← The Josh Hammer Show
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Foreign. I'm Josh Hammer and this is the Josh Hammer Show. Wishing my fellow Jews a continued very happy Passover. Wishing all of our Christian friends well, a blessed Good Friday and a blessed Easter Sunday this Sunday as well. This in this most spiritual times of the calendar for both of the two biblical religions, for Judaism and Christianity, this is not an every year occurrence where the holidays of Passover and Easter coincide. I believe it happened actually last year as well. But it's not necessarily a year in year out development and it's very serendipitous it seems to me when it does. I personally like it when Passover and Easter I read something, I personally like it for that matter when Christmas and Hanukkah are at the exact same time as well, which just happened two Hanukkah's ago, I think it was the first night of Hanukkah two years ago was actually literally on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. I forgot the exact one. But I love it because I have been passionate about Jewish Christian relations for literally my entire life. My best friend from childhood came from a religious Christian family at the time. I was raised in a fairly secular, non observant Jewish setting. And I looked at their household, which is a strong household of faith and I had deep respect, I had deep respect even as a very young boy at that time and made my best friends at every stage of my life, law school, professional life, you name it, have been religious about Christians there and I really do just love it. So again, truly earnestly happy Passover, blessed Good Friday, blessed and happy Easter as well. Some of the core themes by the way are quite similar among among these two holidays there's a very similar theme of Passover and Easter, of redemption. So redemption in the story Passover, pretty self explanatory. This is the story of the Exodus, of the parting of the Red Sea and the redemption of this enslaved nation from the talons of Pharao into eventually into freedom, but for now just crossing the Red Sea. And then of course for Easter, the entire story of the Resurrection Jesus dying on the cross is essentially one grand tale when it comes to redemption. And redemption is a complex topic, but closely entailed with the concept of redemption, I would argue at least is the very similar concept of repentance. And from a Jewish perspective at least this month is on the Hebrew calendar, the month of Nisan. The first month of the year numerically is because it's the first month after or coinciding with the Exodus and we say, or the sages, I should say, say that it is a time for a lot of introspection and a time for a lot of repentance. And certainly from a Christian perspective, I think the story of the resurrection of Jesus dying on the cross and being resurrected there, I think certainly has been an all time historical story that has caused countless Christians over the thousands of years, over the millennia to seek to repent for their own sins there. And just a quick word on that before we get to today's forthcoming guest and some of the news of the day there. Repentance is such a crucial topic. It is one of the most important topics in all of biblical religion. And I want to address one increasingly misunderstood, I think, aspect of repentance. There are a lot of folks, Jew and Christian alike, who look at themselves sometimes and look in the mirror and say, oh my God, I have grievously, grievously sinned. I have done terrible things when it comes to this or when it comes to that. I'm not going to list examples there. You can make up your own examples, but let's assume that, that there are very bad examples. And of course there are, there are some sins that are really, really bad in Judaism, Christianity, and there are some sins that are really, really bad in both religions, because both religions, of course, share the biblical inheritance. And it is all too common where a lot of folks look at that, experience that, and they say that I can never come back, that I am so low. I have reached such a terrible low. Look at me, God, I have failed before you. I have failed. There is nothing redemptive about me. There can be no bettering of me. I'm a puny little midget, a moral midget. I am not worthy of your benevolence. I'm not worthy of your forgiving, of your compassion, of any of this. And this is related to another story, actually from the book of Exodus, at least in my view of the tale. And that would be the story of the golden calf. So in the Exodus narrative, this is what we celebrate during Passover, is the liberation of the Jews from Egyptian bondage. They cross the Red Sea, they get into, get into the, across the Red Sea. At least they're not quite in the Holy Land yet. And eventually they settle at the base of Mount Sinai. And there's Revelation with Moses at the top of Mount Sinai. And because Moses takes 40 days and 40 nights at the top of Mount Sinai, the Israelites at the bottom lost faith that he would return. And they erect the quintessential idol, which is this golden calf. And Moses is so distraught when he sees this that he shatters the tablets there. Well, what does God do? Well, God initially wants to smite the Israelite nation. Moses intercedes to plead for forgiveness, and God essentially relents. And the moral of the story is that this sin, this building of this iconic idol, this golden calf, right after, right after the liberation from Egypt and the revelation at Sinai, how could they do this right now, after you've seen God's miracles, How literally, how