Goldstone – A Broken Man

NOVANEWS

The Weakness and Shame of Goldstone
A lot of hot air, some of which is below, has been devoted to why Richard Goldstone has effectively ditched his own report on Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Omar Barghouti, of PACBI, the Palestinian and Academic Boycott Israel group, sent me and others an e-mail entitled ‘Dr Goldstone and Mr Hide’ (the misspelling was deliberate). Omar wrote detailing how the original report has been biased against the Palestinians:
I have had an exchange with Omar Barghouti of PACBI, the Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. I hope Omar won’t mind me reproducing the correspondence. Omar argument is that it is all really because of Goldstone’s Zionist politics. Goldstone should never have been appointed, given he was a Zionist.
Omar’s rejects my suggestion that Goldstone’s Zionist politics are not the main explanation for his reversal so much as the pressure that was put upon him, including his family. It reached the stage where he at one stagecouldn’t attend the bar mitzvah of his nephew. This together with his establishment politics are the explanation.
In a sense it is a chicken and egg situation because of course if Goldstone hadn’t been a Zionist or pro-imperialist he wouldn’t have been appointed in the first place.
But there seems little point in indulging in a textual analysis of the Goldstone Report. Hamas, which originally rejected the Report, woke up and then accepted it because they knew that the criticisms of them were minor in comparison with the thrust of the Report. Likewise the Palestinian Authority was castigated because it withdrew a resolution endorsing Goldstone. It seems like sour grapes to now go back over the Goldstone Report and say ‘we told you so’. This is hindsight and not very useful. It is not the inadequacies of the Goldstone Report or indeed the political inadequacies of Goldstone himself that is the explanation. It is the vicious concerted campaign by Israel’s propagandists and hasbara merchants, not least against Goldstone himself, a man who is reported below as being broken by the affair, given that the Zionist swine didn’t attack him politically but via his family, friends and personal associations.
Tony Greenstein

Omar

I never said that Goldstone’s Zionist or in my view his pro-imperialist politics had nothing to do with his change of position. Clearly they all feed into each other.

However Goldstone was subject to pressure of a far greater kind than Dugard and was attacked personally in the way Zionists do – family etc.
Goldstone himself is a weak, pliable man always willing to do the bidding of the most powerful. He did that in South Africa under apartheid and when he saw who the new masters were had a new awakening.
I think what is important and explains his change is not his Zionist politics, because he always had them, but the pressure applied.
Mao is probably not the best person to quote in view of his own record on these matters. Of course if Goldstone was an anti-imperialist none of this would have happened but then he wouldn’t have been appointed in the first place.
Tony
I do mention the pressure clearly. I disagree with you though that his Zionism had nothing to do with this. All the pressure in the world could not prevent John Dugard or Richard Falk from reversing their excellent and far more radical positions on Israel. As Mao said, a chicken lying over a stone will not produce a chick–you need the egg to start with.
Omar
On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 6:17 AM, tony greenstein wrote:
I think this is the wrong approach to Goldstone. What is more important is not the flaws in the original report of Goldstone’s Zionist leanings, which we knew already, but why he has retracted. And that has nothing to do with Gaza and what happened there but the pressure on Goldstone.
tony

‘Of all the biased procedures followed and conclusions reached in the Report, I shall cite just one that should make any moral person’s blood boil (page 13):

