Why everything you’re told about Israel is a lie | Roy K Altman

Tammy regularly hauled stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's wholesale club saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. "Have you met my kid?" And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. "They call me the road warrior." This is your home road warrior mom, home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com/maskete and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon, limited time offer, new members only. BJ's, home of the save. This episode is brought to you by TXU Energy. For the first time ever, Texans have an energy plan that combines free nights all year with daytime summer savings. It's called Free Nights in Cool Summer. You get free nights every night all year long, plus a 25% bonus toward your daytime use all summer. It's a first of its kind plan, created for how Texans actually use energy. Discover how much more you could save with Free Nights in Cool Summer. TXU Energy, energy for everything. Visit TXU.com for more information at rep #100004. Hi Ryan Reynolds here for a Mint Mobile. Are you looking for a beach read this summer? May I suggest your big wireless bill? It's got suspense, mystery, a slightly flat emotional arc, and a shocking twist where you realize you've been overpaying the entire time. Fortunately though, mint story is better. Every plan $15 a month, even unlimited. That's it. Happy ending, zero tears. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. A front payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12-month plan required, $15 per month equivalent to taxas and fees extra. The initial plan turned only greater than 50 gigabytes when network is busy. See terms. The entire conversation about Israel is being driven by six main claims. Each of the six claims is totally false as a matter of history, a fact, and of law. We know that the people who lived and ruled in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea going back thousands of years were Jews. People in the West just don't know that, they don't understand that. They suffered an act of genocide and terrorism on 7th of October 2023, and yet it is Israel that is accused of genocide simply for responding to that. Israel's war in Gaza is the furthest thing from the definition of genocide. Israel has the lowest militant to civilian, cure ratio in world history. If Israel wanted to destroy the entire civilian population of Gaza, they could have done it on October 8th in a moment. Hello, welcome back to the Brendan O'Neil show with me, Brendan O'Neil and my special guest this week, Roy Altman. Roy, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you on. Some listeners might be familiar with you. You are a US district judge in Florida, which sounds very, very important. I'm sure that it is. But the reason I've got you on this podcast is because you are also the author of a brilliant new book called Israel on trial examining the history, the evidence, and the law, in which you really take a kind of legal scalpel to some of the claims that we hear about Israel all the time these days, and you really kind of dissect them in a way that is incredibly illuminating. So I highly recommend the book to listeners and viewers of this podcast. I've got some questions for you about the book, but I thought I'd kick off with a kind of broad question to start with, which is, I mean, the artist is kind of obvious, but what compelled you to write this book now? What was it in the current moment, I guess over the past three years that made you think, right, I need to get this down in writing about why everything that people are saying is wrong? Well, so, you know, I came to this country, the United States, from Venezuela, from Caracas, where I was born, a poor country, a country rife with corruption, and where the rule of law really doesn't matter at all, or at least hasn't historically. And we came to America, and my parents always told me that if we were tired and we treated people with respect, and we followed the law that we could be or do anything, and that has proven to be true. In fact, one of the great blessings I have as a federal judge is I get to naturalize our newest citizens every few months, a couple hundred of them at a time from all over the world. And I tell them that 20 or 25 years ago, I was sitting right where they're sitting today, waving their little American flags full of expectancy about the rights and obligations. That come along with being a member of this vibrant and special community. And if you'd asked me before October 7th, how I wanted to be remembered, I think I would have said that I wanted to be remembered as a fair judge and a model citizen and a good husband and father and friend, but then something happened after October 7th, not thousands of miles away in the desert in Israel. But here in the West, in what we thought were our sacrosanct institutions and the media on college campuses at the United Nations, in organization that in many ways was created specifically for the purpose of ensuring that never again would this level of subjugation, humiliation and degradation that we saw on October 7th be visited upon the Jewish people that there was a moral distortion, a moral confusion, a moral inversion of everything that we had always been taught to be true and rational and just in any circumstance. And I started to travel around the whole country. And I went up to almost all 50 states to churches of every denomination, dozens of colleges and law school and high school campuses trying to understand what was motivating people who were otherwise law-biting, otherwise cared about the rules, to chant for the death and destruction of millions of Jews and the only