Hamas’s massacre and hostage-taking on Oct. 7, 2023, marked the start of a bloody war against the terrorist group in Gaza and a broader regional conflict over the Middle East’s balance of power. Far from the battlefield, accusations of colonialism, apartheid, and genocide against Israel have reached a fever pitch. Liberal essayists, representatives of international institutions, and student activists have repeated these charges until what began as a set of provocative claims has hardened into a type of received wisdom.Enter United States District Court Judge Roy K. Altman, who responds to these accusations with a pointed question: Are they true? His new book, Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law, is his answer. It is a valuable contribution to the public discourse, both for its substance — the book is dense with history and analysis — as well as its author, who is a well-respected jurist. At the same time, the book is not without its shortcomings. Altman sometimes argues past his opponents, and at other times overstates his case.Altman begins with the claim of colonialism. His argument is straightforward: Israel cannot be a colonial endeavor since the common thread across all forms of colonialism, whether extractive or settler, is that the population is foreign to the land. And since Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel, they, by definition, cannot be foreign to that land. To prove his point, Altman takes the reader through an impressive array of evidence, including archaeological findings dating back to the Merneptah Stele (a 13th-century BCE Egyptian inscription that constitutes the earliest known references to Israel), DNA studies linking contemporary Jewish populations to ancient Levantine peoples, and the continuous historical presence of Jews in their land, documented across millennia of recorded history.