Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel's Assaults on Gaza (4 page)

Ex-Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni declared that the Goldstone Report was “born in sin,”
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while current Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman declared that it had “no legal, factual or moral value,” and current Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon warned that it “provides legitimacy to terrorism” and risks “turning international law into a circus.”
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Israeli ambassador to the United States and ballyhooed historian Michael Oren intoned in the
Boston Globe
that the Goldstone Report “must be rebuffed by all those who care about peace”; alleged in an address to the American Jewish Committee that Hezbollah was one of the Report’s prime beneficiaries; and reckoned in the
New Republic
that the Report was even worse than “[Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers.”
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Settler movement leader Israel Harel deemed the Goldstone Report “destructive, toxic,” more wretched than the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, and misdirected “against precisely that country which protects human and military ethics more than the world has ever seen,” while residents of Sderot picketed UN offices in Jerusalem holding placards that exhorted Goldstone to “apologize” and decried “anti-Semites.”
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A Tel Aviv University center for the study of “antisemitism and racism” alleged that the Goldstone Report was responsible for a global upsurge in “hate crimes against Jews” and “the equation of the war in Gaza with the Holocaust.”
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Fully 94 percent of Israeli Jews who were familiar with the Report’s content held it to be biased against Israel, and 79 percent rejected its accusation that the IDF committed war crimes.
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Since the Report’s findings were beyond the pale, the only topic deemed worthy of deliberation in Israel was whether it had been prudent for Israel to boycott the Goldstone Mission.
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But, as veteran peace activist Uri Avnery pointed out, the “real answer” as to why Israel chose not to cooperate “is quite simple: they knew full well that the mission, any mission, would have to reach the conclusions it did reach.”
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Back in the US, the usual suspects rose (or sunk) to the occasion of smearing the message and the messenger. Elie Wiesel condemned the Goldstone Report as not only “a crime against the Jewish people” but also “unnecessary,” ostensibly because “I can’t believe that Israeli soldiers murdered people or shot children. It just can’t be.”
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Harvard’s Alan M. Dershowitz alleged that the Goldstone Report “is so filled with lies, distortions and blood libels that it could have been drafted by Hamas extremists”; that it recalled the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
and was “biased and bigoted”; that “every serious student of human rights should be appalled at this anti-human rights and highly politicized report”; that it made “findings of fact (nearly all wrong),” stated “conclusions of law (nearly all questionable),” and made “specific recommendations (nearly all one-sided)”; and that Goldstone himself was “a traitor to the Jewish people,” an “evil, evil man” and—he said on Israeli television—on a par with Auschwitz “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele.
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The “essence” and “central conclusion” of the Goldstone Report, according to Dershowitz, was that Israel had a “carefully planned and executed policy of deliberately targeting innocent civilians for mass murder”; that Israel’s “real purpose” was “to target innocent Palestinian civilians—children, women and the elderly—for death.” He repeated this characterization of the Goldstone Report on nearly every page—often multiple times on a single page—of his lengthy “study in evidentiary bias,” and then handily refuted the allegation.
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The problem was that Dershowitz conjured a straw man: the Goldstone Report never said or implied that the principal objective of Cast Lead was to murder Palestinians. If the Goldstone Report did level such an allegation, it would have had to charge Israel with genocide—but it didn’t. It is a commonplace that the more frequently a lie is repeated the more credible it becomes. The novelty of Dershowitz’s “study” was that it kept repeating a lie, the more easily to discredit its purveyor. Dershowitz and other Goldstone-bashers also alleged that Palestinian witnesses were either coached and intimidated by Hamas or were actually Hamas militants in disguise, without a jot of evidence being adduced,
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while Goldstone himself emphatically rejoined that “it didn’t happen.”
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The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) called the Goldstone Mission “rigged” and the Goldstone Report “deeply flawed,”
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the American Jewish Committee deplored it as a “deeply distorted document,”
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and Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League was “shocked and distressed that the United States would not unilaterally dismiss it.”
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New York Democrat Gary Ackerman, chair of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, mocked Goldstone as inhabiting a “self-righteous fantasyland” and the Report as a “pompous, tendentious, one-sided political diatribe.”
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The US House of Representatives passed by a vote of 344 to 36 a nonbinding resolution that condemned the Goldstone Report as “irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy.”
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Before the vote was taken, Goldstone provided a point-by-point demonstration that the House resolution was vitiated by “serious factual inaccuracies and instances where information and statements are taken grossly out of context.”
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The Obama administration quickly fell into line with the Israel lobby, but it probably did not need much prodding. An Israeli talking point in Washington was that the Goldstone Report’s recommendation to prosecute soldiers for war crimes “should worry every country fighting terror.”
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In its 47-page entry for “Israel and the occupied territories,” the US State Department’s
2009 Human Rights Report
devoted all of three sentences to Cast Lead, then touched on the Goldstone Mission’s findings and dismissively concluded: “The Goldstone report was widely criticized for methodological failings, legal and factual errors, falsehoods, and for devoting insufficient attention to the asymmetrical nature of the conflict and the fact that Hamas and other Palestinian militants were deliberately operating in heavily populated urban areas of Gaza.”