Jewish state in the world against an enemy that not only was, didn't care about the rules, not only violated the rules at every turn, but was an organization, Hamas, and its Iranian backers that wants to destroy the entire rule-based order on which western civilization are civilization, the one that we partake of, that we benefit from. Every second of every day was built on. And in the course of those travels, I had really thousands of conversations with people young and old about Israel. It's ancient past, it's painful present, it's hopes for a brighter future. And I came to recognize that the entire conversation about Israel is being driven by six main claims about the Jewish state. And each of those claims, as I say in the book, is actually at its core, if you drill down on it, a legal claim. It's pretty unique. And so I thought, you know what, two pieces of good news. One, each of the six claims is totally false as a matter of history, a fact, and of law. But two, we have a language. We have a methodology that we have developed over hundreds of years in this country, thousands of years in your country, in order to be able to answer and assess the veracity of contested legal claims. And so I thought, why not apply that same time-tested methodology, a methodology that we know we trust, because of course we use it. We're truth telling matters the most in the courtroom, where someone's life or their business or their well-being is at stake, and apply it to each of these six claims and see what happens. And that's why the book is called Israel on trial. We literally put Israel on trial. We apply each of the six claims. That's why there's six chapters. Each chapter gets a claim. We apply the relevant legal methodology, and then we issue a verdict in the end one way or the other. Of course, we're not going to tell your listeners what the verdict is because we want them to read the book. But that's the idea behind the animating principle behind the book. It's a really useful opening. And listening to you talk about the reaction in the west really connects with me, because I often say that, you know, as horrifying as seventh of October was, for me, it was the eighth of October that was really the wake-up call, because that's when people in London, Berlin, Sydney were celebrating the massacre of Jews by her mass. And that's the day on which I knew that the west was going to change radically as well. Or some of those trends were really going to come to the surface of our society. So it's really interesting to hear you say that. I'm looking at the six claims now that you just mentioned. They're listed very usefully in near the beginning of the book. And then, of course, you analyze them chapter by chapter. I don't want to go through all six of them, because, as you say, we want people to buy this book. It's an incredibly important contribution to this discussion. But I do want to ask you about a couple of them, just as. So you can give a flavor of why you think these are problematic claims. You describe them at the beginning of the book as compelling, almost intoxicating claims. And that's a really good way to describe them, because I meet people virtually every single day who are intoxicated by these claims, who live and breathe them, who really believe them almost as if they are gospel truths. And it's worth just kind of thinking much more critically. So the first one is the idea of settler colonialism, that the Jews are colonists in the Holy Land, that they have. They pushed aside the indigenous population of Palestine, and they created this colonial entity that people call Israel. Give us a sense of why you thought that was important to have as the first claim to analyze and give us a sense of your take on it as well. It's the claim that I spend the most time on, because not only is it the most pervasive of the claims, but it also bleeds into all the other claims in ways that are quite pernicious and understated. I'll give you an example as to one of the other claims, and that's the genocide claim that I tackle at the end in chapter 6. And so in America, we think in England too, there's a doctrine of self-defense called the castle doctrine, and the castle, the castle doctrine works like this in the law. Imagine that you are a person you're sleeping in your bed, nice and cozy and soundly, and it's three, four in the morning, it's dark, and then suddenly the alarm sounds in your home, and you open your eyes, and there's a man standing over you in your bed, right? This is a terrifying thought, I'm sure every human being has had it at one point or another even if you don't admit it, and it's a horrible, a horrible feeling, right? You have the right under the castle doctrine, I'm from Florida, so most people have a gun, to pull out a gun and shoot the person in your home dead. You don't have to warn, you don't have to ask any questions, you don't have to shoot them in the knee or whatever and then call the cops, you don't have to do any of them. The castle doctrine says he's in your home, you can use lethal force, okay? And there are ancient reasons for that to preserve private property and all kinds of reasons we don't need to get into, but that's basically the doctrine. Now imagine a second scenario, imagine that you are attacked in your home, middle of the night, you're fleeing from your home, you're bleeding, you're bruised, you're battered, you're attacked, you're assailant is chasing you, and you're now in the street, and there's nobody around, it's three, four in the morning. You see a neighbor's home and you run to the neighbor's home just to have the neighbor call the police, right? So you break into your neighbor's home, you come into his bedroom, it's three, four in the morning, the alarm