{"id":6054,"date":"2011-04-15T12:55:42","date_gmt":"2011-04-15T08:55:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=6054"},"modified":"2011-04-17T18:22:39","modified_gmt":"2011-04-17T14:22:39","slug":"disgraceful-the-only-proper-term-for-goldstones-moral-collapse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-politics-analysis\/disgraceful-the-only-proper-term-for-goldstones-moral-collapse\/","title":{"rendered":"“Disgraceful”: The Term for Goldstone’s Moral Collapse"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Shocking is not a sufficient term to describe Justice Richard Goldstone\u2019s decision to recant parts of the 2009 report on alleged war crimes in Gaza.<\/p>\n

The document, known as the Goldstone Report, was compiled after a thorough\u00a0investigation led by the South African judge and three other well-regarded\u00a0investigators. 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.<\/p>\n

Goldstone is both Jewish and Zionist. His love for Israel has been widely and\u00a0affectionately 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.<\/p>\n

After 18 months of what seemed a wholly personal introspection, accompanied by an\u00a0endless campaign of pressure and intimidation by Zionist and pro-Israel Jewish groups from all over the world, the man finally surrendered.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a\u00a0different document,\u201d he wrote in the Washington Post on April 1. But what did\u00a0Goldstone learn anew since he issued his 575-page report in September 2009?<\/p>\n

The supposed basis of Goldstone\u2019s rethink is a follow-up report issued by a UN\u00a0committee chaired by retired New York Judge Mary McGowan Davis. Her report was not a reinvestigation of Israel\u2019s \u2014\u00a0 and Hamas\u2019 \u2014 alleged war crimes in Gaza, but a follow up on the Goldstone Commission\u2019s 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,\u00a0\u201cOur work was completely separate from (Goldstone\u2019s) work.\u201d She further stated, \u201cOur mandate was to take his report as given and start from there.\u201d<\/p>\n

So how did a probe that used Goldstone\u2019s findings as a starting point go on to\u00a0inspire such a major refutation from one of the authors of the original report?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

McGowan Davis\u2019 report merely acknowledged that Israel has carried out an\u00a0investigation into a possible \u201coperational misconduct\u201d in what is largely known outside Israel as the Gaza massacre. The UN follow-up report recognized the alleged 400 investigations, but didn\u2019t bear out their validity. These secret inquiries\u00a0actually led to little in terms of disciplinary action.<\/p>\n

More, the UN team of experts claimed there was \u201cno indication that Israel has opened investigations into the actions of those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw Operation Cast Lead.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u00a0investigation 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, \u201cif I had known then what I know now\u201d? And could this added knowledge about Israel\u2019s secret \u2014\u00a0 and largely farcical \u2014 investigations be enough to draw such extreme conclusions such as \u201ccivilians were not intentionally\u00a0targeted as a matter of policy\u201d?<\/p>\n

This was the thrust of the Israeli argument, which attempted to reduce a persistent policy predicated on collective punishment \u2014\u00a0 one that used controversial and outright illegal weapons against civilians \u2014\u00a0 to the injudiciousness of individual\u00a0soldiers. Goldstone\u2019s calculated retraction is an adoption of \u201cthe 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,\u201d according to George Bisharat, professor at the Hastings College of the Law (as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, April 7). Bisharat added, \u201cYet the original report never accused Israel of widespread deliberate attacks on civilians, and thus Goldstone\u00a0retracted a claim that had never been made. Most of its essential findings remain unchallenged.\u201d<\/p>\n

John Dugard, professor of law at the University of Pretoria and former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territory agrees. \u201cRichard 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dugard, well known for his principled stances in the past, is also known for his moral consistency. \u201cIt is sad that this champion of accountability and international criminal justice should abandon the cause in such an ill-considered but nevertheless\u00a0extremely harmful op-ed,\u201d he wrote in the New Statesman on April 6.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, Israeli leaders are gloating. \u201cEverything we said was proved true,\u201d declared Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in response to Goldstone\u2019s moral collapse. The New York Times reported on April 5 that Goldstone agreed to visit Israel in July during a telephone call with Israel\u2019s Interior Minister Eli Yishai. \u201cI will be happy to come,\u201d Yishai quoted Goldstone as saying. \u201cI always have love for the State of Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fact is, Goldstone\u2019s repudiations of some of his commission\u2019s findings clearly\u00a0have 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\u2019s rethink will represent the backbone of Israel\u2019s rationale in its future attacks on Gaza. Goldstone, once regarded as an \u201cevil, evil man\u201d by prominent Israel apologist in the US, will become the selling point of Israel\u2019s\u00a0future war crimes.<\/p>\n

If the killing of over 1,400 Palestinians is not a \u201cmatter of policy\u201d, and Hamas\u2019\u00a0killing of four Israelis is \u201cintentional\u201d \u2014\u00a0 as claimed by Goldstone \u2014\u00a0 then the sky is the limit for Israel\u2019s war machine.<\/p>\n

Indeed, \u201cshocking\u201d is not the right term. \u201cDisgraceful\u201d may be more fitting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RAMZY BAROUD: Eighteen months of relentless pressure by the Israeli authorities eventually bore fruit with the publication of Goldstone’s now notorious op-ed. Cheers can only be heard in Tel Aviv. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":6056,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82,60],"tags":[2275,6115,278,227,5333,18311,18309,1171,18297,2204,2420,2549,2465,6119,2278,2627,6108,387,18302],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6054"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6054\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}