Norman G. Finkelstein - Goldstone Recants: Richard Goldstone Renews Israels License to Kill

Norman G. Finkelstein

OR BOOKS
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2011 Norman G. Finkelstein

Published by OR Books, New York and London.

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First printing 2011

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Sections of this pamphlet have been reproduced from Norman G. Finkelsteins This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion , now published in a revised and expanded paperback by OR Books. For more information please go to www.orbooks.com.

The author wishes to thank Maren Hackmann for her assistance in preparing this pamphlet.

ON 1 APRIL 2011, in the pages of the Washington Post , Richard Goldstone dropped a bombshell.

He effectively disowned the massive evidence assembled in the report carrying his name that Israel had committed multiple war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in Gaza during its 2008-9 invasion.

Israel was jubilant. Everything that we said proved to be true, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu crowed. We always said that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is a moral army that acted according to international law, Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared. We had no doubt that the truth would come out eventually, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman proclaimed.

The Obama administration used the occasion of Goldstones recantation to affirm that Israel had not engaged in any war crimes during the Gaza assault while the U.S. Senate unanimously called on the United Nations to rescind the Goldstone Report.

Some commentators have endeavored to prove by parsing his words that Goldstone did not actually recant. While there are grounds for making this argument on a technical basis, such a rhetorical strategy will not wash.

Goldstone is a distinguished jurist. He knows how to use precise language. If he did not want to sever his connection with the Report he could simply have said I am not recanting my original report by which I still stand. He must have known exactly how his words would be spun and it is this falloutnot his parsed wordsthat we must now confront.

Goldstone has done terrible damage to the cause of truth and justice and the rule of law. He has poisoned Jewish-Palestinian relations, undermined the courageous work of Israeli dissenters andmost unforgivablyincreased the risk of another merciless IDF assault.

There has been much speculation on why Goldstone recanted. Was he blackmailed? Did he finally succumb to the relentless hate campaign directed against him? Did he decide to put his tribe ahead of truth?

What can be said with certainty, and what I will demonstrate below, is that Goldstone did not change his mind because the facts compelled him to reconsider his original findings .

IN APRIL 2009 the president of the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed a Fact-Finding Mission to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.

Richard Goldstone, former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, was named head of the Mission.

The Missions original mandate was to scrutinize only Israeli violations of human rights during the assault on Gaza, but Goldstone made his acceptance of the job conditional on broadening the mandate to include violations on all sides. The council president invited Goldstone to write the mandate himself, which Goldstone did and which the president then accepted. It was very difficult to refuse... a mandate that Id written for myself, Goldstone later observed.

Nonetheless Israel did not cooperate with the Mission on the grounds of its alleged bias.

In September 2009 the long-awaited report of the Goldstone Mission was released. It was a searing indictment not just of the Gaza invasion but also of the ongoing Israeli occupation.

The Goldstone Report found that much of the death and destruction Israel inflicted on the civilian population and infrastructure of Gaza was premeditated. The assault was said to be anchored in a military doctrine that views disproportionate destruction and creating maximum disruption in the lives of many people as a legitimate means to achieve military and political goals. The disproportionate destruction and violence against civilians were said to be part of a deliberate policy, as were the humiliation and dehumanization of the Palestinian population.

Although Israel justified the attack on grounds of self-defense against Hamas rocket attacks, the Goldstone Report pointed to a different motive. The invasion was aimed at punishing the Gaza population for its resilience and for its apparent support for Hamas, and possibly with the intent of forcing a change in such support.

The Report concluded that the Israeli assault on Gaza constituted a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.

It ticked off a lengthy list of war crimes that Israel committed such as willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly, and use of human shields.

It further found that Israeli actions that deprive Palestinians in the Gaza Strip of their means of sustenance, employment, housing and water, that deny their freedom of movement and their right to leave and enter their own country, that limit their access to courts of law and effective remedies... might justify a competent court finding that crimes against humanity have been committed.

The Goldstone Report pinned primary culpability for these criminal offenses on Israels political and military elites: The systematic and deliberate nature of the activities... leave the Mission in no doubt that responsibility lies in the first place with those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw the operations.

It also found that the fatalities, property damage, and psychological trauma resulting from Hamass indiscriminate and deliberate rocket attacks on Israels civilian population constituted war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity.

Because the Goldstone Mission (like human rights organizations) devoted a much smaller fraction of its findings to Hamas rocket attacks, critics accused it of bias. The accusation was valid, but its weight ran in the opposite direction. If one considers that the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths stood at more than 100:1 and of dwellings ravaged at more than 6000:1, then the proportion of the Goldstone Report given over to death and destruction caused by Hamas in Israel was much greater than the objective data would have warranted.