sounds, now you see where we are, right? We're an inverse of the first scenario. You're there for a perfectly good reason, you're trying to get away from an attacker. It doesn't matter, your neighbor wakes up in the middle of the night, the alarm is sounding, sees you in his home, he can pull out his gun, shoot you dead, no warnings, no questions, no shooting you in the knee, and your family will have no recourse. That's the way the castle doctrine works. In the law, I like to say people say, oh, the law is so complicated, it's really not. The law is a system of rules that we humans have developed over hundreds, maybe even thousands of years, because they made sense in the most number of circumstances, okay? And to protect the most vital interests. And so this castle doctrine actually is deeply rooted in logic, we won't get into it. But you see how it bleeds into this debate, because you can go to college campus after college campus, and you can talk about how Israel's Warren Gaza is the furthest thing from the definition of genocide. I'm sure we'll talk about that in a moment. I don't want to steal that chapter's thunder, but in a word, genocide requires the specific intent to destroy all of the people in a particular area, okay? Israel warns the civilians to get out of the killing zone. That's different from any genocide that's ever happened in history and makes it definitionally the opposite of genocide. But when you teach people that, even people who didn't know about that before, they like to change the ground underneath your feet. That's one of the things that happens in these debates. So they say, okay, fine, fine, fine. So maybe it isn't genocide, but you didn't have the right to be there. You were in their home. So no matter what warnings you gave, if one civilian died, it was not appropriate, right? On the other hand, that's how you can get people who are otherwise law abiding and good, and who feel moral and just about their role in society, to say that they side with Hamas is killing of babies, women, children, in front of their families. Because of the castle doctrine, you were in their home in the middle of the night. They had the right to kill you, just as you would in the castle doctrine. This is how these normal logical concepts get inverted. It's also why, without going too far into this answer, this first claim is the most pernicious of all. So how do you address it? Well, as with all the claims, as with any legal problem, we start with a definition. And we start with a basic legal role, which is this. A word or phrase must mean the same thing when it comes to people with an English accent, as it does to people with a non-English accent. It has to apply the same way to Jews, as to non-Jews, to blacks, as to whites. A rule or word must be the same when it comes to every single group in society. That's a basic legal principle. We know what a colonialist is, right? We have examples. And the basic definition of a colonist, there's two main examples. There's the extractive colonialist who comes and extracts minerals or people or resources for the benefit of the home empire. And then there's the settler colonialist who comes and displaces the local population, again, for the benefit of the home empire and the foreign population. Both have one key ingredient, usually two key ingredients. One is they have a home empire they're working on behalf of. And second, the foreignness of the colonizing population, right? So as an example, there were obviously no ancient example, no ancient pedigree of kings and queens who spoke English, practiced Christianity, and passed on to their children, English names, like John and Joseph and John and George and Thomas, who ruled Virginia and New York thousands of years ago. There's no ancient pedigree of Spanish kings and queens who practiced Catholicism and spoke Spanish and named their kids Simone and Thomas and whenever else who ruled Bolivia and my Venezuela thousands of years ago. But from three buckets of independent neutral evidence, that's rocks in the ground, I like to call it, words on the page and blood in the veins, we know that the people who lived and ruled in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea going back thousands of years were Jews who spoke Hebrew, who practiced the Judaic religion and who passed on to their children and grandchildren the very same names that we still Jews in the land of Israel still pass on to their children today like Benjamin and David and Esther and Moses. And one of those three buckets, rocks in the ground is archaeological evidence. By the way, this is an amazing week to be talking about this because Israel just announced the discovery of original wooden beams from the patio of the courtyard of the first temple built in about a thousand BC destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, the second the Babylonian king in 586 BC. These charred remains of actual wooden beams from the first temple period were kept and preserved by the plaster that melted off from the walls and enshrined them for all time for 26 centuries and they were just uncovered and announced, I think yesterday or the day before, a window into ancient Jewish history in the land of Israel. Second, there's words on the page, that's documentary evidence, often from Israel's ancient adversaries. One thing in the law is when a party says something that supports its claim, it's a whole other thing entirely when a party's adversaries support its claim. And here many of Israel's ancient conquerors including the Babylonians, the Romans, the Assyrians and obviously all of the Muslim invaders, remember people say the Muslims are the indigenous people of the land, that's preposterous, Muhammad wasn't born until 570 AD, Islam