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Israel
asks UN to dump Gaza war crimes report
Israel has
asked the United Nations to dump a damning report on its
much-criticised military operation in Gaza two years back after its
author regretted some of his conclusions.
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Shocking is not a sufficient term to
describe Justice Richard Goldstone’s decision to recant parts of
the 2009 report on alleged war crimes in Gaza.
The document, known as the Goldstone Report, was compiled after a
thorough investigation led by the South African judge and three
other well-regarded investigators. They documented 36 incidents
that occurred during the Israeli Operation Cast Lead, an
unprecedentedly violent attack against small, impoverished and
besieged Gaza. It resulted in the death of over 1,400
Palestinians, and the wounding of over 5,500.
Goldstone is both Jewish and Zionist. His love for Israel has been
widely and affectionately conveyed. In this particular case, he
seemed completely torn between his ideological and tribal position
and his commitment to justice and truth, as enshrined in the
mandate of the UN Human Rights Council.
After 18 months of what seemed a wholly personal introspection,
accompanied by an endless campaign of pressure and intimidation by
Zionist and pro-Israel Jewish groups from all over the world, the
man finally surrendered.
“If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would
have been a different document,” he wrote in the Washington Post
on April 1. But what did Goldstone learn anew since he issued his
575-page report in September 2009?
The supposed basis of Goldstone’s rethink is a follow-up report
issued by a UN committee chaired by retired New York Judge Mary
McGowan Davis. Her report was not a reinvestigation of Israel’s —
and Hamas’ — alleged war crimes in Gaza, but a follow up on the
Goldstone Commission’s findings, which urged the referral of the
matter to the International Criminal Court. McGowan Davis made
this distinction clear in a recent interview with the Israeli
Jerusalem Post. According to the post, she said, “Our work was
completely separate from (Goldstone’s) work.” She further stated,
“Our mandate was to take his report as given and start from
there.”
So how did a probe that used Goldstone’s findings as a starting
point go on to inspire such a major refutation from one of the
authors of the original report?
McGowan Davis’ report merely acknowledged that Israel has carried
out an investigation into a possible “operational misconduct” in
what is largely known outside Israel as the Gaza massacre. The UN
follow-up report recognized the alleged 400 investigations, but
didn’t bear out their validity. These secret inquiries actually
led to little in terms of disciplinary action.
More, the UN team of experts claimed there was “no indication that
Israel has opened investigations into the actions of those who
designed, planned, ordered and oversaw Operation Cast Lead.”
In fact, Israel is known for investigating itself, and also for
almost always finding everyone but its own leadership at fault.
Israeli investigations are an obvious mockery of justice. Most of
their findings, like those that followed another investigation of
the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006, merely chastised the failure
to win the war and to explain Israeli action to the world. They
said little about looking into the death and wounding of innocent
civilians. Is this what Goldstone meant when he used the words,
“if I had known then what I know now”? And could this added
knowledge about Israel’s secret — and largely farcical —
investigations be enough to draw such extreme conclusions such as
“civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy”?
This was the trust of the Israeli argument, which attempted to
reduce a persistent policy predicated on collective punishment —
one that used controversial and outright illegal weapons against
civilians — to the injudiciousness of individual soldiers.
Goldstone’s calculated retraction is an adoption of “the Israeli
position that any misdeeds during the Gaza assault were caused by
individual deviants, not by policies or rules of engagement
ordered by military leaders,” according to George Bisharat,
professor at the Hastings College of the Law (as reported by the
San Francisco Chronicle, April 7). Bisharat added, “Yet the
original report never accused Israel of widespread deliberate
attacks on civilians, and thus Goldstone retracted a claim that
had never been made. Most of its essential findings remain
unchallenged.”
John Dugard, professor of law at the University of Pretoria and
former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the occupied
Palestinian territory agrees. “Richard Goldstone is a former judge
and he knows full well that a fact-finding report by four persons,
of whom he was only one, like the judgment of a court of law,
cannot be changed by the subsequent reflections of a single member
of the committee.”
Dugard, well known for his principled stances in the past, is also
known for his moral consistency. “It is sad that this champion of
accountability and international criminal justice should abandon
the cause in such an ill-considered but nevertheless extremely
harmful op-ed,” he wrote in the New Statesman on April 6.
Unsurprisingly, Israeli leaders are gloating. “Everything we said
was proved true,” declared Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in
response to Goldstone’s moral collapse. The New York Times
reported on April 5 that Goldstone agreed to visit Israel in July
during a telephone call with Israel’s Interior Minister Eli Yishai.
“I will be happy to come,” Yishai quoted Goldstone as saying. “I
always have love for the State of Israel.”
The fact is, Goldstone’s repudiations of some of his commission’s
findings clearly have no legal validity. They are personally, and
in fact selfishly motivated, and they prove that political and
ideological affiliations are of greater weight for Goldstone than
human suffering and international law and justice. There is no
doubt, however, that Goldstone’s rethink will represent the
backbone of Israel’s rationale in its future attacks on Gaza.
Goldstone, once regarded as an “evil, evil man” by a prominent
Israel apologist in the US, will become the selling point of
Israel’s future war crimes.
If the killing of over 1,400 Palestinians is not a “matter of
policy”, and Hamas’ killing of four Israelis is “intentional” — as
claimed by Goldstone — then the sky is the limit for Israel’s war
machine.
Indeed, “shocking” is not the right term. “Disgraceful” may be
more fitting.
Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an
internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of
PalestineChronicle.com.
His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom
Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press, London), available on Amazon.com.
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