Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel's Assaults on Gaza (6 page)

U
N
C
OMMITTEE
R
EPORT
, M
ARCH
2011:

The Committee does not have sufficient information to establish the current status of the ongoing criminal investigations into the killings of Ateya and Ahmad Samouni, the attack on the Wa’el al-Samouni house and the shooting of Iyad Samouni. This is of considerable concern: reportedly 24 civilians were killed and 19 were injured in the related incidents on 4 and 5 January 2009. Furthermore, the events may relate both to the actions and decisions of soldiers on the ground and of senior officers located in a war room, as well as to broader issues implicating the rules of engagement and the use of drones. . . .  Media reports further inform that
a senior officer, who was questioned “under caution” and had his promotion put on hold, told investigators that he was not warned that civilians were at the location. However, some of those civilians had been ordered there by IDF soldiers from that same officer’s unit and air force officers reportedly informed him of the possible presence of civilians. Despite allegedly being made aware of this information, the officer apparently approved air strikes that killed 21 people and injured 19 gathered in the al-Samouni house.
Media sources also report that the incident has been described as a legitimate interpretation of drone photographs portrayed on a screen and that the special command investigation, initiated ten months after the incidents, did not conclude that there had been anything out of the ordinary in the strike. [endnotes omitted]

In his recantation, Goldstone excised all the evidence casting doubt on the new Israeli alibi. His tendentious depiction of the facts might be appropriate if he were Israel’s defense attorney, but it hardly befits the head of a mission that was mandated to ferret out the truth.

Goldstone justifies his about-face on the grounds that “we know a lot more today.” It is unclear, however, what, if anything, “a lot more” consists of. He points to the findings of Israeli military investigations. But what do “we know . . . today” about these in camera hearings except what Israel says about them? In fact, Israel has furnished virtually no information on which to independently assess the evidence adduced or the fairness of these proceedings. It is not even known how many investigations are complete and how many still ongoing.
¹⁶

Although he claims to “know a lot more,” and bases his recantation on this “a lot more,” neither Goldstone nor anyone else could have independently assessed any of this purportedly new information before he recanted. Even in the three investigations that resulted in criminal indictments, the proceedings were often inaccessible to the public (apart from the indicted soldiers’ supporters) and full transcripts of the proceedings were not made publicly available.
¹⁷
It’s certain, however, that no information coming out of these criminal indictments could have caused Goldstone to
reverse
himself; if anything, they buttressed his original Report.

The key example of revelatory new information Goldstone cites is the drone image. The misreading of it, Israel alleges (and Goldstone tentatively assents), caused an officer to mistakenly target an extended family of civilians. If, as humanitarian and human rights organizations declared right after the al-Samouni killings, it was one of the “gravest” and “most shocking” incidents
¹⁸
of the Israeli assault, and if, as Goldstone said, the al-Samouni killings were “the single most serious incident” in his Report, then the wonder is that Israel did not rush to restore its bruised reputation after Cast Lead but instead waited
22 months
before coming forth with so simple an explanation. To defend itself against Goldstone’s findings, Israel disseminated numerous aerial photographs taken during the Gaza assault. Why has Israel still not made publicly available this drone image that allegedly exonerates it of criminal culpability for the most egregious incident of which it was accused? It is also cause for wonder why Goldstone credits this new Israeli “evidence” sight unseen, yet ignores genuinely new evidence revealed by Israeli journalist Amira Hass in
Haaretz
after his Report’s publication: that before the attack—the civilian deaths of which allegedly surprised the Givati brigade commander who ordered it—“a Givati force set up outposts and bases in at least six houses in the Samouni compound.”
¹⁹
Didn’t the Givati commander check with these soldiers on the ground before launching the murderous attack, to ascertain that they were out of harm’s way? Didn’t he ask them whether they had observed men carrying rocket launchers, and didn’t they reply no?

Israel might be able to furnish plausible answers in its defense. But Goldstone does not even bother to pose these obvious questions because “we know . . . today”—Israel said so—it was just a simple mistake. After publication of the Goldstone Report, Israeli authorities had a ready-made, if evidence-free, explanation not just for the al-Samouni killings but also for many of the other documented war crimes. They alleged that the al-Bader flour mill was destroyed “in order to neutralize immediate threats to IDF forces”;
²⁰
that the Sawafeary chicken farm had been destroyed “for reasons of military necessity”;
²¹
and that the al-Maqadmah mosque was targeted because “two terrorist operatives [were] standing near the entrance.”
²²
Do “we know . . . today” that the copious evidence of war crimes assembled in the Goldstone Report and thousands of pages of other human rights reports was all wrong just because Israel says so? Did we also “know” during Cast Lead that Israel wasn’t using white phosphorus because it emphatically denied such use?

The only other scrap of novel information Goldstone references in his recantation is a revised casualty figure belatedly announced by a Hamas official. On the basis of this new reckoning, Goldstone observes, the number of Hamas combatants killed during Cast Lead “turned out to be similar” to the official Israeli figure. The upshot is, Hamas’s figure appeared to confirm Israel’s contention that combatants, not civilians, comprised the majority of Gazans killed during the invasion. But then Goldstone notes parenthetically that Hamas “may have reason to inflate” its figure. So why does he credit it?

