Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Jessica Morgan

At a moment when one of the world's most charged conflicts is being argued mostly through social media posts and protest chants, a sitting federal judge decided to do something almost radical: demand evidence. Israel on Trial is not a comfortable book, but it is a necessary one, and the difference between those two things is exactly what Roy K. Altman is writing about.

Reading it produces a particular kind of mental friction that is actually the point. Altman is not asking you to agree with him. He is asking you to slow down, examine what you think you know, and hold it up against the same standards a courtroom would apply. That process is uncomfortable precisely because most of us have absorbed strong opinions about this conflict from sources that never once asked for our burden of proof. The book catches you mid-assumption, repeatedly, and that experience stays with you long after you put it down.

The themes here stretch well beyond the Israel-Palestine debate, which is what makes the book genuinely significant. Altman is writing about epistemology, about how we decide what is true, who gets to assert it, and what it costs a society when emotional momentum replaces evidentiary reasoning. The labels he examines, colonialism, apartheid, genocide, are ones being deployed across many political conversations right now, often with tremendous confidence and very little scrutiny. His legal framework offers something rare: a method for thinking rather than just a conclusion to adopt.

His writing carries the precision you would expect from a Yale-trained federal judge without ever becoming cold or academic. He writes like someone who genuinely believes the truth is worth the effort of finding it, and that belief animates every chapter. The structure mirrors a legal argument, building deliberately, and that architecture gives the book real intellectual backbone.

Whether or not you arrive at his conclusions, this book will permanently change how you evaluate the next viral claim you encounter. That is not a small contribution.

About The Author

Roy K. Altman

Roy K. Altman is a United States District Judge for the Southern District of Florida. At 36, he became the youngest federal district court judge in the country and the youngest federal judge ever appointed in the Southern District of Florida. Altman received his BA from Columbia University, where he played quarterback for the football team and pitched for the baseball team, earning All-Ivy honors. Altman received his JD from the Yale Law School, where he was projects editor of the Yale Law Journal. After law school, Altman clerked on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for the Honorable Stanley Marcus. 

Altman then became a federal prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami, where he twice received the Director of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys' Award for Superior Performance--a nationwide honor. In 2013, Altman was named "Federal Prosecutor of the Year" by the Miami-Dade Chiefs of Police and the Law Enforcement Officers' Charitable Foundation. 

In 2014, Altman became a partner at the Miami law firm of Podhurst Orseck, where he represented the victims of bank-fraud conspiracies and international airplane crashes--including the families of passengers aboard Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared over the Indian Ocean after taking off from Kuala Lumpur. 

Since the Hamas massacres in Southern Israel on October 7, 2023, Altman has led dozens of federal judges from all across the United States on the first-ever Judicial Education Missions to Israel. He's also given hundreds of speeches about Israel, antisemitism, and the rule of law at colleges, law schools, churches, synagogues, and community centers around the world.