can you possibly build this idol? And even then in that juncture, at that moment, God forgives. God forgives the Israeli nation for the grievous, collective and national sin that they have committed. So the moral of the story, folks, at this time of the year on the calendar for both Jews and Christians alike, is that there is no such thing as something that you are so upset yourself for. You are so angry yourself. You're not so small in the eyes of God. We're all made in that divine image, all of us, not just the ones that are quote, unquote, perfect on some arbitrary metric. Who is perfect but God Almighty Himself? None of us are. We all have that spark of the divine made in his image, per Genesis 1:27. And we all have the uniquely human capability of genuinely engaging in the repentance process and seeking atonement. And if we do that, then God will be standing there to forgive us. And so too, according to the dictates of our own consciences and the teachings and revelations of our own respective religions, so too then will we have the possibility of being redeemed. Now, our guest coming up on today's show, which will be the bulk of today's show, is Judge Roy Altman, who was a sitting federal judge in the U.S. district Court for the Southern District of Florida, who has a wonderful book coming out later this month, Israel on Trial, examining the history of the evidence and the law. He's looking at the post October 7, 2023 war, not just in Gaza, but also involving Hezbollah, this seven front war that Israel was fighting there for a while. He's looking at this from an international law perspective. Look, there have been centuries of folks who have thought on themselves as international lawyers, international law jurors mainly. This goes back to the 18th century with some European thinkers, some dut folks like Emer de Vattel, who wrote his famous treatise, the Law of nations in 1758 there. International law, though, is a very misunderstood concept. And unfortunately, in the modern era, international law is much more often used as an offensive sword, as a cudgel than it is as, as a shield and is weaponized. It is weaponized as a sword. It is, it is used erroneously. It is used incorrectly as a sword at that. Israel tends to be at the crucible, at the epicenter of this international law gang up when it comes to all these various institutions that are just invariably, invariably gang up on the ones the world's one tiny Jewish state and accusing it of all sorts of terrible things. Well, again, some miswjudge all when it comes to things like genocide and, and the reason for this, in my estimation, we'll get Judge Altman's view as well. The reason for this gang up is essentially the reason, I believe, for the eternal existence of antisemitism. And it is eternal. It's never going to go away. I am not so complacent to say that it should not be fought. That is certainly not my stance. But it is part seemingly of the cosmological order, is part certainly of God's plan. And the reason that Israel is so singled out when it comes to international law, because the very notion of international law, of globalist schemes, of globalist utopias, is inherently, is inherently an effort to try to impose by will, by force or some other measure, to impose something unto the broader world. And what is here, there and everywhere? What is the number one foe of universalists, of globalists, of hegemons, of those who seek to impose their will on the masses? The number one thorn to the side and the biggest obstacle are the particularists, the nationalists, the particularists, the nationalists are here, there and everywhere the thorn in the side of the utopian globalists. Well, the Jewish people have been the quintessential particularists for thousands and thousands of years. The quintessential example of refusing to fully assimilate into the ways of the world, to fully assimilate maybe into the ways of the nations. To again, take us back to this international treatise from Emer de Vattel from 250 years ago, the law of nations there. So to me, it is nothing less than this, than this conception of the modern 1948 post state of Israel as the Jew of the world. That really ultimately is why so much of this fixation? Because really there's, I mean, think, think about it this way. Is there any other country where the words international law are deployed as often? You know, prior to Donald Trump getting a remarkable peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan last August, there were all sorts of interesting international law arguments about some of the disputed territory there known as the Nagorno Karabakh region. Well, did you ever hear international law used in that context? Probably not. How many times have you heard international law used, though, in the context of Gaza and Judea and Samaria, AKA the West Bank? It's a fixation. And the fixation is coming from a deeply unhealthy place, as I've just explained. But it's a fixation nonetheless. When there is a fixation and a fixation is rooted in faulty premises and ultimately seeks to disseminate bad, wrong headed, immoral or perhaps outright evil things, when that happens, that fixation must be confronted. And fortunately, there are people like Roy Allman to do exactly that. So, folks, stay with us through a quick commercial break. We're going to bring on right after this break, Judge Roy Allment, a judge from the U.S. district Court for the Southern District of Florida, talk about his book out later this month, israel on Trial, examining the history, the evidence and the law. Stay with us. Judge Altman joins on the other side.