To prove that it defeated Israel on the battlefield, Hamas originally alleged that only 48 of its fighters had been killed. After the full breadth of Israel’s destruction became apparent and the claims of a battlefield victory rang hollow, and in the face of accusations that the people of Gaza “had paid the price” of its reckless decisions, Hamas abruptly upped the figure by several hundred in order to show that it, too, had suffered major losses.
²³
As none other than Goldstone himself put it at Stanford just two months before his recantation, the new Hamas figure “was intended to bolster the reputation of Hamas with the people of Gaza.”
²⁴
Whereas Goldstone now defers to this politically inflated Hamas figure, the Goldstone Report relied on numbers furnished by respected Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations, each of which independently and meticulously investigated the aggregate and civilian/combatant breakdown of those killed. Disputing Israel’s claim that only 300 Gazan civilians were killed,
²⁵
these human rights organizations put the figure at some 800–1,200
²⁶
and also demonstrated that Israeli figures lacked credibility.
²⁷
Even the largely apologetic US Department of State
2009 Human Rights Report
put the number of dead “at close to 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 1,000 civilians.”
²⁸
But because a politically manipulated Israeli figure chimes with a politically manipulated Hamas figure, Goldstone discards the much larger figure for Palestinian civilian deaths documented by human rights organizations and even validated by the US State Department.

In his recantation, Goldstone avows that he is “confident” Israeli military investigations will bring those guilty of wrongdoing to justice. He goes on to assert that Israel has already “done this to a significant degree.” In fact, in this instance we
do
have new data since publication of the Goldstone Report but, alas, they hardly redeem his newfound faith. In the course of Cast Lead, Israel damaged or destroyed “everything in its way,” including 280 schools and kindergartens, 1,500 factories and workshops, electrical, water and sewage installations, 190 greenhouse complexes, 80 percent of agricultural crops, and nearly one-fifth of cultivated land. Whole neighborhoods were laid waste; fully 600,000 tons of rubble were left behind after Israel withdrew. More than two years later, the only penalty Israel has imposed for unlawful property destruction was some disciplinary measure penalizing one soldier.
²⁹
Yet Goldstone is now not only “confident” that Israeli wrongdoers will be punished, but also asserts that Israel has already “done this to a significant degree.”

Beyond killing 1,400 Palestinians (including more than 300 children) and the massive destruction it inflicted on civilian infrastructure, Israel damaged or destroyed 29 ambulances, almost half of Gaza’s 122 health facilities (including 15 hospitals), and 45 mosques. It also—in the words of Human Rights Watch—“repeatedly exploded white phosphorus munitions in the air over populated areas, killing and injuring civilians, and damaging civilian structures, including a school, a market, a humanitarian aid warehouse and a hospital.”
³⁰
Both the Goldstone Report and human rights organizations concluded that much of this death and destruction would constitute war crimes. More than two years later, the only Israeli soldier who did jail time for criminal conduct served seven months after being convicted of credit card theft. Yet Goldstone is now not only “confident” that Israeli wrongdoers will be punished, but also asserts that Israel has already “done this to a significant degree.”

To be sure, Israel did express remorse at what happened in Gaza. “I am ashamed of the soldier,” Information Minister Yuli Edelstein declared, “who stole some credit cards.”
³¹
After this wondrous show of contrition, how could Goldstone not be “confident” of Israel’s resolve to punish wrongdoers?

In his recantation, Goldstone can barely contain his loathing and contempt for Hamas. He says that, unlike in Israel’s case, Hamas’s criminal intent “goes without saying—its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.” The Goldstone Report had reached this conclusion on the basis of a couple of statements by Hamas leaders combined with Hamas’s actual targeting of these civilian areas. It is unclear, however, why comparable statements by Israeli officials combined with Israel’s purposeful and indiscriminate targeting of civilian areas in Gaza no longer prove Israel’s criminal guilt. In fact, judging by his Report’s findings, none of which Goldstone repudiates, the case against Israel was incontrovertible. If, as Israel asserted and investigators found, it possessed fine “grid maps” of Gaza and an “intelligence gathering capacity” that “remained extremely effective”; and if it made extensive use of state-of-the-art precision weaponry; and if 99 percent of the Israeli Air Force’s combat missions hit targets accurately; and if it only once targeted a building erroneously: then, as the Goldstone Report logically concluded, the massive destruction Israel inflicted on Gaza’s civilian infrastructure must have “resulted from deliberate planning and policy decisions throughout the chain of command, down to the standard operating procedures and instructions given to the troops on the ground.”
³²

It has “done nothing,” Goldstone further chastises Hamas, to investigate the criminal conduct of Gazans during the Israeli invasion. Hamas attacks killed three Israeli civilians and nearly destroyed one civilian home. The Israeli assault on Gaza killed as many as 1,200 civilians and nearly or totally destroyed more than 6,000 civilian homes. Hamas did not sentence anyone to prison for criminal misconduct, according to Goldstone, whereas Israel sentenced one soldier to seven months prison time for stealing a credit card.
³³
Isn’t it blazingly obvious how much eviler Hamas is?

In his recantation, Goldstone declares that his goal is to apply evenhandedly the laws of war to state and non-state actors. It is unlikely however that this admirable objective will be advanced by his double standards. Goldstone now rues his “unrealistic” hope that Hamas would have investigated itself. Meanwhile, his detractors heap ridicule on his past naiveté:
How could a terrorist organization like Hamas have possibly investigated itself?
Only civilized countries like Israel are capable of such self-scrutiny. Indeed, Israel’s judicial record precisely quantifies its capacity in this regard. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem found that, in the decade following the outbreak of the first intifada, 1,300 Palestinians had been killed yet only 19 Israeli soldiers were convicted of homicide, while the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din found that, although thousands of Palestinian civilians were killed during the second intifada, only five Israeli soldiers were held criminally liable and not a single Israeli soldier was convicted on a murder or manslaughter charge.
³⁴