wasn't a thing in the world until 610 AD. The first Arab Muslims don't invade and subjugate the land of Israel until the Battle of Yarmuk in 636 AD by then Jews, according to the documentary and archeological record, had lived in Israel for thousands of years. But these ancient adversaries of Israel took very detailed notes about the people they were subjugating in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and they all say that these are Jewish people who spoke Hebrew, who practiced the hebraic religion and who passed on to their children the very same names Jews passed on to their children today and then the third bucket is blood in the veins. Over the last few decades there have been dozens of genetic studies on almost every major Jewish population in the world, each of which has confirmed that all the major Jewish populations in the world are genetically connected to one another and that they come from a common DNA ancestry from the Levant, from the Middle East 2000 years ago. Why is that number important? Because it corroborates the other two buckets, the words on the page and the rocks in the ground, which tell us that in 70 AD 2000 years ago, Titus of Rome, the son of the Emperor of Espazion, conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and exiled the Jewish population thus creating the major diaspora communities of the world if we care at all about the rights of indigenous people, then we have to recognize that if we go back 3,200 years ago. And we fast forward until today, there is only one people on earth today that still speaks the same language, still practices the same religion, and still lives in governs in the same land as they did 3,200 years ago. And those are the Jews who live in Israel. They're the furthest thing from a colonist that we have on this planet. Yeah, very well put. And that chapter is so illuminating as well, I mean, it's stuff I kind of instinctively knew, but you kind of really draw it out. And there's a great history in there as well, as you say about the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Romans, the various conquerings of the land of Israel over the centuries. You also say, you've just mentioned it there, you say in the book, as this history has made plain, if anyone has colonized the land of Israel, it has been this succession of Muslim armies from Arabia, Egypt, Damascus, Baghdad and Turkey. It's such an important point, but as you know, and I'm sure you'll get this argument as you go around promoting your book, to many people of a left-wing persuasion or a liberal persuasion or even the kind of coastal elites who kind of cleave to a certain extent to anti-Israel sentiment, that will just sound so alien to them because they have become so convinced that the Jews in Israel are white colonizers, that they came from Europe, they took over this land that belonged traditionally to brown Muslims. What have you found that works in terms of persuading people to rethink that argument? Because it has become such a core tenet of progressive belief, and it is one that, as you've just illustrated there, is not founded in anything like historical fact. What works in trying to dislodge this idea that the Jews are the invaders and the Muslims are their victims? Well, the first thing I'll say about the comment that I think is true, which is that to many people, this notion of Jews being white in Israel and European as become self-evident is just old Gurbals propaganda doctrine, right? Gurbals was clear that if you tell a lie loud enough and long enough, and people will criticize you at the beginning, right? But if you keep on with the lie, if you stay on the message, he was a genius at this. Then over time, people will forget that it was a lie, and they'll say, "Well, I've heard it before. I heard it from this source. I heard it from that source. It becomes credible because you've heard it so many times. It's actually how the human brain processes information. It becomes a brilliant way of manipulating our psychology, and after it becomes familiar in that way, it gains credibility, and after it gains credibility, it becomes over time self-evident." And that's what we're seeing with a lot of these claims about Israel. The greatest antidote, by the way, is showing people for themselves. I've taken trips of judges from the United States to Israel of all sides of the political aisle, I guess you would say, "We don't see ourselves as political judges, but it's true that judges in America were appointed by members of one party or the other." And so people in the media like to say, "Oh, that person was appointed by President Trump. That person was appointed by President Obama, as if that says everything about us that we really doesn't." But I've taken judges from the entire range of the ideological spectrum to Israel, and I'll never forget, you know, I was with an African-American judge, a black judge. In the Mahaneh Yuhuda market in Jerusalem, where it became evident to him that this stereotype you're talking about is just baloney. There were black soldiers, Ethiopian soldiers, there were brown soldiers, which is the majority of the Jewish population of Israel, Yemenite and Moroccan and Algerian and Libyan and Lebanese and Egyptian, and then there were a couple of white soldiers, Russians and Ashkenazi Jews, all having beers and kissing and dancing and having a great time at this kind of bar/party that we were walking by. And he looked at me, he said, "You know what's just shocked me over the last few days in the city? Is it's probably the most diverse country I have ever been to in my life?" That says a lot for somebody who comes from America, and nobody knows that back home. And by the way, you know, in terms of the data, depending on how