Ros-Lehtinen, meanwhile, is not only the most senior Republican woman in the US House, a hawkish Zionist, and a supporter of the Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq, the Military Commission Act, drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the military coup in Honduras. She is against the funding of stem cell research, affirmative action (scoring a 31% favorability by the NAACP), and civil rights (scoring a dismal 14% by the ACLU) encourages continued sanctions against Cuba (the country of her birth), and has openlycalled for the assassination of Fidel Castro.
Once H.Res.867 was drawn up, it was rapidly co-sponsored by over 200 other representatives before hitting the House floor for a vote.
The resolution itself neither addresses nor disputes any of the Goldstone Report’s actual findings or conclusions. Instead, via a series of deliberately misleading, factually inaccurate, and unrelated “whereas” clauses, it seeks to delegitimize the entire Fact Finding Mission as a whole, oftentimes personally attacking its members in an effort to show anti-Israel tendencies or bias. What the resolution actually amounts to is a repetition of Israeli propaganda and Zionist apologia masquerading as a legal and moral defense of indefensible Israeli military aggression.
The wide support it received in Congress demonstrates that the United States House of Representatives is determined only to promote human rights and international law with regards to how it relates to the protection of Israeli Jews and, in equal measure, proves its unequivocal and unabashed disregard, if not outright contempt, for the rights and lives of Palestinians.
The text of H.Res.867 is rife with blatant inaccuracies, decontextualized mischaracterizations, and a thorough lack of historical perspective. Many of these factual errors were addressed and corrected in a letter written by Judge Goldstone himself to both Berman and Ros-Lehtinen on October 29.
For instance, in one of its 33 “whereas” clauses, the resolution claims:
“…the mandate of the ‘fact-finding mission’ makes no mention of the relentless rocket and mortar attacks, which numbered in the thousands and spanned a period of eight years, by Hamas and other violent militant groups in Gaza against civilian targets in Israel, that necessitated Israel’s defensive measures.”
This is a deliberate, decontextualized falsehood. The mandate called for the UN Mission “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any timein the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.” (A/HRC/12/48 p.13)
Palestinian rocket attacks, in addition to Israeli military operations, were clearly included in this mandate. Additionally, had those who wrote and supported the House resolution actually read the contents of Goldstone Report rather than simply making things up, they would have been well aware that, in addition to Palestinian rocket attacks and their consequences being mentioned at length in the report’s Introduction, there is also an entire 20-page chapter (XXIV, p.346-366) entitled “The Impact on Civilians of Rocket and Mortar Attacks by Palestinian Armed Groups on Southern Israel,” which practically begins with the following statement: “Since April 2001, Palestinian armed groups have launched more than 8,000 rockets and mortars from Gaza into southern Israel.”
After exhaustively documenting the impact of these rocket attacks, including Israeli fatalities, physical injuries, psychological trauma, mental health, damage to property, the impact on the right to education and on the economic and social life of affected communities (both Israeli and Palestinian within southern Israel), the Mission states that “There is no justification in international law for the launching of rockets and mortars that cannot be directed at specific military targets into areas where civilian populations are located” and concludes that because these rockets cannot be aimed at specific targets, “one of the primary purposes of these continued attacks is to spread terror,” an act which it explicitly states is “prohibited under international humanitarian law.” (A/HRC/12/48, p.365) It continues:
“…the launching of unguided rockets and mortars breaches the fundamental principle of distinction: an attack must distinguish between military and civilian targets. Where there is no intended military target and the rockets and mortars are launched into civilian areas, they constitute a deliberate attack against the civilian population…
…From the facts available, the Mission finds that the rocket and mortars attacks, launched by Palestinian armed groups in Gaza, have caused terror in the affected communities of southern Israel and in Israel as a whole. Furthermore, it is the Mission’s view that the mortars and rockets are uncontrolled and uncontrollable, respectively. This indicates the commission of an indiscriminate attack on the civilian population of southern Israel, a war crime, and may amount to crimes against humanity. These attacks have caused loss of life and physical and mental injury to civilians and damage to private houses, religious buildings and property and have eroded the economic and cultural life of the affected communities.” (A/HRC/12/48, p.366) (emphasis mine)
The Goldstone Report is perfectly clear. The House Resolution is deliberately false. Furthermore, as Jeremy R. Hammond of Foreign Policy Journal deftly points out, the resolution “ignores the fact that even if Israel’s military operations were justifiable as ‘defensive measures,’ Israel would still be legally obligated to conduct its operations in accordance with international law, and to conduct investigations into alleged war crimes conducted by its own forces.”
The resolution and its supporters repeatedly refer to the Goldstone Report as “one-sided,” referencing comments made by both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan E. Rice, who called its initial mandate “unbalanced, one sided and basically unacceptable.” However, as Goldstone himself explains, “the House resolution fails to mention that notwithstanding my repeated personal pleas to the Government of Israel, Israel refused all cooperation with the Mission. Among other things, I requested the views of Israel with regard to the implementation of the mandate and details of any issues that the Government of Israel might wish us to investigate,” continuing,
“This refusal meant that Israel did not offer any information or evidence it may have collected regarding actions by Hamas or other Palestinian groups in Gaza. Any omission of such information and evidence in the report is regrettable, but is the result of Israel’s decision not to cooperate with the Fact-Finding mission, not a decision by the mission to downplay or cast doubt on such information and evidence.”
The Israeli government even denied the Mission entry to Israel in order to interview witnesses and tour affected communities such as Sderot [sic; the real name of the town is Najd] and Ashkelon [sic; the real name of the town is al-Majdal]. Israeli witnesses had to be flown to Geneva or Jordan to be interviewed. Other interviews were conducted over the phone and via the internet. “I believed that Israel would cooperate,” Goldstone told Ha’aretz. “It turned to be a naïve expectation.”