“37. …The Mission acknowledges the significant efforts made by Israel to issue warnings through telephone calls, leaflets and radio broadcasts and accepts that in some cases, particularly when the warnings were sufficiently specific, they encouraged residents to leave an area and get out of harms way. However, the Mission also notes factors that significantly undermined the effectiveness of the warnings issued. These include the lack of specificity and thus credibility of many pre-recorded phone messages and leaflets. The credibility of instructions to move to city centres for safety was also diminished by the fact that the city centres themselves had been the subject of intense attacks during the air phase of the military operations. The Mission also examined the practice of dropping lighter explosives on roofs (so-called “roof knocking”). It concludes that this technique is not effective as a warning and constitutes a form of attack against the civilians inhabiting the building. Finally, the Mission stresses that the fact that a warning was issued does not relieve a commander and his subordinates of taking all other feasible measures to distinguish between civilians and combatants.”
Imagine if such “early warning” techniques of “roof knocking” were to be used against Israeli civilian buildings to “encourage” residents to leave for a safer place before bombing the building! Would Goldstone have described that as “not effective” or merely a “form of attack against the civilians inhabiting the building”?! Given the fact that the Report itself acknowledges that civilians had NO REFUGE to escape to and that willful killings were actually committed by Israeli forces against many Palestinian civilians whose buildings were bombed over their heads because of their failure to heed the Israeli army’s humane “roof knocking,” is this the most accurate and legally precise description of this crime that such a luminous judge can issue?
By now, and under sustained, vicious and inhumane pressure by Israel and its lobby groups in South Africa, the US and elsewhere, Goldstone’s ideological commitment to Israel and Zionism has won over his relatively professional commitment, making him lose any veneer of respectability or credibility. His argument in the Washington Post op-ed below takes the Israeli investigation’s claims as truths, more or less, ignoring the conclusion that he and his colleagues who produced the Report have reached regarding Israel’s justice system. Referring to “structural flaws” in the so-called Israeli justice system, the Goldstone report concluded that Israel cannot be trusted to administer justice according to international standards [Goldstone Report, paragraph 1756] Here’s the exact clause:
1756. After reviewing Israel’s system of investigation and prosecution of serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law, in particular of suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity, the Mission found major structural flaws that in its view make the system inconsistent with international standards. With military “operational debriefings” at the core of the system, there is the absence of any effective and impartial investigation mechanism and victims of such alleged violations are deprived of any effective or prompt remedy. Furthermore, such investigations being internal to the Israeli military authority, do not comply with international standards of independence and impartiality. The Mission believes that the few investigations conducted by the Israeli authorities on alleged serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law and, in particular, alleged war crimes, in the context of the military operations in Gaza between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, are affected by the defects in the system, have been unduly delayed despite the gravity of the allegations, and, therefore, lack the required credibility and conformity with international standards. The Mission is concerned that investigations of relatively less serious violations that the GOI claims to be investigating have also been unduly protracted.
Has any of that changed or only its author’s commitment to the truth?’
To his credit, from the very beginning, Goldstone was reluctant to take this UN job, arguing that the issues involved in this investigation were “deeply charged and politically loaded.” Indeed! Someone should have heeded his advice!
Goldstone was from the start the wrong choice for leading this investigation, given his political and ideological allegiance to Israel. Imagine, for instance, if the UN were to select an overt supporter of Iran — who also happens to be a Shiite Muslim — to head a UN investigation of allegations of Iranian violations of international law in crushing demonstrations last year!
Furthermore, the Goldstone report added little new evidence to what had already been very well documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN officials on the ground, leading Palestinian human rights organizations and experienced journalists. As UN Special Rapporteur and leading international law expert Prof. Richard Falk writes:
“Perhaps, most damning of all the material available before the Goldstone report was the publication of a document entitled ‘Breaking the Silence,’ containing commentaries by 30 members of the Israeli army who had taken part in Operation Cast Lead (the Israeli official name for the Gaza war). These soldiers spoke movingly about the loose rules of engagement issued by their commanders that help explain why so little care was taken to avoid civilian casualties. The sense emerges from the testimony of these Israeli soldiers who were in no sense critical of Israel or even of the Gaza war as such, that Israeli policy emerged out of a combination of efforts ‘to teach the people of Gaza a lesson for their support of Hamas’ and to keep Israeli military casualties as close to zero as possible even if meant massive death and destruction for innocent Palestinians.”
Despite welcoming the report and praising its many positives and its authors’ uprightness at the time of its issuance, Falk accurately describes Goldstone as “deeply sympathetic to Israel” and the Report as giving Israel “the benefit of the doubt”in key areas. He presents in the article cited above devastating evidence of Goldstone’s political bias:
“Arguably, [the Report] was more sensitive to Israel’s contentions that Hamas was guilty of war crimes by firing rockets into its territory than earlier reports had been. And in many ways the Goldstone report endorses the misleading main line of the Israeli narrative by assuming that Israel was acting in self-defense against a terrorist adversary. The report does describe the success of the ceasefire with Hamas that had cut violence in southern Israel to very low levels, and attributes its disruption to Israel’s attack on 4 November 2008, but nowhere does it make the inference that would seem to follow, that the Israeli attacks were an instance of the international crime of aggression. Instead, the report focuses its criticism on Israel’s excessive and indiscriminate uses of force. …
… the report takes for granted the dubious proposition that Israel was entitled to act against Gaza in self-defense, thereby excluding inquiry into whether crimes against the peace in the form of aggression had taken place by the launching of the attack. In this respect, although the report takes notice of the temporary ceasefire that had cut the rocket fire directed at Israel practically to zero in the months preceding the attacks, it seems to avoid drawing any legal conclusions as to the bearing of this context in which the Gaza war was initiated. The report also ignores Hamas’ repeated efforts to extend the ceasefire indefinitely provided Israel lifted its unlawful blockade of Gaza. Israel disregarded this seemingly available diplomatic alternative to war to achieve security on its borders. Recourse to war, even if the facts were to justify self-defense, is according to international law, a last resort. By ignoring Israel’s initiation of a one-sided war the Goldstone report implicitly accepts the dubious central premise of Operation Cast Lead, and avoids making a finding of aggression.
Also disappointing was the failure of the report to comment upon the Israeli denial of a refugee option to the civilian population trapped in the tiny, crowded combat zone that constitutes the Gaza Strip. Israel closed all crossings during the period of the Gaza war, allowing only Gaza residents with foreign passports to leave. It is rare in modern warfare that civilians are not given the option to become refugees. Although there is no specific provision of the laws of war requiring a state at war to allow civilians to leave the combat zone, it seems like an elementary humanitarian requirement, and should at least have been mentioned either as part of customary international law or as a gap in the law that should be filled. The importance of this issue is reinforced by many accounts of the widespread post-traumatic stress experienced by the civilians in Gaza, especially children, who comprise 53 percent of the population. One might also notice that the report accords considerable attention to the one Israeli soldier held prisoner by Hamas in Gaza, recommending his release on humanitarian grounds, while making only a very general recommendation that Israel release some of the thousands of Palestinians being held under conditions of harsh detention, suggesting that children especially should be released.”
One can only conclude that the UN made a mistake by appointing Goldstone to lead this investigation, given his obvious and explicit predispositions and biases. It should fix it now, especially after this damaging, obviously political reversal, by commissioning a new, neutral judge or group of international law experts to investigate Goldstone’s pathetically weak attempt here to exonerate Israel despite the mass of evidence compiled condemning it.
Dr. Goldstone has turned into Mr. Hide, shamelessly attempting to retrospectively conceal and whitewash Israel’s war crimes, sacrificing any judicial or moral integrity he may have once had, all to appease Zionist groups that strove to excommunicate him, more or less. The blood of hundreds of Palestinians killed in Gaza, including hundreds of children, during the Israeli massacre is on Goldstone’s hands now, not just Israel’s. The Goldstone Report, as flawed and biased towards Israel as it is, will not go down to the dustbin of history; the credibility of and respect for its main author may, though.
Omar

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