Ever since it first struck the raw nerve of Israeli political consciousness, I thought it misleading to associate the Goldstone Report so exclusively with its chair, Judge Richard Goldstone. After all, despite his deserved prominence as an international jurist, he was the least qualified substantively of the four members of the mission. Undoubtedly, part of the intensely hostile Israeli reaction of their highest political leaders had to do with the sense that Goldstone as a devoted Zionist had been guilty of betrayal, even of ‘a blood libel’ against the Jewish people, because he seemed to be elevating his fidelity to the ‘law’ above that of tribal loyalties, and according to Tel Aviv he should never have been mixed up with such a suspect entity as the UN Human Rights Council in the first place.
What should be observed, and stands out over time, is the degree of importance that even the extremist Israeli leadership attaches to the avoidance of further stains on their reputation as a law abiding political actor. This seems true for the Israeli leadership even when the assessing organization is the UN Human Rights Council that Israel, as well as the U.S. Government, never misses the chance to denounce and defame. Implicit in this Israeli search for vindication is their implicit acknowledgement that the UN is, after all, a major site of struggle in the ongoing legitimacy war being fought against Palestinian claims of self-determination. This acknowledgement of importance has been expressed more recently by Netanyahu’s inappropriate insistence that in view of the Goldstone retreat, the UN retract the report in its totality.
This assessment was embarrassingly confirmed by the reaction of the U.S. Senate to Goldstone’s Washington Post op/ed of April 1st when, two weeks later on, it unanimously passed a resolution calling on the UN “to reflect the author’s repudiation of the Goldstone report’s central findings, rescind the report and reconsider further Council actions with respect to its findings.” It also asked the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, “to do all in his power to redress the damage to Israel’s reputation.” This ill-informed and inflammatory wording is quite extraordinary, starting with the reference to Goldstone as ‘the author’ of the report, thereby completely overlooking the reality that it was a joint effort, that his input was probably the smallest, and the other authors have reaffirmed their support for the entire report subsequent to the Goldstone retreat. What is mostly revealed by this Senate initiative is the blatant partisanship that is now unquestioned in official Washington. This unsubtle disregard for international law and the authority of the UN should at the very least encourage the Palestine Authority to seek other auspices for any future negotiations with Israel than what is provided by the U.S. Government.
It is probably true that if Goldstone had not been so vilified for his association with the report it would have likely experienced the same fate as thousands of other well documented UN reports on controversial issues. By lending his name to the fact-finding mission and its outcome, Goldstone became an unwilling lightning rod, the target of vicious attacks, but also heralded at the time by fair-minded persons around the world for his fidelity to the law, even in the face of such hostile fire. In this regard, Goldstone became a sacrificial scarecrow that failed in his appointed role of keeping the birds of prey at a safe distance. In effect, how could Israel attack one of their own if the assessment of their behavior produced findings of severe violations of international humanitarian law? How could such findings be avoided given the widely known characteristics of Operation Cast Lead? There is a double irony present: Goldstone was partly selected to head this sensitive undertaking because, as a known supporter of Israel, he would make it harder for Israel to complain about UN bias so as to deflect attention away from the message; but precisely because of the difficulty posed for Israel’s propaganda machine by Goldstone’s credibility, the level of attack on him reached hysterical heights, and evidently exerted such intense pressure that he eventually made an awkward and unprecedented partial repudiation of the report that pleases neither side.
Two other aspects of the situation are often neglected or misstated. First of all, several other respected international studies had already confirmed most of the conclusions reached by the time the Goldstone Report was released in September 2009. Other prior noteworthy reports on the international law issues including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, Al Haq, and especially the comprehensive report of an earlier detailed and authoritative fact-finding team composed of internationally respected international law experts under the leadership of John Dugard, a leading South African jurist and former UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine carried out on behalf of the Arab League. Against such a background, in a substantive sense the Goldstone Report did not say anything that was not already well established by a highly credible accountability community of NGOs, journalists, and an array of UN humanitarian workers and civilians who were on the scene during the attacks. Such an overwhelming informed consensus is what makes such a mockery of this effort by the U.S. State Department and the Senate to seize on the Goldstone retreat as a new occasion to repudiate the report as a whole, and throw once more a blanket of impunity over Israeli defiance of international law.
