives in the area has a gun, so she goes to her friend’s place.

When she got to the apartment, the Nazi came in behind her, forced her friend into the bathroom, and took my grandmother into bedroom where he started to rape her.

But she was tough and she pulled out his gun from its holster and she shot him in the side. And then he fell onto his back. And she shot him two or three times in the chest. And she dropped the gun and went out the window and down the fire escape.

Now, I told this story at a commencement speech I gave a few years ago. She was 96 and she was in the audience in the front row.

I said, “Hey, don't mess with the Altmans because my grandmother, she killed a Nazi who tried to rape her when she was 16.”

And my grandmother says in front of everybody, “I’m not sure that he died.”

I responded, “That’s not how firearms work, abuela.” by @roykaltman

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15 days ago

All over the country, I get people who say to me, "You know what I was at a dinner and there were 10 or 12 people. Two of them were Jews. And somebody said, 'oh, it's genocide, it's apartheid,' whatever it is. And the Jews, they stayed silent. So we all just went home and assumed that it was true."

It's not nice to say, many of us have been in that situation.

That is how they feel whether you like it or not.

So I know that it's awkward to say something back to a person at dinner. I know that it's hard to make the dinner difficult. Maybe even lose a friend.

But let me tell you, it'll be much more awkward for you 20 or 30 years from now, if not 20% or 30% of people, but 100% of your fellow Americans believe that you and your children and grandchildren are genocidal monsters.

It'll be much more awkward then.

So, It's time to wake up and nip this thing in the bud.

We are the Jewish people. We gave the world not just Jesus and monotheism and the Bible — a system of political democracy.

We're the first people to say, you don't need a God to be your King. You don't need to have a Queen who's divine.

Every single one of you has a light within yourself to be equal under the law for our God.

All political democracy stems from that.

Remember who we are, be proud of where you come from.

And be optimistic that just as for thousands of years, there have been cataclysmic problems brought on by much bigger and more powerful empires than a few people with purple hair on the Upper West Side, and they are all gone now.

But we are still here.

Know that. Internalize that. And put that into your conversations. by @roykaltman

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17 days ago

Israel’s doing the very opposite of genocide.

Israel does everything in its power to move civilians out of harm’s way in order to preserve and protect them.

I'll give you an example. Israel, at the beginning of the war, would warn civilians to get out of harm’s way. They would say, “here are the areas that we’re going to attack tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that you need to leave so that we can fight Hamas who’s hiding in those places.”

Already that’s the very opposite of genocide. Genocide requires an army to be pushing civilians into the killing zone. Here’s an army warning civilians to get out of the killing zone.

But here’s the thing, over time Israel learned that Hamas was not going to tolerate that. Hamas, we know from their private correspondence, they want more civilians to die, not less.

They want to convince the world that Israel is bad, so that Israel can be easily destroyed. So they start killing civilians who are fleeing the war zone. They start at gunpoint, forcing civilians to go back into the places that Israel is going to attack in order to increase the amount of civilian casualties.

Israel learns about this and what does Israel do? Israel starts building these humanitarian corridors—these are unheard of in warfare. They started at 4 hours a day, 8 hours a day. Ultimately there were 16, sometimes 20 hours a day, where Israel would man these highways that they would create.

They would put their own soldiers, Israeli sons and daughters on the front lines of these highways to sit there and guard Palestinian civilians from other Palestinians as they fled the war zone to make sure that Hamas couldn't kill them as they fled.

Again, that’s doubly the opposite of genocide and the numbers bear this out.

In fact, every month since the war went on, you see the ratio of militants-to-civilians killed get lower and lower and lower so that ultimately, at the end of the war, when they go into Rafah—where Israel moved 1.2 million civilians out of harm’s way in order to destroy the final stronghold of Hamas in southern Gaza—you see the lowest civilian casualties of the war, at the end of the war.

Again, it’s the very opposite of a genocide. by @roykaltman

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25 days ago

Israel could easily have dropped 10,000 bombs and cleaned house and turned all of Gaza into a parking lot. That’s what almost every army in the world would have done with 251 of their people being held in holes underground.

What would we have done if 10,000 Mexicans had crossed the border and murdered 40,000 Americans in San Diego? That’s what it would be proportionally, 40,000, and taken a few thousand of our children from San Diego hostage and held them in holes under Tijuana for hundreds of days.

You think Tijuana would still be here? Of course not.

I used to be a football player. But in war as in football, what’s the most important thing on offense? Surprise.

And Israel every single day relinquishes offensive surprise, tells Hamas exactly where they are going in order to preserve and protect innocent Palestinian civilian lives. And it results in the deaths of hundreds of Israeli boys and girls.

Think about that, Israel has sacrificed over 600 of its own sons and daughters in order to preserve and protect the lives of the enemy’s civilian population. What army in the world would ever do that?

Here’s why it’s really important that we reserve our ultimate claims for real genocides: In the future, if the country that did more to preserve innocent civilian life in the most complicated urban war zone that’s ever been constructed is still being accused on college campuses and in the international courts of the ultimate crime of crimes, of genocide, then why would any other Western army in the future take the measures that Israel took endangering the lives of its own sons and daughters to preserve the enemies civilian population if they're just going to be hauled into court anyway?

This is the real danger. If you're going to bring in Western armies that follow the rules, that engage in the complicated cost benefit analysis that international law and the proportionality doctrine require of armies in the field, if you're going to still haul them into court and accuse them of genocide, you’re going see a much more dangerous world in the future where armies just throw the rules out the window because it doesn't matter anyway. by @roykaltman

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a month ago

Kfir and Ariel Bibas, ten months and four years old, respectively, were strangled by their Hamas captors in a dungeon far away from their dead mother.

And then to have their posters up in Times Square, be pulled down, was unbelievable.

Douglas Murray talks about this.

If a person loses his dog, he goes all around his neighborhood and he posts pictures of his dog. Cute little dog, right?

"Rover is missing. If you find him, please call this number."

Imagine if your neighbor was caught pulling down the picture of the dog. This person is a sociopath, would never be invited to a barbecue ever again. No one would ever talk to him. His kids would never be invited over to play, the person's a psycho. But thousands and thousands of Americans went and pulled down the photos of infants—human infants—who were being held tortured and then murdered in Hamas' dungeons, without food or water or any medical attention.

For those of you who've had children, I have little babies. They need attention every minute of every day.

Think about how scared they were. And Americans were going into our public squares, ripping down their posters and being celebrated for it.

What has happened to us?

We've become almost inhuman.

And I thought to myself, something has to change.

Something is deeply wrong. The moral confusion among our youngest people is so deep. The moral rot in their souls is so profound that something must be done. by @roykaltman

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a month ago

Shana Tova family- here is my Yom Kippur reading, what’s yours? ‘Israel on Trial’ by my friend - @roykaltman by @roykaltman

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a month ago