Monday, April 04, 2011

Goldstone redux

So Justice Richard Goldstone has retracted all the main accusations against Israel that he made in his Report in an article he authored in The Washington Post ("Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and War Crimes"). He has belatedly admitted that:
1. Israel did not deliberately target civilians
2. the IDF did not commit war crimes
3. his Report deliberately ignored the massive rocket attacks on Israel by Hamas from Gaza
4. Israel has investigated itself appropriately, while Hamas has not investigated itself at all
5. his Report as submitted to the UN Human Rights Council was biased and incomplete
This is a total reversal of the findings he alleged in his infamous and damaging Report of the IDF's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2008-9, and shows that everything that Israel and its supporters were saying was in fact the truth. By deliberately ignoring the causative factor of the rocket firings from Gaza into Israel the Report lacked credibility. And by accusing the IDFof war crimes when the evidence was based mainly on Arab eyewitnesses was clearly inadequate. As a jurist, Goldstone had destroyed his own claims of neutrality and as a Jew Goldstone had willingly allowed himself to be used as a figurehead of a document that was destined to be anti-Israel as a result of its origins in the Muslim-dominated HRC. In fact, at the time, Libya was a prominent member of the HRC!

Goldstone stated in his retraction that he wished Israel had in fact cooperated with the fact-finding aspect of the enquiry, so the results might not have been so bad, although it is a lame hope to expect that it would have made any difference to the outcome then. Only now, two years later, can he afford to say that. I am glad that Israel did not cooperate with an obviously biased system, that from the beginning ignored the actions of Hamas.

Why print his retraction now? Goldstone waited until the dust had settled on his Report to come clean. He probably expected to be rewarded by the UN with a plum position, since he is known to be an unprincipled self-promotor, but since that did not happen he probably decided to take the moral high-ground by admitting his guilt. PM Netanyahu called upon the UN to retract his Report and several Israeli and American leaders called on the UN to issue a formal document reflecting Goldstone's admissions.

Tremendous damage was done to Israel's credibility by this Report, mainly because a large number of liberal-minded westerners, including many Jews, were eager to grab at any thread that castigates Israel. After all, if the UN says it, it must be true, but in fact as we know, the opposite is the case. All UN documents and findings related to Israel are biased and untrue, and to persist in believing otherwise is massive self-delusion. The fact that a supposedly upright Jewish judge allowed himself to be used in this way in no way increased the intrinsic credibility of this false and harmful document. Now at least we can return to the status quo ante, where we are all aware that the IDF is known to be a moral army that avoids civilian casualties.

For the article see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reconsidering-the-goldstone-report-on-israel-and-war-crimes/2011/04/01/AFg111JC_story.html?wpisrc=emailtoafriend

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home