The second element that should be kept in mind, but is rarely ever acknowledged even by those who stand 100% behind the report, is that it was not, as the media mostly claimed, unduly critical of Israel. On the contrary, in my view, the report was one-sided, but to the benefit of Israel. Let me mention several evidences of leaning toward Israel: the report proceeds on the basis of Israel’s right of self-defense without bothering to decide whether in a situation of continuing occupation a claim of self-defense is ever available under international humanitarian law, although Israel was entitled to rely on force to the extent necessary to uphold specific security interests arising from the rocket attacks. Furthermore, the report did not examine whether the factual conditions prior to the attacks supported any security claim considering the success of the truce to cut rocket fire to almost zero in the months preceding the attacks, a truce that had held until Israel provocatively broke it on 4 November 2008 by conducting a lethal raid within Gaza. Beyond this, the claimed security justification seemed artificially fashioned to serve as a rationalization for the Israeli aggressive and unlawful all out military assault against Gaza that was mostly motivated by a series of Israeli claims that were quite independent of security in Gaza. The real goals were as follows: to destroy Hamas; to induce the return of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, to punish Gazans for voting in favor of Hamas back in 2006. In addition, it was clear that the IDF had been planning Operation Cast Lead for six months prior to launching the attack on 27 December 2008, and for a variety of reasons other than securing southern Israel against rockets: striking hard at Gaza before Obama took office, influencing in Kadima’s favor the Israeli domestic elections that were about to take place, restoring confidence in the IDF after its failures in the Lebanon War of 2006, and sending a message to Iran that Israel would not hesitate to use overwhelming force whenever its interests dictated and without restraint.
The Goldstone Report did appropriately emphasize the severe Israeli departures from the law of war by attacking with disproportionate and indiscriminate force against a crowded, mainly urbanized society. But it failed to emphasize a distinctive feature of the attacks—the denial to the civilian population of Gaza of the option to leave the war zone and become refugees, at least temporarily. To keep civilians, especially children, the aged, and the disabled, so confined leaves permanent psychic wounds as has been reported by many post-attack studies and residents of Gaza, but is not disclosed by the casualty figures that count only the dead and the wounded. Part of the public horror of Operation Cast Lead resulted from the 100:1 ratio of war dead, which is a vivid confirmation of the defenseless plight of the Gazan population and the helplessness of Hamas protectors when confronted by the Israeli war machine. Despite this indicator of one-sidedness, the casualty comparison dramatically understated the real losses to the Palestinians. If the psychologically damaged are added to the Palestinian total and the friendly fire victims are subtracted from the Israeli side, reducing their total deaths from 13 to 6 or 7 the ratio of losses is gigantically uneven. In view of this one-sidedness, together with Israel’s initiation of the attacks and its role as occupying power, the report gave excessive emphasis to Hamas violations of international humanitarian law, which should have been noted, but not treated, as was the case, as virtually symmetrical with those of Israel. To treat as balanced that which is so manifestly unbalanced is to falsify the relevant reality.
As has been pointed out in the media, including by Goldstone, his retraction was limited to the admittedly important issue of whether Israel intentionally targeted civilians as a matter of policy. Even this limited retraction is unconvincing because it rests so heavily on Israel’s self-investigations, which the post-Goldstone UN fact-finding mission jointly headed by an American judge, Mary McGowan Davis and the Swedish judge, Lennart Aspergen, found in their recent report failed to meet international standards. As mentioned previously, the retraction by Goldstone was also seriously undermined by the joint statement of the three other members of the Goldstone mission who publically reaffirmed the report in its totality, which never made the sweeping accusation of Israel that Goldstone retracted!
Only half satirically, I would think that it might be time to rechristen the Goldstone Report as the Chinkin Report, or blandly let it be henceforth be known as the ‘Report on Israeli and Hamas War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity during Operation Cast Lead.’ Whatever the name, the main allegations have been confirmed over and over again, and it is now up to the governments making up the UN General Assembly and Security Council to show the world whether international criminal accountability and the International Criminal Court is exclusively reserved for sub-Saharan African wrongdoing!
Many have asked whether the Goldstone retraction will doom the future of the report. In my view, rather than performing a funeral rite, Goldstone miscalculated, and has given the report a second life. It may still languish in the UN System, thanks to the geopolitical leverage being exerted by the United States to ensure that Israeli impunity is safeguarded once more, but this new controversy surrounding the report has provided civil society with renewed energy to push harder on the legitimacy agenda that has been animating the growing Palestinian global solidarity movement. Never before has the Goldstone Report received such sympathetic attention even from American mainstream sources. Astonishingly, even the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen chided Goldstone for trying belatedly to distance himself from the report, going so far as to suggest that his behavior has contributed a new verb, ‘to Goldstone,’ to the language of politics; “Its meaning: to make a finding, and then partially retract it for uncertain motive.” Cohen’s formal definition—”to ‘Goldstone’: (Colloq.) To sow confusion, hide a secret, create havoc.”