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Here's something most people don't know. When Warren Buffett was just 13 years old, he didn't put his money into a savings account. While other kids were earning next to nothing at local banks, Buffett put $114 into a little known investment. Today that $114 would be worth over $15 million. And it wasn't a risky trade. It wasn't even insider knowledge. It was an account that's been around since 1888. And over the last 25 years, it's averaged 29% a year. That's what happens when your money is allowed to compound. Compare that to today's savings accounts paying less than half a percent while inflation quietly eats away at your buying power. Buffett understood early banks are great businesses, just not for savers. If you'd like to see what some investors call the 29% account, go now to secret account29.com that's secret account the numbers29.com secret account29.com.
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Welcome back. So as we continue our Passover and Easter themed conversation that we're having here today on the Josh Hammer show is just a thrill to bring on a wonderful man and a wonderful fellow Floridian who I'm proud to now call a friend. That is Judge Roy Altman. Judge Altman is a U.S. judge on the U.S. district Court for the Southern District of Florida. He is also, perhaps even more relevant for present purposes, the author of the soon to be released book, Israel on Trial, examining the history, the evidence and the law. So, Judge Altman, welcome to the Josh Hammer show. It's truly an honor to have you. I think you might actually be the first sitting active federal judge that we've possibly ever had here on the show. So we're breaking barriers here on the show today and wishing a very happy Passover, and it's just wonderful to have you here. So you wrote this book, and this book was written in the context and the aftermath of the horrific hamas pogrom of October 7, 2023. Before we get into a little more detail here, and there's a lot that I do want to dive into here, just contextualize the moment a little bit for, for us here. You are a federal judge. It's not necessarily a common thing. I would know. I clerked for a federal judge myself. It's not common for judges to publish books like this. But you are so passionate, as I know, about these issues here. What ultimately was it that really galvanized you to get this involved and ultimately to publish this new book that comes out later this month?
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Well, first of all, thank you for having me, Josh. It's nice to break barriers together with you, and I'm honored to be on the show. I think I just go back to the the nights after October 7th. My wife and I, like so many people who love freedom and the rule of law around the world, totally confused by the reaction on many Western campuses. People who sided with fascistic, tyrannical jihadist regime against a pluralistic rule of law, democracy, an ally and a friend of the United States. And and for nights on end, my wife and I just doom scrolling on our phones, not able to sleep, looking for some bit of good news and finding very little. One night, maybe three nights, in three, four in the morning, my wife turned to me, reached out her hand and grabbed mine and looked over at her and she had a tear in her eye, which is unusual because she's very tough, very strong. And she said to me, how is it that 80 years after the Holocaust, we are all still alone? And then something amazing happened. Then it turned out we weren't alone. In the days and weeks and months after October 7, dozens and hundreds, even thousands of people that we've known, friends in the judiciary and outside of the judiciary, would reach out to us, text, call, come to visit to show us that they stood shoulder to shoulder with us, that they stood shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish people and all of Western civilization more broadly, and started inviting me around the country to give speeches about the history of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, Israel under international law, Israel as an essential ally of the United States in an otherwise very dangerous neighborhood. And at one of those speeches, I met a guy who was the publisher, the CEO of a publishing company, and he said, hey, I loved your speech. Not a Jewish guy. And he said, I want to publish that in a book. And I said, well, I don't have an agent, I don't have an editor. I'm a federal judge. I don't have time for that. And he said, well, you find the time and I'll publish it. You've skipped all those steps. And so I took four weeks when we were on vacation for the summer out in California, I dropped my kids off at surf camp and then come home and plug away at the book on the laptop and made it happen in about four weeks. And that's how the book came to be.
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A
You wrote the whole manuscript in four weeks? Is that what you just said?
