The Battered Judge…

THE basic issue raised by the Goldstone Report on Israel’s Cast Lead operation against Gaza is whether the investigators followed their judicial responsibilities.

Here are some of the responsibilities of a judge as outlined in the Code of Judicial Conduct:

A judge shall uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary

A judge shall avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all the judge’s activities

A judge shall perform the duties of office impartially and diligently

Despite complaints about the report and investigation chairman Judge Richard Goldstone, there has been no impartial evidence of the investigators’ failure to meet their responsibilities.

In fact, the investigation met the hardest test of impartiality: Goldstone reported evidence that was unfavourable to his personal interests as a Zionist.

Before the report by him was made public, Antony Lerman wrote in The Guardian that “despicable attacks” had been made on human rights organisations investigating Israel’s Gaza offensive

As most people following this saga know, Israel refused to co-operate with Goldstone’s investigators.

It refused to respond to letters from Human Rights Watch (HRW) and denied the Goldstone mission entry to Israel.

Furthermore, according to Lerman, Israel rubbished testimony from people in Gaza unless it supported Israel’s version of the offensive. It also allowed the Israeli army to investigate.

Despite Israel’s refusal to co-operate in the HRW investigation, Israelis and Jewish organisations in America couldn’t fault Goldstone enough.

Letters came from holocaust survivors bemoaning facts they claimed he ignored, such as the threat to Israel from “larger and larger rockets” allegedly arriving from Iran.

People using social networks such as Twitter and Facebook ignored Israel’s refusal to co-operate with the investigation and vented rage in non-stop temper tantrums.

It got so bad following the report’s release that Goldstone was called “an enemy of the Jewish people” and almost forced to miss his son’s bar mitzvah in South Africa.

After the story made international news, its main effect was to rally defenders of the one-sided report – and Goldstone was able to attend the bar mitzvah without Jewish protests.

His earlier investigations into violence in South Africa and willingness to criticise all sides led to him once being dubbed “perhaps the most trusted man, certainly the most trusted member of the white establishment” in South Africa.

Writing in the Baltimore Sun, Laila El Haddad recounts that Goldstone published an op-ed in the Washington Post reconsidering one of the allegations in the report: that Israel intentionally targeted Palestinian civilians during the assault.

She said his co-authors Hina Jilani, Christine Chinkin and Desmond Travers sharply disagreed with him in a statement issued in The Guardian on April 14.

“They stood by the report in its entirety, saying ‘there is no justification for any demand or expectation for reconsideration of the report as nothing of substance has appeared that would in any way change the context, findings or conclusions,” wrote El Haddad.

However, Israelis and their supporters have been celebrating Goldstone’s retraction of one bit of the original report as vociferously as those Israelis who danced on the roof of a van in New Jersey on 9/11 as the twin towers collapsed.

Unfortunately, Goldstone has been battered so badly that he felt compelled to retract one aspect of his report on which the Israelis refused to co-operate.

Shame on his biased critics.