History has funny ways of reversing expectations. Just as most of the world was ready to forget the allegations against Israel from the ghastly 2008-09 attacks on Gaza and move on, Richard Goldstone inadvertently wakes us all up to a remembrance of those morbid events, and in the process, does irreparable damage to his own reputation while trying to redeem himself in certain circles.
It is up to persons of conscience to seize this opportunity, and press hard for a more even handed approach to the application of the rule of law in world politics. There is much righteous talk these days at the UN and elsewhere about the ‘responsibility to protect,’ contending that the Qaddafi threats directed at Libyans civilians justified a No Fly Zone and a full-fledged military intervention from the air undertaken with UN blessings and NATO bombs and missiles, but not even a whisper of support for providing the still beleaguered people of Gaza with a No Fly Zone despite frequent violent incursions by Israel and a debilitating unlawful blockade that has lasted almost four years, a severe form of collective punishment that directly violates Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. This blockade continues to block the entry of building materials needed in Gaza to recover from the devastation caused more than two years ago.
We Jews know what to expect from Falk and his ilk. This week we celebrate our freedom from a nation that embodied his feelings about Jews. They are gone, as he will be some day; we are here, as we will continue to be.
“Disregard for international law?” I’m also an attorney. How do you respond to the Hamas terrorist regime whose aspirations call for the killing of your women, children, or any other breathing Jew? If the definition of war crimes is unjust, isn’t it time to redefine it, as with any other law that is immoral?
Yassir Arafat rejected the Palestinian state offered to him by then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. A campaign vilifying Israel with war crime claims, the exact conclusion of the Goldstone commission, but Arafat rejected the idea, so he put it aside until later. You cannot have peace with someone who will not sit down with you for a cup of coffee.
Goldstone’s inquiry was a kangaroo court and a UN sanctioned set-up in every sense.
If Goldstone’s reversal marked the beginning of a more fair-minded approach to Israel, rather than Falk’s poison, it would in turn produce a changed Israeli mindset in response. The truth is, the three remaining members of the Fact-Finding Mission on Gaza are rightly worried about their reputations, as their integrity is in ruins.
Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said that Goldstone’s regrets are “too little, too late.” Falk should be have the man that the crook Olmert is.
“We Jews know …”
Yes, perhaps too much about yourselves, and not about others, and care little else. Fortunately, there are honorable people, too, among Jews.
In his various articles including the present one, Richard Falk’s point of departure in his political analyses continues to be one of adherence to rule of law in international politics, especially in wars and conflict zones. Such a perspective offers everybody including the major actors in world-affairs a saner approach to resolving the conflicts than the one practised by the powerful nations that ignore international humanitarian law and commit various crimes against humanity, such as the United States has done in its genocidal wars in the twentieth century from Vietnam to the twenty-first century’s wars of aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. America’s closest ally in the Middle East has been the Zionist State of Israel and its destructive war-machine, funded, equipped and oiled by American political establishment. The colonization of Palestine and systematic crushing of Palestinian people has been the hallmark of Israeli politics. Of course, all this with the active support of the United States.
The question of ethnic and religious identity of an individual, keeping in view that Richard Falk himself is a Jew, is used by many Zionists to attack those who object to the Israeli policies and war crimes. For Zionists truth is what Zionism stands for, the rest is a lie! As a result many principled scholars and writers, including some Jews, who show the Israeli policies and crimes against the people of the occupied Palestine are routinely vilified and mocked by Zionists and Israeli propaganda machine. The responses to Falk in the American political establishment and Zionists world-wide show how the network of falsifiers operates to hide the facts such those of Operation Cast Lead.
ghj – unfortunately, it is Goldstone whose integrity and reputation is in tatters.
I feel sympathetic towards him – the man had no idea the level of intense bullying that would impact him and his family in Johannesburg, South Africa, from the conservative Jewish community within which he lives.
The South African Zionist Federation is a small but powerful body of diaspora Jewish people highly loyal towards Zionism and the Israeli status quo.
Goldstone dared to apply his respected judicial mind to the issue of Cast Lead, where hundreds of Gazans were killed and hundreds of buildings (clinics, businesses, etc) were smashed and destroyed .