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I wrote the whole manuscript in four weeks. I tried to just basically take the speech I was giving from memory and write it down on the page and figured that would be enough for a book. But when it got written, it was like 29 pages, and I was like, oh, God, I got a long way to go. So that first day was a little bit of a disappointment. And then I worked on it for about four weeks and got the draft done.
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So just for context here, for those in the audience who have, I presume most people watching this or listening have not written a book. I did write my first book last year. I appreciate that, Judge, very much. But just for the audience's context, it took me probably six to six and a half months to write that manuscript. And frankly, I thought that that was pretty quick, actually. I think in the publishing industry, six months is considered a quick ish timeframe. So for four weeks, I mean, my goodness gracious, that is a lot of work. Very quickly. But I would expect nothing less from today's guest, which again is Judge Roy Altman, who is a sitting federal judge on the U.S. district Court for the Southern District of Florida. You can follow him on X, by the way, he's got a great new account on X. Oykaltman Judge, as we begin to kind of dive a little more substantively into this book, which again comes out later this month. It's called Israel On Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law. Before getting into the Middle east or the state of Israel in particular, I want to start out a little broader here. International law. There is an enormous amount of confusion about this particular topic. A lot of my fellow conservatives, I think Tend to get a little cheeky on this one, Judge. I hear a lot of folks say the international law is fictitious. They say it's fake, it's not a real thing, and there's some truth in that, but they're being a little too cute by half. There is such thing as the law of nations going back hundreds of years. There were these great big Dutch theorists like de Grotius, who wrote these books on the law of nations in the 1700s there. So I think it's a little overstating the case to say that international law does not exist, but it definitely does not have the binding force of nature that I think a lot of global utopians like those of the United nations might think that it has there. So before we go any further, let's kind of define some terms here. What actually is international law from your perspective?
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Well, the answer to your question is yes and no, right? Because international law can take many forms. There are conventions that are signed by the representatives of different countries in the world who get together and they negotiate and they hammer things out and they bring their own separate interests and their own separate viewpoints. And then in the end, when the document is set to be ratified, some countries can back out and not sign it. And that happens from time to time. We, the United States, for example, we're not signatory members to some treaties, and we are to others. On the other hand, when a country comes to the negotiating table, gives some, but gets what it wants in part, it can choose to be a signatory and to elect to be bound by that legal regime, which means that you're effectively saying, hey, this international court is either, in one instance, like the icj, for example, the International Court of Justice, this international court can adjudicate claims with respect to me if I violate the terms of this agreement that we all negotiated. And that'll become important, I think, later in our conversation when we talk about the Genocide Convention, which both Israel and the Geneva Convention, which both Israel and the United States are signatory members of. But of course, where a country chooses not to be a signatory to a particular treaty, or like, for example, the treaty that created the International Criminal Court, what's known as the icc, a different treaty, Israel and the United States have chosen not to be members of that court. And so technically, that court shouldn't have jurisdiction over countries like Israel and the United States that have elected not to be bound by it. And so then the last part of it is sometimes American law and domestic law in countries more broadly can choose to domesticate the international legal regime. So you might say, for example, you might say if you're the government of Netherlands or Belgium or France, you might say, I'm a member of this treaty, I agree to be bound by these requirements and so do all the other signatory nations. And if the requirements involve war, genocide or the laws of war, we might say, okay, we're going to agree to continue to sell weaponry and weapons components, parts to countries so long as they abide by the terms of these treaties. But if a country is found to have violated the terms of this or that treaty, then under our domestic law, we might prohibit our government from selling weapons or weapons components to that particular country. And that's why some of these international courts actually can have some teeth because many of their rulings affect the extent to which domestic governments under domestic law can continue to do business with countries like, for example, Russia or Venezuela or Iran.
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Lots of great stuff in there for further thought. For sure. Look, I totally agree with you to be sure. I think, though, Judge, I know you hear this just as I do. Some people say international law, it's totally fake. And like, look, I mean, a lot of it is fake. I mean, I mean a lot of what the United nations, for instance, calls international law does not necessarily have the full binding force of international law as you're defining when it comes to bilateral treaties there. But there is something there. And what that something is I think is very relevant. Unfortunately, the institutions of international law, as you know, have been weaponized profoundly against the United States, against Israel, against a lot of our like minded countries, been a festering problem for a very long time. It's one of the many issues that I want to explore further with today's guest, Judge Roy Oldman, after a very short commercial break. Stay with us, folks. Judge Ollman will join us right after a short break for further discussion of his book coming out this month, israel On Examine the History, the Evidence and the law. We'll be right back with Judge Roy Ullman.