you cut it, anywhere between 25 and 40 or so percent of Jews in Israel are Ashkenazi, what we would call white or European. However, you slice it, it's a minority of the Jewish population of the country. The majority of the Jewish population in the country is brown or black. There's about 200,000 Ethiopian black Jews who were saved and rescued beginning in the 80s and then in the 90s and early 2000s in a program that was daring and dangerous by the Israeli government to save them from a real genocide that was taking place in Ethiopia, Eritrea and at some points in Sudan, they went at great risk to themselves to bring hundreds of thousands of these people to Israel. Many of these people, by the way, hadn't had proper schooling, they'd never been on an airplane before, some had never used a toilet, none of them knew any Hebrew. Other than the Hebrew they used in their prayers because they did pray in Hebrew and the Israeli government spent hundreds of millions of shekels to fully integrate them into Israeli society, free education, free language training, cars, apartments. And now if you go to Israel, you'll see them integrated into every echelon of the fabric of Israeli society in the military, in the universities, in the judiciary, in the hospitals, in ways that really aren't even true of many Western democracies today. So it's kind of ironic for people in the West who have their own racial problems to come and talk to Israel about being a white supremacist state when Israel has done better in just 20 or 30 years of integrating its minority black Jews than many Western countries have done in 200 years. And then you have the overwhelming majority of Jews who are neither black nor white, who were ethnically cleansed from the Middle Eastern Arab countries in which they had built communities over thousands of years. Remember, there were up to between, depending on how you count, between 850,000 and 1 million Jews who lived all across the 22 Arab states of the Arab world, who were ethnically cleansed and pushed out over the course of maybe 50 or so years starting in 1948 and who had nowhere to go but Israel. They are now the dominant political, social and cultural force of the country. All of the best restaurants are Mizrahi or what you would call Arabic Jewish restaurants. All of the best and pop most popular food, the movies, the cultural commentary, and now the biggest political force in the country is all Mizrahi or ground Arabic Jews, which is to mean Arabic in the sense that they come from Arabic countries, which is to say the entire political block, for example, that the leku'd party, the right-wing party relies on, is mostly these what you would call from Arab countries. We would call them Mizrahi Jews. And it's important to show them the truth because, as Gerbil said, if you don't, that lie will become self-evident. Yeah. On the various trips I've taken to Israel, I've always been struck by the diversity of the population. It really does grab you because of what we hear so often in mainstream commentary, which is that Israel is this white supremacist nation, they're all European, et cetera, et cetera. I saw a clip the other day of two anti-Israel activists in Israel harassing this brown-skinned, curly-haired Jewish shepherd boy. And these were two white activists from Europe who were harassing this brown-skinned Jew. And I thought, who are the real white colonizers here? Because it looks to me like it's them. It's these anti-Israel activists. I want to ask you just about a couple more of your claims, just to give it a flavor of the kind of thing that you really address in great detail in the book. You mentioned their white supremacist, the myth that Israel is a white supremacist nation. In the book, you tie that to the idea that Israel is an apartheid nation. And this is another thing that we hear all the time. I mean, I don't know what it's like in America, I'm sure it's very similar. But in the UK, the word apartheid trips off the tongue of leftists, even of fairly mainstream politicians sometimes. We see it in the mainstream media. It's in a apartheid regime. That's what we hear pretty much every day. Why did you think it was important to tackle that claim specifically, and what are some good ways do you think for people to really take that apart? Well, the first thing to note, by the way, about each of these claims, and this is one of the surprising sub-themes of the book that I really only recognized as I was researching and writing it. And that is that each of the six claims actually, they don't arrive ex nihilo as we say in the law. They don't come out of thin air, out of nowhere. Each of the six claims is actually brilliantly calibrated to invert reality, to minimize things that have actually happened to the Jews, and make it seem as though the Jews are the ones that are doing that thing to the Arabs. It's kind of like a child's game of, no, I'm not, you are, but in a much more sophisticated and pervasive way, apartheid is one of the obvious examples of that. We've already talked about colonialism where there is real colonism. going on in the land of Israel, by the way, real colonization all over the Middle East and North Africa. Remember, if anyone's ever heard of the Berbers or the Amazon people, these are the native indigenous people of North Africa. We know that going all the way back hundreds of years to the people from Europe who interacted with them, they are totally a subjugated minority by the Arab Muslims who conquered not just Israel, but all of North Africa who expelled the Persians and Zorastrians from much of what's today Iraq and Iran, the Kurds, the Yazidis, the Jews, many peoples in addition to the Jews subjugated by the most imperial empire, the most colonizing