Israel's kinetic war against Hamas has been successful. Although still defiant, Hamas is a shadow of its pre-October 7 self. The possibility of an October 7 reprisal is forever nil. But Hamas and their supporters are winning the equally important battle for hearts and minds in demonizing Israel and Jews.
The Coming Trials
Their toxic flow of accusations — settler colonialism, apartheid and, above all, genocide in Gaza — have never been interrogated in a court of actual law. But they will be. As alpha Israeli journalist Amit Segal recently reported in his daily newsletter, "Oct 7 launched the propaganda war, but the trial of the perpetrators will put the propagandists on trial."
A Knesset committee is currently at work on a bill that will create the framework "for what is destined to be the largest and most complex judicial event in Israel's history," Segal writes. As Knesset member Yulia Malinovsky, the bill's initiator put it: "There is nothing better than a proceeding to tell the story."
Historical Precedent
This was the rationale for the post-Second World War Nuremberg Trials, considered "the true beginning of international criminal law," which prosecuted 24 surviving architects of the Holocaust, and made Nazism the world's gold standard for moral depravity. The October 7 trial will prosecute 350 pogrom captured agents. The process may take years, but it will be time and effort well spent.
Since courtrooms are now the last public space in the West where evidence is privileged over ideology and "narratives" that are considered sacred in the woke West, the recent publication of a book by a Florida-based federal U.S. judge, "Israel on Trial: Examining the history, the evidence, and the law," dovetails nicely with the above news.
Legal Framework
Author Roy K. Altman's motivation for making what Commentary editor John Podhoretz describes as "the definitive case for the historical necessity of the state of Israel and its actions in its own defence" arose from a perception of the charges swirling around Israel as "quintessentially legal, not moral." It made sense to Altman to apply the same rigorous standards and methodology he uses in his courtroom to the anti-Zionists' spurious claims.
The book's six chapters explore, in elegantly lucid prose, the most frequently promoted canards against Israel: that Israel's founding was aberrational; that the Palestinians' failure to achieve statehood is Israel's fault; that Zionism is a colonizing project; that Israel's "occupation" of Gaza made it an "open-air prison"; that Israel is an apartheid state; and that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
In each case, Altman adduces unrebuttable evidence: archeological records, settled genetic data and international law, which combine to eviscerate anti-Zionist arguments. Notably, as he writes in his introduction, in court, when a party stakes their case on a provable lie, the falsehood is treated as evidence of the party's "consciousness of guilt — evidence of its culpability — and not as an innocent." (If only media applied the same standard to Hamas's press releases.)
By insisting on the same courtroom "playbook" that judges give jurors, rules that enable ordinary people to adjudicate even the most complex of issues, Altman invalidates bias, "emotion posing as argument" and political advocacy rather than analysis.