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Here's something most people don't know. When Warren Buffett was just 13 years old, he didn't put his money into a savings account while other kids were earning next to nothing at local banks. Buffett put $114 into a little known investment. Today that $114 would be worth over $15 million. And it wasn't a risky trade. It wasn't even insider knowledge. It was an account that's been around since 1888. And over the last 25 years, it's averaged 29% a year. That's what happens when your money is allowed to compound. Compare that to today's savings accounts paying less than half a percent while inflation quietly eats away at your buying power. Buffett understood early banks are great businesses, just not for savers. If you'd like to see what some investors call the 29% account, go now to secretaccount29.com that's secret account the numbers29.com secretaccount29.com.
- [24:20]
A
Welcome back. And Judge Roy Altman is also back. Judge Altman is a judge on the U.S. district Court for the Southern District of Florida, author of the book out later this month, israel on Trial, Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law. So, Judge, I want to now dive a little deeper into the, shall we say, peculiar focus of these biased institutions of international law when it comes to the state of Israel, which is a large chunk certainly of your soon to be forthcoming book. You mentioned genocide. Earlier in our conversation, there were all sorts of of legal terms that got bandied about during Israel's response to the horrific Hamas pogrom, this Nazi slaughter. Folks start accusing Israel of genocide. There was a lot of talk about the international law doctrine of proportionality, which doesn't really mean what a lot of people think it means there. Can you just talk to us about some of the most common international law misconceptions of this particular October 7th and post October 7th milu, and try to set the record straight on some of them?
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Yeah, so those are actually two sources of law. One is international humanitarian law, or what we know as the laws of war. And that has several elements. The doctrine of mitigation, for example, which says you need to mitigate as much as possible the harm to a civilian population. The doctrine of proportionality, which you mentioned, which says that it doesn't mean what people think it means. It doesn't mean that if you kill 20 of my people, I can only kill 20 of your people. If it meant that, then no one could ever actually, actually win a war. It just means that any individual strike, that the benefits, the military benefits of any individual strike must be proportionate to their collateral consequences. And so we want countries to make assessments both before the war begins and once the war has begun and strikes are being called in about the collateral consequences of each given strike with respect to proportionality. I'll say a couple things. One, there was a New York Times article during the war which received all kinds of attention for precisely the wrong reasons. The New York Times article made clear, using some confidential discussions that Israel had increased the ratio that it would allow its lawyers to authorize strikes for. We'll talk more about that in a second. From, I think it was 10 civilians per Hamas target to up to 20 depending on on who the target was. And so they said, well, this is outrageous. And this is just another piece of evidence in the case against Israel as having committed genocide. This is precisely the evidence that shows that Israel does not commit genocide and that Israel is following the laws of war, because it's exactly this kind of complicated and frankly, tragic cost benefit analysis that international law requires nations to engage in before they undertake these strikes. So Israel was saying, because of the complicated nature of this war where we've been attacked, there's been this strategic fragility that took place where Israel was fighting on seven fronts at the same time. And because of the fact that Hamas was embedding its military architecture both within and underneath the civilian structures in Gaza. We the judges. I started leading trips of federal judges to Israel after Octo seventh. We the judges saw with our own eyes rocket launchers being launched from little girls bedrooms, people shooting out of mosques, Hamas terrorists hiding in hospitals and schools. I myself had an intern whose first cousin was in the IDF and was killed stepping on a landmine Hamas had left inside of an elementary school next to pictures and cartoons and drawings for the children. So given the complicated nature of fighting Hamas in that context, Israel said we need to allow for more latitude for our commanders to be able to win this war. Obviously Israel would prefer that Hamas just came out of its dungeons and Israel and Hamas would just hash it out out there in the desert, one on one. But Hamas knows it would be destroyed. It doesn't want that. So it embeds itself within and underneath the civilian population in order to increase rather than decrease the harm to the civilian pop. Because it knows the only