empire the world is ever known, which is the Arab Muslim empires that flowed from the Arabian Peninsula, they're not native to Tel Aviv, by the way, or Jerusalem, hence the name Arabia. And so there is real apartheid going on all over the Middle East. Just last night I was at an event where I was talking to women, one Christian and one Jewish who were born in Egypt, their parents were born in Egypt, their grandparents were born in Egypt, and guess what? They were never permitted to become Egyptian citizens and never were given an Egyptian passport, because only Arab Muslims were granted that right, that's true all over the Middle East, where Arab Muslims, for example, have totally destroyed, as I mentioned, the ancient Jewish communities that existed there, but also are in the process of destroying the ancient Christian communities that have existed there for hundreds of years. Think about these numbers. In the Middle East, at the time of the foundation of the State of Israel, in 1948, Christians were 20% about 20% of the population of the Arab countries. The percentage today, again, depending on how you count, is either less than 2% or about 4%. It is dwindling and it ain't coming back, and it's not because they decided that it was better to live somewhere else, it's because they have been systematically and methodically subjugated and destroyed by two true apartheid regimes all over the Middle East, these are the imperial apartheid regimes of the Arab world, and by the way, there's only one place in the Middle East where that trend is in reverse. This is something I find one of the most preposterous claims that I didn't actually include in the book because it wasn't prevalent last year when I was writing the book, but as become prevalent today, I think I might need to include it in the updated paperback version that'll come out next year, which is this claim that Israel is bad for Christians that maybe the most preposterous claim of all. There is one and only one place in the Middle East where those Christian trends are totally inverted, and that's in Israel. Again, if you go back to 1948, the time of the foundation of the state, Christians were, there were 36,000 Christians in the state of Israel, a teeny tiny, almost negligible minority. Today, there are over 160,000, that is a 400, a bigger than 400% increase in the population of Christians in Israel, the opposite of what you see all over the Arab world. If I were to talk to you about this in any other context, think about horses. Imagine a place where there were horses, and the next generation, the horses were double the population of horses that there were before, and they were bigger and stronger and healthier and faster than they were in their parents' generation. And then one generation later, they were twice as big as they were in their grandparents' generation, and they were bigger and healthier and stronger. Would we say that that was a place that was bad for those horses that was detrimental to the health and flourishing of those horses? Of course not. On the other hand, if we had a place where there were horses that every generation, the population of horses, declined by half, and then half again, and then half again. And the horses that remained were subjugated into the corner, and they were skinnier and weaker and less powerful than they were in their grandparents' generation, would we say that those were good places that allowed for the flourishing and prosperity of those horses? Of course not. But somehow, when we talk about Israel, all logic and common sense just goes out the window, and all of these concepts become inverted. So just to talk about apartheid in Israel for a second, apartheid is a very specific term. It's an Afrikaans word that comes from South Africa, and it has a very specific meaning. It means separateness. And apartheid in South Africa, for example, was marked by tremendous separateness. Blacks couldn't go to the same beaches, drink from the same water fountains, eat at the same restaurants. Obviously couldn't serve on the Supreme Court of South Africa, had no voice in the ruling government. I mean, this is what apartheid looks like. And in fact, one of the, I think, cool parts of the end of chapter five of my book is that Nelson Mandela's granddaughters, just last year in 2025, the greatest warrior against apartheid in South Africa, his granddaughters, flew to Israel last year in the middle of a war. They traveled all around Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, and in Israel itself met with Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Jews, and came out with fascinating quotes that I have in the book, which are, this is the furthest thing from apartheid we have ever seen. And it minimizes and degrades what happened to the blacks of South Africa to claim that there's any relationship between Israel and apartheid South Africa. Israel is a country of 10 million people, 21% of whom are Arabs. 