From the minute he returned to his community after submitting this report, his life was made hell. He, his wife and relatives were made to feel like traitors, they were ostracised in subtle and unsubtle ways – thugs theatened to disrupt his beloved grandson’s barmitzvah and Goldstone was only able to attend surrounded by bodyguards, such was the venom.
After Goldstone’s ‘retraction’, the spokesman for the SA Zionist Fed crowed that his organisation had played a big part in ‘making Goldstone see the error of his ways’. (Avram Krengel – as reported in the Jerusalem Post).
The fact that Goldstone buckled and betrayed his own, respected judicial instincts, has basically ruined respect for Goldstone, going forward, which is a great pity and not something the man deserves.
The fact that Goldstone wants to flip-flop and waver in the face of ugly bullying – does not change the Report or the views of the other three Report authors.
What can one reasonably say about Richard Falk. To me, it would be that his words so belong on the “Foreign Policy Journal” website because he is absolutely aligned with the anti – Israel bias contained within all it’s mideast articles.
Of course, being Jewish himself, he is the perfect useful idiot, with the emphasis on idiot. The man has a sickness of the soul that has always reflected in his verbal attacks on Israel. That is who he is.
When his article states “Other prior noteworthy reports on the international law issues including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, Al Haq” he should have stated it as, other reports on the issues came from the vehemently anti Israel groups Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, Al Haq, because that is what they are.
In fact, what that other useful idiot (perhaps they are related) Goldstone was referring to when he somewhat withdrew his condemnations of Israel’s actions was his acknowledgement that these sources were one sided against Israel.
Why he couldn’t figure that out during his findings is beyond comprehension.
Yes, they are both Jewish and supposedly have Israel’s best interests at heart, but one would never know from their actions. Falk is pure evil while Goldstone is more a dupe. Together they represent nothing good and more important, nothing that can be trusted and certainly not admired.
The full story about operation Cast Lead has yet to be told and if it ever is, the story would be that if people such as Hamas want to fire rockets onto another people, in order to kill and scare them to death, they should be prepared for reprisals. Is it any more complex than that?
Yes you say, ok, then let me add this. Hamas is evil (perhaps they and Falk are related) in that they would just as soon see their own people die if it would help them in their PR war. How distorted is that?
All the fine talk and gobblygook that this man Falk comes up with pales in the face of truth and decency. He is an academic with a bone up his derriere, and while he has an audience of other demented dolts that bow to his phony and false scholarship, anyone with a brain realizes this man belongs in the trash heap of history, and hopefully there will be a place for him there soon enough.
Barry, it’s ironic that you call Falk an “idiot” while not being able to formulate an intelligent, rational argument contrary to anything he said. The only arguments you have are ad hominem.
Jeremy, it’s you again? You always seem to pop up after my comments. It’s like finding an old friend??? each and every time I write.
When dealing with fools like Falk, there’s no point in trying to rehash this point or that point because he is blatantly wrong across the board.
Better to do a fair overview of the man, which I believe I did, in order that your readers get a picture of who he really might be.
There’s little point in my dissecting an evil persons thought process – would someone have been better off arguing merit with Hitler or just pointing out that he was an immoral ass from the getgo?
There’s room for people like you Jeremy, who pretend your scholarship is everything because you’ve researched this and that, and I believe there’s room for people like myself, someone who quickly grasps the bullshitter and calls him on it. Perhaps it’s just a gift I have.
You certainly do have a gift for ad hominem arguments that don’t actually address any facts, Barry, I’ll give you that.
Jeremy, is a point ever reached when undiluted abuse calls for banning?
Barry can consider himself warned.
I find it incomprehensible Jeremy, that on a site when some of the most blatant untruths are written, when all articles follow an extreme far left sensibility, and when a basically good country like Israel is consistently and unfairly be bashed, that my words can be called abuse.
Those who support what you believe in can write all sorts of inflammatory statements and be encouraged to go even deeper.
Those of us who see through this charade and point out the other side are called abusive.
Well, I acknowledge your warning and am confident that I will be soon booted from your pages. At that point the Journal will be free to continue its rant without anyone pointing out that the king is not wearing any clothing.
Barry, if you must know, I rarely exercise my right to revoke people’s commenting privileges, but in those instances where I have, it has nearly always been because of racist comments against Jews. If you don’t wish to be booted, then just don’t resort to personal attacks. Simple as that. Make an intelligent, logically valid (i.e. non-ad hominem) argument, if you are capable, and you are welcome to continue commenting here.