way for it to win, which is to say to survive to fight another day, is to have lots of civilian casualties that would then cause Western countries like ours to force Israel to stop. So the point about proportionality is that Israel is actually engaging on a daily basis with its lawyers who are deployed with the commanders in the field in precisely the kind of cost benefit analysis the law of proportionality requires. That just underscores the extent to which Israel is not committing genocide and not violating the laws of war. In fact, I'll tell you one other thing about these lawyers. They're called mags in Israel. Military Advocate Generals, just like our Jags Judge Advocate Generals here in the United States. Our Jags when they give instructions to a commander in the field, those instructions are precatory. They're advisory. The commander can override them, doesn't have to follow them. So if a lawyer in the United States says, hey, too many civilians there. Don't strike that target, the commander can say, well, I think the target's very important. I'm going to override you and strike the target. In Israel, these mags are actually deployed in the field with the commanders. And if the lawyer tells the commander not to strike a target because of the collateral consequences on the civilian population, that is not a precatory instruction. That is an order mandatory that must be followed. Unless the commander wants to go up the chain of command, which ultimately can go to a court of justice that would rule and decide on whether the strike was appropriate, given all the collateral consequences. And we, the judges on our trips, we saw firsthand video after video after video of an Israeli plane or drone over a clear Hamas target. Guys with rifles or bazookas, all wearing the keffiyehs, by the way, that are now somehow fashionable on Western campuses. And the pilot says, I'm ready to strike. And then something amazing happens. A lawyer, a nerdy lawyer comes over the airwave and says, hey, what's that on the top right part of the screen? And the pilot will say, oh, that's two kids playing soccer 50 meters away. What's that on the left part of the screen? That's two women walking, holding a loaf of bread. Strike canceled. Strike canceled, over and over and over again. That is just a tiny piece, but a critical piece of evidence in the legal case showing that Israel is not only not committing genocide, the ultimate crime of crimes, which requires proof of an intent, a specific intent, to eradicate the entire civilian population on the other side for reasons of race or religion or ethnicity as such. Which means that you're trying to kill them not because they have a terrorist population inside of them or because they have attacked you and invaded southern Israel, but because you want to wipe them off from the face of the earth. That's what we saw with Nazi Germany. That's what we saw in, of course, Rwanda. That has nothing to do with what was happening in Gaza. And one more point about that. Israel has sent over 20 million text messages, made over 20 million phone calls, issued millions of leaflets and social media posts telling the civilian population of Gaza exactly which homes and neighborhoods would be attacked the next day and the day after that. When it does that, it of course alerts not just the civilian population of Gaza, but the enemy population, the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters as well, thereby endangering the lives of Israel's own sons and daughters. The high level military group, the hlmg, which is an international coalition of high level officers and generals in almost every Western army in the world, has submitted a brief to the ICC making clear that Israel's warning system is not only totally and definitionally inconsistent with any claim of genocide or law of war violation. Think, for example, what do the Nazis have warned Jews not to go into the gas chambers? Would the genocide regime in Rwanda have warned the ethnic, the ethnic population on the other side, the civilian population, to steer away from military checkpoints and facilities? Of course not. The question is absurd even to ask it. The HLMG group said not only is it definitionally the warning system, definitionally not genocide, it also is the most sophisticated warning system in the world. And, and they say our own armies, America's, Japan's and other armies in the west would never be able to implement such a warning system because our own civilian populations would never go along with allowing our sons and daughters to be endangered by warning the enemy about where we would be attacking the next day.
- [34:02]
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Judge Royalman, a man who clearly knows what he is talking about, check out his book that comes out later this month, Israel on Trial, examining the history of history, the evidence and the law. Judge Altman will join us yet again after a very short commercial break. Stay with us, folks. We're going to wrap up our conversation with a wonderful man and a wonderful jurist. That's Judge Roy Altman of the U.S. district Court for the District, Southern District of Florida. We'll be right back with Judge Altman.