17% of whom, 1.7 or 1.8 million are Arab Muslims, who have full and free commercial civil and political rights on equal terms with their Jewish and Christian neighbors, just to give a few examples. There is an Arab Muslim justice on the Supreme Court of Israel. There are 10 of the 120 seats in parliament are Arab Muslim representatives who vote with equal rights to their Jewish and Christian and Jews counterparts. In fact, there are four major Muslim political parties in the country, and one of the things that people, I love when people say, "Oh, it's all because of Netanyahu's government, and he's bad. I'm not here to support or oppose any particular government." I will just note that all of these same claims about apartheid Israel were going on in 2021. When the ruling coalition of the country had no BB Netanyahu, no Ben-Gvier, no Smotrich, it included the major Arab parties of the country in the governing coalition of the Jewish state. If this is apartheid, Israel is doing a real, real poor job of it, and then it's not just in the political sphere or in the judicial sphere, by the way, there are Arab Muslims throughout the judiciary. They're also running major hospitals and clinics. In fact, if you look at matriculation and graduation rates at Israel's biggest universities, the engines of socioeconomic mobility in any Western democracy, you'll see that, for example, in postgraduate schools like nursing, in dentistry, in medicine, and many others, Arab Muslims are either 27, 30, sometimes 47% of the graduates, even though they're less than 20% of the population as a whole. Why is that? That's because Israel is the opposite of an apartheid state, because Israel is doing everything in its power through, for example, very robust affirmative action programs to lift up its Arab Muslim community. By the way, it does the same with its Arab Christian community. In fact, although Christians are only about 1% of the population, they're over 4% of PhD graduates, something that obviously isn't true in any other country for Christians, anywhere in the Middle East. Again, the claim that Israel engages in apartheid is simply ludicrous on its face, and people only say it and believe it because of the Gurbals doctrine. If you tell a lie loud and long enough, over time, people will come to see it as self-evident. If people want to arm themselves with facts for these kinds of discussions with people who say Israel is an apartheid state, they could do far worse than to read your chapter on that, because it is so incredibly useful in terms of just picking apart this notion, this lie that Israel is an apartheid state, as you've just outlined there is just beyond preposterous to say that. Roy, just one more question for you before I let you go. It's the big question. It's the closing chapter of your book. I think it's the big lie of our era, and I don't just mean in relation to this war and this conflict, but I mean across the Western world, which is the idea that Israel is committing a genocide, and I think the consequences of this lie are going to be huge both for our societies and potentially for the Jewish state itself. You talked a moment ago about moral inversion and how one of the problems with these, the six things that you take apart, one of the problems is not only that they are untrue and cannot be legally stood up, but also that they invert the truth, and they accuse Israel of things that are actually more true of its enemies. The genocide lies a good example of that. The Jews are, of course, histories, biggest victims of genocide, and they suffered an act of genocidal terrorism on 7th of October, 2021. three, and yet it is Israel that is accused of genocide simply for responding to that. You can't tell us everything you think about the genocide lie right now. I know and people should read your chapter on that. But how important do you think it is to take apart that claim in particular? Because it does seem to me to have a pretty rotting effect on the western conscience as well as on Israel's reputation. So it's really important, isn't it, to take apart this claim in particular. So first of all, you're exactly right that the word genocide was created in the English language by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer, in order to give a name to the ultimate crime of crimes, the catastrophe of the Holocaust that had befallen who, the Jewish people. That's why it's no surprise that this is the word that's used to attack the one Jewish state in the world, not just to make that state a pariah state in the world. But also to convince people back home, we don't need to study the Holocaust anymore. You don't need to spend money and resources on Holocaust education and literature, the IRA definition of anti-Semitism. It's all bad throw it all out with the bathwater because the Holocaust is no big deal. You see, it happens all the time it's happening now in Gaza. Of course, that's preposterous. Even if you accepted Hamas's numbers of 60 or 70,000 people dead and those numbers are ridiculous. They've been debunked time and time again. I explain how we know that in the book. We know that at least half of those are rank and serial members of a terrorist organization, either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic jihad or popular fund for the liberation of Palestine or people who support them, who are lookouts for them, who hold hostages, even if they're not technically in Hamas. That's about half of all the people, even if you if you accepted then that there were 30 or 35,000 people who were not Hamas who were dead. By the way, we should say any civilian who dies in war is a tragedy. But that doesn't make every war that's ever happened a genocide and thousands and thousands and sometimes millions and millions of civilians have died in war. But you can't begin to compare 30,000 civilians to six million Jews that were exterminated during the course of the Holocaust. But that's not really the point. The point is that Israel does the very opposite of genocide. Genocide has a very specific legal definition. It's the hardest crime to prove for a reason because it is the ultimate crime of crimes. It requires the specific intent on behalf of a governing authority to eradicate, to destroy an entire population in a whole or in part as such. In other words, for being Palestinians in Gaza. They have nuclear weapons and the most sophisticated air force pound for pound. Maybe the world is ever known other than our own here in the United States. We know that Israel can shoot a missile