Goldstone Recants (4 page)

Throughout his professional career Goldstone has functioned in bureaucracies and has no doubt internalized their norms. Yet, in a shocking rupture with bureaucratic protocol he dropped his bombshell without first notifying his colleagues on the Mission or anyone at the United Nations.

It is as if Goldstone feared confronting them beforehand because he knew that he didn’t have grounds to issue a recantation and could not possibly defend it.

His worries proved well founded. Shortly after publication of his recantation Goldstone’s three colleagues on the Mission—Christine Chinkin, Hina Jilani and Desmond Travers—issued a joint statement unequivocally affirming the Report’s original findings: “We concur in our view that there is no justification for any demand or expectation for reconsideration of the report as nothing of substance has appeared that would in any way change the context, findings or conclusions of that report.”

In his op-ed Goldstone alleges that it was new information on the killings of the al-Samouni family and the total number of Hamas combatants killed during the invasion that induced him to recant. But just two months earlier at Stanford University he matter-of-factly addressed these very same points without drawing any dramatic conclusions. No new evidence surfaced in the interim.

In his recantation Goldstone also references a U.N. document to give Israel a clean bill of health on its investigations although, as widely noted, this document was much more critical of Israeli investigations than he lets on.

It is as if Goldstone were desperately clutching at any shred of evidence, however problematic, to justify his recantation. Indeed he rushed to acquit Israel of criminal culpability in the al-Samouni deaths even before the Israeli military had completed its investigation.

A few days before submitting his op-ed to the
Washington Post
, Goldstone submitted another version of it to the
New York Times
. The
Times
rejected the submission apparently because it did not repudiate the Goldstone Report.

The impression one gets is of Goldstone being pressured against his will to publish a repudiation of the Report. To protect his reputation and because his heart is not in it, Goldstone submits a wishy-washy recantation to the
Times
. After the
Times
rejects it, and in a race against the clock, he hurriedly slips in wording that can be construed as a full-blown repudiation to make sure that the
Post
will run what is now a bombshell.

The exertion of outside pressure on Goldstone would perhaps also explain the murkiness of his op-ed, in which he seems to be simultaneously recanting and not recanting the Report, and his embarrassing inclusion of irrelevances such as a call on the Human Rights Council to condemn the slaughter of an Israeli settler family—two years after the Gaza invasion in an incident unrelated to the Gaza Strip—by unknown perpetrators.

THE EMINENT South African jurist John Dugard is a colleague of Goldstone’s. Dugard also headed a fact-finding mission that investigated what happened in Gaza. The conclusions of his report—which contained a finer legal analysis while Goldstone’s was broader in scope—largely overlapped with those of the Goldstone Mission: “the purpose of Israel’s action was to punish the people of Gaza” and Israel was “responsible for the commission of internationally wrongful acts by reason of the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

In a devastating dissection of Goldstone’s recantation in the
New Statesman
, Dugard concluded: “There are no new facts that exonerate Israel and that could possibly have led Goldstone to change his mind. What made him change his mind therefore remains a closely guarded secret.”

Although Goldstone’s secret will perhaps never be revealed and his recantation has caused irreparable damage, it is still possible by patient reconstruction of the factual record to know the truth about what happened in Gaza. Out of respect for the memory of those who perished during the Gaza massacre we must preserve and protect this truth from its assassins.

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