- [34:24]
B
Here's something most people don't know. When Warren Buffett was just 13 years old, he didn't put his money into a savings account while other kids were earning next to nothing at local banks, Buffett put 100, $114 into a little known investment. Today, that $114 would be worth over $15 million. And it wasn't a risky trade. It wasn't even insider knowledge. It was an account that's been around since 1888. And over the last 25 years, it's averaged 29% a year. That's what happens when your money is allowed to compound. Compare that to today's savings accounts paying less than half a percentage while inflation quietly eats away at your buying power. Buffett understood early banks are great businesses, just not for savers. If you'd like to see what some investors call the 29% account go now to secretaccount29.com that's secretaccount the numbers29.com secretaccount29.com.
- [35:28]
A
Welcome back. And Judge Roy Altmand joins us again as well. You can follow Judge Altmand on X. As a reminder, his brand new Twitter account is oykaltman. Brand new book comes out later this month. Israel on Trial, Examining the History, the Evidence and the Law Judge, before the break you were making these analogies to some of the atrocities of World War II and various other atrocities from the past century of totalitarianism and so forth there. I too often thought about World War II watching the post October 7, 2023 war unfold. I had a specific question for you actually. When it comes to the law of siege and some of the humanitarian concerns of that, there was this whole debate at various times. It was mostly in the Biden administration, but I guess it held over a little bit to the early days of the second Trump administration as to Israel's obligations or purported obligations when it comes to the people in Gaza, when it comes to electricity and power and food and water. And the Biden administration was very, very, very tough invariably on Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israelis. But Judge, I kept on thinking about World War II. I mean, the United States was bombed at Pearl harbor by Imperial Japan. The United States did not think about how he could give food and water to the Japanese civilians prior to the Doolittle raid. I don't think we thought about this when it came to the German's ire prior to the carpet bombing of Dresden. And I couldn't help but think that this is just a total act of historical amnesia and historical revisionism to think that a country that has been, has been attacked as brutally as Israel was. Again, it's equivalent to like 45 to 59 11s on a proportional population comparison there. Am I just totally off there or was the commentary, broadly speaking of and making it seem like Israel had this overriding, not just moral, but actually like a literal legal obligation to provide this sort of aid?
- [37:18]
C
Well, I won't comment on this or that administration, but the point is well taken. The law of siege, the law of war, enshrines the right of every army to engage in siege warfare. It's in the manual of every Western army, including ours, by the way, in fact, the law of the siege warfare, the strategy of engaging in siege warfare is often in these military codebook seen as the more humane option when compared with what you're describing, which is what we did in Japan and in Germany in World War II, where you carpet, bomb or indiscriminately bomb an urban center in order to destroy the infrastructure there and force the population to surrender. So the law of siege is actually seen as oftentimes the more humane option. And the laws of war enshrine the right of every nation to engage in siege warfare. Now, you're not allowed to engage in siege warfare in order to purposefully starve the civilian population. On the other side, you're allowed to engage in siege warfare in order to starve the enemy population that's there and to win the war against the enemy army that's embedded within the civilian population. But there's also an exception to the rule involving siege warfare, the rule that says you're not allowed to starve an enemy population or prevent them from getting fuel or electricity, where it becomes clear that a significant percentage of the aid that you're allowing into the enemy's civilian population is actually being hijacked and taken by the enemy army. And that's precisely what we have here. It's now clear beyond peradventure that Hamas was stealing a huge proportion of the aid. And by the way, we should say what's now clear, which is that Israel provided and facilitated into Gaza during the two and a half or so years of the war more aid, more food, more fuel, more electricity, more medicine than any other army has ever allowed into the enemy's civilian population in a time of war. In the last 50 years, period in full, they provided polio vaccines. Again, we talked about genocide. Do we think the Nazis were interested in vaccinating the Jews they were pushing into the gas chamber? The question answers itself. The idf. When it became clear, when there were rumors that there was polio outbreak among a few children in Gaza, the IDF won, went, moved the entire civilian population of Rafah out of Rafah, out of harm's way. People said it couldn't be done. You remember the whole Eyes on Rafah campaign? We forgot about that because it was done in about 10 days. 1.1 or 1.2 million people were moved out of Rafah into a series of housing units that the Israeli government had built for them for a million people with food purveyors, with makeshift hospitals, with running water. And they went and they vaccinated two shots, not just one, for polio. They provided two shots for free to something like 98 or 99% of the children in that part of Gaza. Completely incompatible with any claim that Israel was purposefully trying to harm rather than help the civilian population of Gaza. And so to go back to my point, Israel was not required actually to allow all of this aid, food, water and electricity into Gaza under the laws of war, because once it became clear that the war was actually dragging on longer, creating more pressure on the civilian population because the war was not coming to an end precisely because Hamas was stealing so much of the aid in order to fund its war machine. Hamas was taking the food and taking the medicine and taking the fuel. It was using the fuel to power up its underground terror network, terror tunnel network. It was using the food both to feed its fighters and to hoard food on the black market, charging exorbitant rates of the civilian population of Gaza for basic foodstuffs, which came from the international community. As soon as that became clear, which it's now, as I said, clear beyond per adventure. There are videos of it, there are testimonials from civilians in Gaza. The hostages who've been released all talked about how much food, UN food and international aid, food and medicine their Hamas captors had all the time. Once that became clear, international law no longer required Israel not to engage in siege warfare in Gaza.
