On Friday, South African judge Richard Goldstone offered a
half-hearted apology for and retraction of his 2009 “Goldstone
Report,” a particularly damaging and libelous document accusing
Israel of war crimes and “crimes against humanity” during
Operation Cast
Lead in late 2008.
Goldstone’s “oops,” given in a
Washington Post op-ed,
blames his jumping to the worst possible — and obviously wrong —
conclusions on “Israel’s lack of cooperation with our
investigation.” Had any nation but Israel been treated this way,
the international community would have rightly castigated Goldstone
and his report as propaganda rather than investigation.
As I reported in
2009, the Goldstone Report “(was) not just more of
the same from the U.N.: it’s much worse.” It accused Israel of
deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians as a matter of policy
despite this testimony by Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of
British Forces in Afghanistan:
During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defense Forces did
more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any
other army in the history of warfare.
Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately
positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the
civilian population…
The truth is that the IDF took extraordinary measures to
give Gaza civilians notice of targeted areas, dropping over 2
million leaflets, and making over 100,000 phone calls. Many
missions that could have taken out Hamas military capability were
aborted to prevent civilian casualties. During the conflict, the
IDF allowed huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza. To deliver
aid virtually into your enemy’s hands is, to the military
tactician, normally quite unthinkable. But the IDF took on those
risks.
Goldstone nevertheless released a 575-page report creating
a UN-sanctioned moral equivalence between the terrorist murder of
civilians by Hamas and Israel’s defensive response based on what
Goldstone now calls “potential war crimes” and
“possibly crimes against humanity” (emphasis
mine.) Israeli columnist Assaf
Wohl said that Goldstone “constituted the kosher
stamp for this blood libel.”
What should have been a forgiveness-begging mea culpa
by Goldstone is instead a weak attempt to blame the victim and
justify behavior that a judge in particular should have avoided:
“Although the Israeli evidence that has emerged since publication
of our report doesn’t negate the tragic loss of civilian life, I
regret that our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence
explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza
were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our
findings about intentionality and war crimes.”
In other words, Goldstone was Israel’s judge, jury, and
co-executioner (along with the Islamofascists in Hamas) because
Israel’s unwillingness to prove to him that they were innocent of
intentionally targeting civilians. Israel was guilty until proven
innocent.
But why should Israel have wasted its time “cooperating”
with the UNHRC, an organization which, according to
Eye on the UN, has since its founding in
2006 issued 38 “resolutions” condemning Israel, one short of half
of all the resolutions ever issued by that body? In 2009, the year
during which the Goldstone Report was being “researched” (UN-speak
for “justifying pre-determined conclusions without evidence”),
members of the UN Human Rights Council included Pakistan, Algeria,
Cuba and Saudi Arabia. Israel was on solid ground to assume that
nothing it would have said would have made any difference to a
group looking for confirmation, not information.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a
cabinet meeting on Sunday, responded to
Goldstone’s non-apology:
There are very few instances in
which those who disseminate libels retract their
libel.
This happened in the case of the Goldstone Report. Goldstone himself said that all of the
things that we have been saying all along are correct — that Israel never intentionally fired at civilians
and that our inquiries operated according to the highest
international standards. Of course, this
is in complete contrast to Hamas, which intentionally attacked and
murdered civilians and, naturally, never carried out any sort of
inquiry. This leads us to call for the immediate cancellation of
the Goldstone Report.
I have asked National Security
Council Chairman Yaakov Amidror to convene a special staff meeting
of people from the Foreign, Justice and Defense ministries to
formulate practical and public diplomacy measures, in order to
reverse and minimize the great damage that has been done by this
campaign of denigration against the State of Israel. I expect their
recommendations in the coming days. We will act on the public
diplomacy front, and on other fronts, with the international
community and the UN in order to demand the justice that is due to
Israel.
Not surprisingly, the Palestinian reaction has been a
conspiracy theory-fueled anger. Ynet
News reports the Palestinian Intelligence Service
chief saying “If Goldstone went back on his word, it was most
probably as a result of heavy pressure from Israel, otherwise he
would not have done so,” reflecting similar views among Hamas and
Fatah spokesmen.
Another anti-Israel website expresses
the obvious Arab reaction when it observes that “The Washington
Post is not the United Nations.” On this point, at least, who can
disagree? It’s something Judge Goldstone should have kept in mind
before releasing his report; perhaps it too should have been
printed in the Washington Post.
Israel and its few allies — it’s hard to say whether the
U.S. is actually an ally under the Obama Administration — will do
what they can, but it will be very difficult to un-ring this bell.
As the
New York Times reported
on Sunday, the possibility of a September UN vote recognizing
“the State of Palestine as a member whose territory includes all of
the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem” puts Israel in an
existential political vise.
The Goldstone Report eliminated even a pretense of support
for Israel from many European countries, allowing the Palestinians
to feel free to refuse any Israeli peace offer. With the impending
UN vote, the Palestinians believe they can have their land and eat
the Jews too. Proposing any peace treaty to the Palestinians now
would be a fool’s errand on the part of the Israelis. Hamas and
Fatah will refuse to agree to anything, but will use a proposal as
the baseline from which to begin a “negotiation” that will feel
like the world versus Israel.
Thus, while opponents of Israel and their useful idiots
like Judge Goldstone are calling for Israel to make a “grand
gesture” of their most-generous-possible peace offer, that is
exactly what Israel must not do, at least not until the issue of a
UN vote on membership for a Palestinian State is
settled.
This is not an ordinary negotiation, not a question of
reducing travel barriers or determining whether a tariff should be
5% or 7%. This “negotiation” will be the next tactical step in the
Palestinian and wider Arab desire for the destruction of the Jewish
state. It will have only one honest participant, namely Israel,
which is no basis for a fair or sustainable outcome.
Perhaps — just perhaps — a real negotiation might have
been possible in 2009 or early 2010. But the existence of
Goldstone’s “investigation” followed by his libelous “report” gave
the Palestinians a sense of inevitable victory, especially when
even the UK abstained from voting on the report rather than vote
against it, a move that former UN Ambassador John Bolton called
“simultaneously inexplicable and gutless.”
Judge Goldstone’s retraction of his report’s baseless
condemnation of Israel, while welcome, is too little, too late. The
judge and all who supported his pre-judgment of Israel and the
moral equivalence he created between terrorists attacking civilians
and a democratic nation defending itself have blood on their hands.
Unfortunately, the damage they have done to the prospects for a
real Mideast peace will be long lasting, perhaps permanent; they’ll
be washing blood off their hands for years to come.