from thousands of kilometers away and hit a nuclear scientist in his apartment, in his bedroom, in Tehran. That's the level of aptitude that this air force has. And you're telling me that they couldn't have the next stage as killed every single Palestinian in Gaza. So people say, oh no, but they would have become a pariah state. They would have been hailed before the ICJ on charges of genocide. They would have been protests in every Western city and that happened anyway. And everyone knew that was going to happen anyway. If Israel wanted to kill every last Palestinian, it could have done it in a moment. But Israel does the opposite of genocide. Israel, and by the way, you don't have to take my word for it. As I quote extensively in my book, urban warfare scholars like Richard Kemp, like Andrew Fox, like John Spencer. These are not Jews, not Israelis. These are independent scholars of urban warfare. They have time and again said that Israel has the lowest militant to civilian kill ratio in Gaza of any urban warfare conflict in world history. In fact, the average militant to civilian kill ratio in urban warfare is about one to nine, one militant to every nine civilians. Again, that's not because every urban warfare conflict in history has been a genocide. It's because urban warfare is horrible and should be avoided at all costs. That's why this is a defensive war. Israel didn't start and never wanted. This would be the first war in history in which a country that was invaded and attacked and then fought a war of self-defense was legitimately accused of genocide. So it's not just that it was one to nine, but that we, the United States, Britain, our allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, we set the gold standard on this ratio. We had a kill ratio of about one to four and a half, maybe one to five. And most urban warfare scholars believed that no Western army would ever be able to meet that gold standard again. Well, Israel and Gaza, even if you believe Hamas's bogus numbers, has a kill ratio, as I've mentioned earlier, of about one to one, slashing by more than 75 percent, even the gold standard of humanity and precision that America and its allies had set in Iraq and Afghanistan. And here's another important factor. Alice DiNedaritu, most people don't know that name. I talk about her all the time. Why is she important? She was one of the world's preeminent experts on genocide. She's a Kenyan woman, not a Jew, not married to a Jew, obviously not Israeli. She rose in the ranks of international communities around the world because of her tremendous expertise in this field. And she became, she reached the apogee of this field. She became the United Nations special rapporteur on the crime of genocide and the prevention of genocide. She became basically the world's preeminent and most prominent source on whether genocides were happening around the world and how to prevent them. By the way, there are other genocides going on in the world, even though no one seems to care about them in Sudan, in Syria, in the Congo and elsewhere. And she was adamant, even though she now says that these interest groups that you're referencing would come to her almost every day and put enormous pressure on her to say that what was happening in Gaza was a genocide. She, this Kenyan woman who rose from the ranks and became the world's preeminent scholar on the question of genocide was clear and is clear today, that there was no genocide in Gaza, that it was the furthest thing from a genocide, that Israel spent tremendous amounts of money and effort and had an entire organization of its government devoted to preserving and protecting the lives of uninvolved Palestinian citizens, that Israel went and vaccinated against polio, almost 1.2 million people in al-Mawasi. That's two shots. Israel's not sending an invoice to Hamas saying, "Hey, please remit payment for those vaccines within 30 days or year pass, do no army in the world has ever provided more food, more fuel, more medicine, more housing to the enemy's civilian population and wartime, and then what did Alice Nidzareeto get for telling the truth at the United Nations?" She was fired. Her contract was not renewed and someone who would tow the party line was placed there in her stead. Again, think about it in any other context in society. Think about a prosecutor who everyone respects, who has risen through the ranks and become the attorney general of the United States or whatever the equivalent is in the UK, who everyone of both sides right and left says that's a fair prosecutor who strikes hard blows but fair ones that we can all live with. And then a political adversary, an ideological adversary of the ruling party of the president is in the crosshairs for prosecution, is investigated and the attorney general comes out and says, "No, I have independently reviewed it and this person, this rival politician, is not guilty of the crimes that you are accusing them of. In fact, it's the opposite. The person has lived a totally spotless and crime-free life. Imagine the uproar. If the president of the United States would then fire that attorney general and put in a political stooge in his place, who then went and promptly indicted that political opponent, no jury in America, first of all, would ever have that information kept from them. Of course, that would be the most relevant exhibit A from the defense. But B, no jury in America would spend more than five minutes on a case like that before dismissing it and acquitting the defendant. This is exactly what happened here with with Miss Nediritu. And it's the fact that no one even knows her name that shows you what it looks like to lose an information war in the West. Roy, thank you very much. Thank you. [Music]