- [42:08]
A
Judge Wallman is the author of the book that comes out later this month, Israel on Trial, Examining the history of the evidence and the law. He's been very gracious with our time. Judge, just a couple minutes left here, but before I let you go, it's been a wonderful conversation. I want to to end on a non law related notes or at least a non legal specific related note, which is this. I find that when Israel's various defenders when it comes to international law, folks like you, Eugene Kantarevich, when folks defend Israel from an actual legal perspective, it's very hard to combat that. A lot of what you've said here, I genuinely fail to understand sometimes what the actual alternative argument is. I've written some of these essays, a lot of it's in my book as well. Israel, civilization, so forth there. But I guess, Judge, my question to you is, is why. Why has so much of the propaganda to the contrary actually gone out there, do you think?
- [42:59]
C
I just think that, that the enemies of Western civilization have been at this game for a very long time. We know that the Holy Land foundation was planning exactly what ended up happening on our college campuses way back in the early 90s. Those wire taps have been made public. Those individuals were charged, indicted and convicted for planning terroristic activity. But what people forget about it is that the conversation they were having in that hotel room was all about how America was too Zionist, how everyone in America recognized at the time how vital Israel was for America's national security and how they meant to change that. And the way they planned to do it was to create this red green alliance. They knew that young people, especially socialists, could be influenced in this way. And they would go to the high school campuses and they would go to the college campuses and they would try to convince them with this oppressor, oppressed narrative that the Palestinians were the underdog, that they had some relationship to black history in America. And by the way, Palestinian history has absolutely nothing in common with black history in America. As I always say, there are blacks who fight and die in this war in Gaza, but they are all on only one side of this fight. They're on the Israeli side. Israel is a country that spent hundreds of millions of dollars taking hundreds of thousands of Africans, Ethiopians and Sudanese, bringing them to Israel and then incorporating them into full fledged citizens who are now at every echelon of Israeli society, in the military, in the academy, in the political level, in the bar as judges. There's this notion that blacks and Palestinians have anything in common or that they're similar underdogs just completely misstates history and misstates reality. So it really was a decades long campaign that has come to fruition under our noses. And the last thing I'll say on that is we as Jews, as defenders of the west, as Americans, we were asleep at the wheel while our adversaries, the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians and much of the Muslim Brotherhood was going all around our country to our campuses and with our young people infiltrating our media organizations in order to get us to the point where we are today.
- [45:24]
A
No doubt about that, Judge. But thanks to folks like you, I think a lot of people are starting to wake up. One final time, folks. Judge Roy Oldman is the author of the new book out later this month, Israel on Trial, Examining the History, the evidence, the law. Follow him on X as well. At Roy K. Alman. Judge, thank you for spending so much time with us. I really appreciate wishing you a very happy Passover.
- [45:41]
C
Same to you, Josh. Thanks for having me.
- [45:43]
A
To all you out there wishing you the my fellow Jews, a happy Passover and to all our Christian friends, wish you a very blessed Good Friday and a blessed Easter Sunday as well. God bless. We'll be right back on Monday.
- [45:58]
B
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