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After enduring a barrage of such attacks, Goldstone finally challenged the Obama administration to justify substantively its criticism of the Report, while Human Rights Watch (HRW) took to task the US government for having “resorted to calling the report ‘unbalanced’ and ‘deeply flawed,’ but providing no real facts to support those assertions.”
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Meanwhile, Washington reportedly planned to block or limit UN Security Council action on the Goldstone Report, while both the US and Israel pressured the Palestinian Authority (PA) to drop its support of the Report’s recommendations. “The PA has reached the point where it has to decide,” a senior Israeli defense official pronounced, “whether it is working with us or against us.”
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The answer was not long in coming. Acting on direct instructions from President Mahmoud Abbas, the PA representative on the UN Human Rights Council effectively acquiesced in killing consideration of the Goldstone Report. However, the decision evoked such outrage among Palestinians that the PA was forced to reverse itself and the council convened to consider the Report’s findings.
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It approved a resolution “condemning all targeting of civilians and stressing the urgent need to ensure accountability for all violations” of international law, and it endorsed the Report’s recommendations and urged the UN to act on them.
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In November 2009, the UN General Assembly passed by a vote of 114 to 18 (44 countries abstained) a resolution also “condemning all targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure,” and it called on both Israel and the “Palestinian side” to “undertake investigations that are independent, credible and in conformity with international standards into the serious violations of international . . . law reported by the Fact-Finding Mission.”
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Israeli officials denounced the resolution as “completely detached from realities” and a “mockery of reality.”
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In February 2010, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon reported back to the General Assembly that as yet “no determination can be made on the implementation” of its November 2009 resolution calling for credible investigations.
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Later in the month, the General Assembly passed another resolution by a vote of 98 to 7 (31 countries abstained) reiterating its call on Israel and Hamas to “conduct investigations that are independent, credible and in conformity with international standards,” and requesting that the Secretary-General report back within five months on the implementation of the resolution.
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Despite intensive lobbying by European Jewish groups, the European Parliament passed in March 2010 by a vote of 335 to 287 a resolution “demanding” implementation of the Goldstone Report’s recommendations and “accountability for all violations of international law, including alleged war crimes.” The spokesman for the Israeli mission to the European Union deplored the resolution as “flawed and counterproductive.”
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In January and July 2010, Israel released “updates” on its own investigations.
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Although it purportedly conducted scores of inquiries, the results overwhelmingly exonerated Israelis of wrongdoing. A handful of soldiers suffered disciplinary sanctions, such as an officer who was “severely reprimanded.” The one and only Israeli convicted on a criminal charge and sentenced to prison was a soldier who stole a credit card.
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Even these risibly token punishments evoked indignation in IDF ranks.
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Still, the Israeli investigations could not be faulted for lack of creativity. One soldier who killed a woman carrying a white flag was exonerated on the grounds that the bullet was actually a “warning shot” that “ricocheted”
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—off a cloud? Despite near-total vindication by these “investigations,” in a magnanimous gesture Israel “adopted important new written procedures and doctrine designed to enhance the protection of civilians . . . and to limit unnecessary damage to civilian property and infrastructure” in future conflicts
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—as if the death and destruction in Gaza had resulted from operational and doctrinal deficits and not from an assault expressly designed to “punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.”
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The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights announced in June 2010 the formation of an independent panel to “ensure accountability for all violations of international humanitarian and international human rights laws during the Gaza conflict.”
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The committee was chaired by a former member of the International Law Commission and included a former Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York. The committee’s report, issued in September 2010,
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found that, although “certain positive steps . . . have resulted from Israel’s investigations,” the bottom line was that “the military investigations thus far appear to have produced very little.”
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Indeed, while “the Committee cannot conclude that credible and genuine investigations have been carried out by the de facto authorities in the Gaza Strip,”
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Hamas had apparently convicted and sentenced to prison time more individuals than Israel.
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After release of this report, Amnesty International urged the UN Human Rights Council to “recognize the failure of the investigations conducted by Israel and the Hamas de facto administration,” and to “call on the ICC [International Criminal Court] Prosecutor urgently to seek a determination . . . whether the ICC has jurisdiction over the Gaza conflict.”
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One might wonder why the Goldstone Report should have triggered so much vituperation in Israel and set off an Israeli “diplomatic blitz” to contain the fallout from it.
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After all, the Goldstone Mission’s findings were merely the last in a long series of human rights reports condemning Israeli actions in Gaza,
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and Israel has never been known for its deference to UN bodies. The answer, however, is not hard to find. Goldstone is not only Jewish but also a self-declared “Zionist” who “worked for Israel all of my adult life,” “fully support[s] Israel’s right to exist” and is a “firm believer in the absolute right of the Jewish people to have their home there.” He headed up a Jewish organization that runs vocational schools in Israel and sits on the Board of Governors of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (from which he also received an honorary doctorate). Moreover, his mother was an activist in the women’s Zionist movement, and his daughter made
aliyah
(Zionist emigration to Israel) and remains an ardent Zionist.
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Goldstone has also claimed the Nazi holocaust as the seminal inspiration for the international law and human rights agenda of which he is a leading exponent.
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