Goldstone Recants (2 page)

On 1 April 2011 Israel’s headache went away.

GOLDSTONE JUSTIFIES his recantation in the
Washington Post
on the grounds that “we know a lot more today about what happened” during the Israeli invasion than when the Mission compiled the Report. On the basis of this alleged new information he suggests that Israel did not commit war crimes in Gaza and that Israel is fully capable on its own of investigating any violations of international law that did occur.

It is correct that much new information on what happened during the Israeli invasion has become available since publication of the Mission’s Report. But the vast preponderance of this new material sustains and even extends the Report’s findings.

In addition to those already cited in the Goldstone Report, many more Israeli combatants stepped forward in 2010 to confirm egregious aspects of the Israeli invasion.

For example, an officer who served at a brigade headquarters recalled that IDF policy amounted to ensuring “literally zero risk to the soldiers,” while a combatant remembered a meeting with his brigade commander and others where it was conveyed that “if you see any signs of movement at all you shoot. This is essentially the rules of engagement.”

Goldstone could have cited this new information to buttress the Mission’s Report but chose to ignore it.

In 2010 Human Rights Watch published a report based on satellite imagery documenting numerous cases “in which Israeli forces caused extensive destruction of homes, factories, farms and greenhouses in areas under IDF control without any evident military purpose. These cases occurred when there was no fighting in these areas; in many cases, the destruction was carried out during the final days of the campaign when an Israeli withdrawal was imminent.”

Goldstone could have cited this new information to buttress the Mission’s Report but again chose to ignore it.

How is it possible to take seriously Goldstone’s claim that the facts compelled him to recant when he scrupulously ignores the copious new evidence confirming the Mission’s Report?

SINCE PUBLICATION of the Goldstone Report Israel has released many purported refutations of it. The most voluminous of these was a 350-page report compiled by the Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center in 2010,
Hamas and the Terrorist Threat from the Gaza Strip: The main findings of the Goldstone Report versus the factual findings
.

The Israeli document was based on unverifiable “reports from IDF forces” and “Israeli intelligence information,” indecipherable photographic evidence and information gathered from “terrorist operatives” who had been tortured.

It falsely alleged that the Goldstone Report made “almost no mention of the brutal means of repression used by Hamas against its opponents”; that the Report devoted “just three paragraphs” to Hamas’s “rocket and mortar fire” during the Israeli invasion; that the Report “absolved” Hamas “of all responsibility for war crimes”; that the Report gave “superficial” treatment to “the terrorist organizations’ use of civilians as human shields”; and that the Report depended on “the unreliable casualty statistics provided by Hamas.”

It is hard to reconcile the mendacity of Israel’s most ambitious attempt to refute the Goldstone Report with Goldstone’s claim that new Israeli information fatally undermines the Mission’s findings.

THE HEART of Goldstone’s recantation is that on the basis of new information he has concluded that “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.” It is not entirely clear what is being asserted here.

If Goldstone is saying that he no longer believes Israel had a
systematic policy
of targeting Gaza’s civilian population
for murder
, his recantation is gratuitous because the Mission’s Report never made such a claim. If the Report had made such a claim it would have verged on charging Israel with genocide. But the Report never even came close to entertaining, let alone leveling, such a charge.

What the Goldstone Report did say was that Israel’s invasion of Gaza was a “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.”

In fact the Goldstone Report assembles compelling evidence that as a matter of policy Israel resorted to indiscriminate, disproportionate force against the civilian population of Gaza. Goldstone does not allege in his
Washington Post
op-ed that new information calls this evidence into doubt.

Israeli leaders themselves did not shy away from acknowledging the indiscriminate, disproportionate nature of the attack they launched.

As the invasion wound down Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni declared that it had “restored Israel’s deterrence . . . Hamas now understands that when you fire on [Israel’s] citizens it responds by going wild—and this is a good thing.” The day after the ceasefire Livni bragged on Israeli television that “Israel demonstrated real hooliganism during the course of the recent operation, which I demanded.”

A former Israeli defense official told the International Crisis Group that “with an armada of fighter planes attacking Gaza, Israel decided to play the role of a mad dog for the sake of future deterrence,” while a former senior Israeli security official boasted to the Crisis Group that Israel had regained its deterrence because it “has shown Hamas, Iran and the region that it can be as lunatic as any of them.”

“The Goldstone Report, which claimed that Israel goes crazy when it is being attacked, caused us some damage,” a leading Israeli commentator on Arab affairs observed, “yet it was a blessing in our region. If Israel goes crazy and destroys everything in its way when it is being attacked, one should be careful. No need to mess with crazy people.”

It is an integral principle of law that “the doer of an act must be taken to have
intended
its natural and foreseeable consequences” (Judge Christopher Weeramantry, International Court of Justice). Thus, an indiscriminate, disproportionate attack that inevitably and predictably results in civilian deaths is indistinguishable from a deliberate and intentional attack on civilians.

“There is no genuine difference between a premeditated attack against civilians (or civilian objects) and a reckless disregard of the principle of distinction” between civilians (or civilian objects) and combatants (or military objects), according to Israel’s leading authority on international law, Yoram Dinstein—“they are equally forbidden.”

If Goldstone now believes that because Israel did not intentionally target civilians for murder it is not guilty of war crimes, he ought to brush up on the law: an indiscriminate, disproportionate attack on civilian areas is no less criminal.

If he now believes that it is not criminal behavior for an invading army to go “wild,” demonstrate “real hooliganism,” carry on like a “mad dog,” act “lunatic” and “crazy,” and “destroy everything in its way,” then he should not be practicing law.

TO SUSTAIN his implied contention that Israel did not commit
any
war crimes because it
never
targeted civilians, Goldstone cites the notorious case of the al-Samouni family. Below I juxtapose his account of what a new Israeli investigation allegedly shows beside (1) the account he gave at a Stanford University forum two months prior to his recantation, (2) the account of Amnesty International in March 2011, and (3) the account of a March 2011 U.N. report that he praises. I have put in bold face what Goldstone omits: