Despite some severe problems the Goldstone report is valuable for describing a pattern that clearly demonstrates IDF terrorism going back to Israel's 2006 rampage through Lebanon.
The Report's Good Side
Zionist subversives in Obama administration worked to deep six the report because after reading it only a Zionist could possibly deny that the IDF is a terrorist organization under US law.
[There is also the issue of the Arms Export Control Act, but in general Zionist subversives within government, Zionist intelligentsia outside government, and Zionist plutocrats have prevented open discussion of Israeli violations.]
US anti-terrorism law is quite clear when it comes to aiding and abetting, material aid, and conspiracy to aid terrorism. Practically all Israel advocates should be arrested forthwith, and their assets should also be seized in accord with current US practice as [Khaleej Times] US Charities Paying for Sending Aid to Palestinians describes.
Because Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey is clearly not applying US law to American Jews in the same way that he applies it to American Muslims, he is preventing enforcement of US law in time of war and should be arrested immediately for Seditious Conspiracy.
The Report's Bad Side
The problems with the report on Gaza result from Goldstone's Zionism.
His daughter discusses the softening of the report in Goldstone's daughter: My father's participation softened UN Gaza report.
As a liberal Zionist, Goldstone seems to be engaging in some form of the well-known Zionist hasbarah defense of Zionist barbarism and bloodthirstiness:
1. we rock (invented the transistor),
2. they don't (oppress women),
3. you suck (genocided Indians)
4. everybody sucks (worry about Tibetans while we slaughter Palestinians).
In this case, everybody sucks amounts to an attempt to create moral equivalence between the Israeli State and Hamas under the Geneva Conventions.
When Goldstone misapplies the Conventions to Hamas, he is providing an analysis according to Jewish Shyster Law and not according to International Law.
The Geneva Conventions apply to Israel because Israel is a state and a signatory. Hamas is a resistance movement. Nuremberg Law applies to partisans and members of the resistance. Nuremberg Law is more than clear in the findings of facts and decision of the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Israel stands with regard to Palestinians just Nazi Germany did with regard to all occupied territories including the Sudetenland, which was annexed to the Reich under international agreement. See the Note in Time for Anti-Zionist Tea Party.
Until the Zionist interlopers leave or negotiate an agreement with the resistance, all Zionists today just like German Nazis back then are legitimate targets for the resistance anywhere throughout the occupied lands, which today comprise Stolen Palestine (pre-1967 Israel) and Occupied Palestine (East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza).
To understand the Zionist mentality I recommend Claudia Koonz's The Nazi Conscience. It describes exactly the mindset that I saw in Israel and still see among American Jewish Zionists.
To understand Operation Cast Lead, I recommend Chapter 7 "Operation Barbarossa and the Onset of the Holocaust, June - December 1941" of The Origins of the Final Solution Solution, The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 - March 1942 by Christopher R. Browning.
This chapter in particular helps put the Goldstone Report in perspective and helps compensate for Goldstone's pettifogging.
By Nathan Guttman
Published September 23, 2009, issue of
October 02, 2009.
Israeli and American diplomats came to the United Nations not to praise the Goldstone Report, but to bury it. And unlike Marc Antony in his eulogy for Julius Caesar, they meant it.
As a result of their efforts, it appears all but certain that the report accusing Israel and the Palestinian faction Hamas of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity will not reach any binding international forums.
The report, released September 15, caused a huge initial international stir, not only because of its findings, the bulk of which focused on Israel, but also because of its ultimate recommendation: that the United Nations Security Council, which has binding power under international law, require Israel and Hamas, which controls Gaza, to conduct their own respective independent investigations of the evidence of human rights violations cited in the report. If they do not do so within six months, the report urged the Security Council to refer their cases to the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
But in the days following the release of Goldstone’s report, it became clear that in the arm-wrestling contest between international rights organizations and the established Israeli-American diplomatic bond, the latter wins easily.
The 574-page report, commissioned by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, was overseen by Judge Richard Goldstone, a widely respected South African jurist who served on his country’s highest court and went on to prosecute war crimes in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The report scrutinized the events of last winter’s Operation Cast Lead, in which Israel bombarded Gaza from the air and ground in response to the continued firing of rockets by Hamas militants at Israeli towns.
Estimates of Palestinian dead from the campaign range from 1,166 to 1,417. The number of non-combatants among them remains in sharp dispute, running from 300 (Israel’s) to 1,000 (Hamas). An estimated 4,000 Palestinian homes were destroyed. Thirteen Israelis were killed during the conflict.
Israel refused to cooperate in the investigation, citing the council’s one-sided condemnation of it in the resolution commissioning the report. It blocked Goldstone from entering Israel to pursue his probe, though Goldstone had secured the backing of the council’s president to expand his mandate to scrutinize Hamas, as well. The Goldstone Commission was thus unable to examine Israeli homes hit by the rockets. And it could not interview Israelis injured by them, but for a few who traveled to Geneva at the Human Rights Council’s expense to testify.
Although the report raised serious accusations against Hamas, the Palestinian faction ruling Gaza, Israel and its supporters condemned it as anti-Israel, citing its lengthier and more detailed accounts of alleged Israeli human rights violations and its use of the terms “war crimes” and “possible crimes against humanity” to describe Israeli actions. Jerusalem was especially worried about the report’s recommendation to refer the issue to the International Criminal Court if Israel refused to launch an independent investigation of its own.
The report’s defenders countered that Israel’s complaint was a case of a child murdering his parents, then seeking special consideration as an orphan. The scantier scrutiny of Hamas’s misdeeds was hardly surprising, they argued, given Israel’s decision to deny the investigators access to the scene of Hamas’s crimes, or to its victims.
Israel’s drive to counter the report began moments after Goldstone’s presentation of it. Israeli leaders took to the airways and blasted the report as biased. They also made reference to an earlier document prepared by the Israeli foreign ministry, which counters some of the points made by Goldstone.
On the diplomatic front, Israeli officials in Washington, New York and Jerusalem pressed Israel’s key goal with their American counterparts: to quarantine the report within the confines of the council and ensure that it is not picked up by other international forums. Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, was on an official Washington visit and met with Susan Rice, American ambassador to the U.N., and raised the issue with her, as well.
The argument that Israel presented to American officials and to diplomats from Russia and key European countries was designed to appeal to their own self-interest. The Goldstone report, Israeli officials asserted, carries a hidden danger for all countries participating in international military campaigns against terrorism. Supporters of Israel pointed out that the United States military, for one, has killed many civilians during its military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“This is a report that should worry every country fighting terror,” said Jonathan Peled, spokesman of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. “We need to make sure this report does not endanger the U.S. and other countries.”
Ayalon urged American Jewish leaders to take on the report. Most major Jewish groups issued statements condemning Goldstone’s findings and calling on the international community to look at the Israeli military’s inquiry into its Gaza operation. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee called the report “deeply flawed” and said that Goldstone’s investigation was rigged.
Key supporters of Israel in Congress also lashed out at the council. New York Democrat Gary Ackerman, chair of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, fumed that the report’s authors lived in a “self-righteous fantasyland.”
Some Israeli officials went after Goldstone. Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz denounced him as an “anti-Semite.”
“Just as a non-Jew can be anti-Semitic, a Jew can also be anti-Semitic and discriminate against our people and despise and hate our people,” he told the New York paper The Jewish Week.
Goldstone has a history of support for Israel that includes his current service on the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s board of governors.
But despite mounting pressure from Israel and its supporters in the United States, the administration took its time in making a clear statement on the report. A State Department spokesman initially said that because of the report’s length, he had no immediate comment.
This made some pro-Israel activists edgy. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said two days after the release of the findings that he was “shocked and distressed” that the United States had yet to come out unequivocally against the report.
But by September 18, three days after the report’s release, the State Department declared Goldstone’s findings unfair toward Israel — citing the lack of equal scrutiny stressed by others. Notably, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly did not challenge any of the report’s specific findings of human rights violations by Israel or Hamas.
“While the report makes overly sweeping conclusions of fact and law with respect to Israel, its conclusions regarding Hamas’s deplorable conduct and its failure to comply with international humanitarian law during the conflict are more general and tentative,” he said.
Kelly also made clear that the United States saw the Human Rights Council as the only venue for discussing Goldstone’s report. The administration has “very serious concerns” about attempts to take up the issue at other international bodies, he said.
Goldstone’s report was published just as the United States began its term as a member of the Human Rights Council. Administration officials said the Goldstone report demonstrated the need for the United States to sit on the council and make sure Israel is treated fairly.
While condemnation in the council is unavoidable, the U.S., which has veto power in the Security Council, can make clear it will not allow a resolution to pass. Israeli officials were confident that the U.S would easily prevent the issue from being raised at the Security Council.
Still, Jewish groups and pro-Israel activists stressed that it remains important to fight the Goldstone report in the public arena to ensure that its findings are not adopted as world public opinion.
That fear could only be reinforced by the assessment of international law expert Richard Falk, a Princeton University professor, strong critic of Israel and earlier U.N. appointee charged with investigating allegations of Israeli war crimes.
Falk cited the report’s likely impact on “the symbols of legitimacy, what I have called the legitimacy war” between Israel and the Palestinians.
“Increasingly,” he wrote on the website Mideast Online, “The Palestinians have been winning this second non-military war.”
Falk predicted the report would mean gains for the international movement to boycott Israel and would fray Israel’s Jewish support, as well. “The weight of the report will be felt by world public opinion,” he predicted.
Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com
===
Had Richard Goldstone not served as the head of the UN inquiry into the Gaza war, the accusations against Israel would have been harsher, Goldstone's daughter, Nicole, said in an interview conducted in Hebrew with Army Radio on Wednesday.
"My father took on this job because he thought he is doing the best thing for peace, for everyone, and also for Israel," Nicole Goldstone told Army Radio.
She added that her father wrestled with the decision to take on the task. "It wasn't easy [for him]," Nicole Goldstone said. "My father did not expect to see and hear what he saw and heard."
Nicole Goldstone, who currently lives in Canada with her family, spoke of her great love for Israel.
"Every time I dream of returning to the country or that my son will one day immigrate there," she told Army Radio.
"Israel is more important to me than anything. I'm not there at the moment, but my heart is always there."
Nicole Goldstone said she expects to host her father for the upcoming Rosh Hashanah holiday.
===
Illustration by Carlos Latuff
By Richard Falk*
"So why did the Israeli government boycott the commission? The real answer is quite simple: they knew full well that the commission, any commission, would have to reach the conclusions it did reach."Uri Avnery (Israeli peace activist, and former Knesset member), "On the Goldstone Report" 19 Sept 2009
Richard Goldstone, former judge of South Aftica's Constitutional Court, the first prosecutor at The Hague on behalf of the International Criminal Court for Former Yugoslavia, and anti-apartheid campaigner reports that he was most reluctant to take on the job of chairing the UN fact-finding mission charged with investigating allegations of war crimes committed by Israel and Hamas during the three week Gaza War of last winter. Goldstone explains that his reluctance was due to the issue being "deeply charged and politically loaded," and was overcome because he and his fellow commissioners were "professionals committed to an objective, fact-based investigation," adding that "above all, I accepted because I believe deeply in the rule of law and the laws of war," as well as the duty to protect civilians to the extent possible in combat zones. The four-person fact-finding mission was composed of widely respected and highly qualified individuals, including the distinguished international law scholar, Christine Chinkin, a professor at the London School of Economics. Undoubtedly adding complexity to Goldstone's decision is the fact that he is Jewish, with deep emotional and family ties to Israel and Zionism, bonds solidified by his long association with several organizations active in Israel.
Despite the impeccable credentials of the commission members, and the worldwide reputation of Richard Goldstone as a person of integrity and political balance, Israel refused cooperation from the outset. It did not even allow the UN undertaking to enter Israel or the Palestinian Territories, forcing reliance on the Egyptian government to facilitate entry at Rafah to Gaza. As Uri Avnery observes, however much Israel may attack the commission report as one-sided and unfair, the only plausible explanation of its refusal to cooperate with fact-finding and taking the opportunity to tell its side of the story was that it had nothing to tell that could hope to overcome the overwhelming evidence of the Israeli failure to carry out its attacks on Gaza last winter in accordance with the international law of war. No credible international commission could reach any set of conclusions other than those reached by the Goldstone Report on the central allegations.
In substantive respects the Goldstone Report adds nothing new. Its main contribution is to confirm widely reported and analyzed Israeli military practices during the Gaza War. There had been several reliable reports already issued, condemning Israel's tactics as violations of the laws of war and international humanitarian law, including by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a variety of respected Israeli human rights groups. Journalists and senior United Nations civil servants had reached similar conclusions. 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 thirty members of the Israel Defense Forces 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 explains why so little care was taken to avoid civilian casualties. The sense emerges from what these IDF 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 IDF casualties as close to zero as possible even if meant massive death and destruction for innocent Palestinians.
Given this background of a prior international consensus on the unlawfulness of Operation Cast Lead, we must first wonder why this massive report of 575 pages has been greeted with such alarm by Israel and given so much attention in the world media. It added little to what was previously known. Arguably, it 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 focuses its criticism on Israel's excessive and indiscriminate uses of force. It does this by examining the evidence surrounding a series of incidents involving attacks on civilians and non-military targets. The report also does draw attention to the unlawful blockade that has restricted the flow of food, fuel, and medical supplies to subsistence levels in Gaza before, during, and since Operation Cast Lead. Such a blockade is a flagrant instance of collective punishment, explicitly prohibited by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention setting forth the legal duties of an occupying power.
All along Israel had rejected international criticism of its conduct of military operations in the Gaza War, claiming that the IDF was the most moral fighting force on the face of the earth. The IDF conducted some nominal investigations of alleged unlawful behavior that consistently vindicated the military tactics relied upon and steadfastly promised to protect any Israeli military officer or political leader internationally accused of war crimes. In view of this extensive background of confirmed allegation and angry Israeli rejection, why has the Goldstone Report been treated in Tel Aviv as a bombshell that is deeply threatening to Israel's stature as a sovereign state? Israel's president, Shimon Peres, calling the report "a mockery of history" that "fails to distinguish the aggressor and a state exercising the right of self-defense," insisting that it "legitimizes terrorist activity, the pursuit of murder and death." More commonly Israel's zealous defenders condemned the report as one-sided, biased, reaching foregone conclusions, and emanating from the supposedly bastion of anti-Israeli attitudes at the UN's Human Rights Council. This line of response to any criticism of Israel's behavior in occupied Palestine, especially if it comes from the UN or human rights NGOs is to cry "foul play!" and avoid any real look at the substance of the charges. It is an example of what I call ‘the politics of deflection,' attempting to shift the attention of an audience away from the message to the messenger. The more damning the criticism, the more ferocious the response. From this perspective, the Goldstone Report obviously hit the bullsye!
Considered more carefully, there are some good reasons for Israel's panicked reaction to this damning report. First, it does come with the backing of an eminent international personality who cannot credibly be accused of anti-Israel bias, making it harder to deflect attention from the findings no matter how loud the screaming of ‘foul play.' Any fair reading of the report would show that it was balanced, was eminently mindful of Israel's arguments relating to security, and indeed gave Israel the benefit of the doubt on some key issues. Secondly, the unsurprising findings are coupled with strong recommendations that do go well beyond previous reports. Two are likely causing the Israeli leadership great worry: the report recommends strongly that if Israel and Hamas do not themselves within six months engage in an investigation and followup action meeting international standards of objectivity with respect to these violations of the law of war, then the Security Council should be brought into the picture, being encouraged to consider referring the whole issue of Israeli and Hamas accountability to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Even if Israel is spared this indignity by the diplomatic muscle of the United States, and possibly some European governments, the negative public relations implications of a failure to abide by this report could be severe.
Thirdly, whatever happens in the UN System, and at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, the weight of the report will be felt by world public opinion. Ever since the Gaza War the solidity of Jewish support for Israel has been fraying at the edges, and this will likely now fray much further. More globally, a very robust boycott and divestment movement was gaining momentum ever since the Gaza War, and the Goldstone Report can only lend added support to such initiatives. There is a growing sense around the world that the only chance for the Palestinians to achieve some kind of just peace depends on the outcome over the symbols of legitimacy, what I have called the Legitimacy War. Increasingly, the Palestinians have been winning this second non-military war. Such a war fought on a global political battlefield is what eventually and unexpectedly undermined the apartheid regime in South Africa, and has become much more threatening to the Israeli sense of security than has armed Palestinian resistance.
A fourth reason for Israeli worry stemming from the report, is the green light given to national courts throughout the world to enforce international criminal law against Israelis suspects should they travel abroad and be detained for prosecution or extradition in some third country. Such individuals could be charged with war crimes arising from their involvement in the Gaza War. The report in this way encourages somewhat controversial reliance on what is known among lawyers as ‘universal jurisdiction,' that is, the authority of courts in any country to detain for extradition or to prosecute individuals for violations of international criminal law regardless of where the alleged offenses took place. Reaction in the Israeli media reveals that Israeli citizens are already anxious about being apprehended during foreign travel. As one law commentator put it in the Israeli press, "From now on, not only soldiers should be careful when they travel abroad, but also ministers and legal advisers." It is well to recall that Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions calls on states throughout the world "to respect and ensure respect" for international humanitarian law "in all circumstances." Remembering the efforts in 1998 of several European courts to prosecute Augusto Pinochet for crimes committed while he was head of state in Chile, is a reminder that national courts can be used to prosecute political and military leaders for crimes committed elsewhere than in the territory of the prosecuting state.
Of course, Israel will fight back. It has already launched a media and diplomatic blitz designed to portray the report as so one-sided as to be unworthy of serious attention. The United States Government has already disappointingly appeared to endorse this view, and repudiate the central recommendation in the Goldstone Report that the Security Council be assigned the task of implementing its findings. The American Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, evidently told a closed session of the Security Council on September 16, just a day after the report was issued, that "[w]e have serious concerns about many recommendations in the report." Elaborating on this, Ambassador Rice indicated that the UN Human Rights Council, which has no implementing authority, is the only proper venue for any action to be taken on the basis of the report. The initial struggle will likely be whether to follow the recommendation of the report to have the Security Council refer the issues of accountability to the International Criminal Court, which could be blocked by a veto from the United States or other permanent members.
There are reasons to applaud the forthrightness and comprehensiveness of the report, its care, and scrupulous willingness to conclude that both Israel and Hamas seem responsible for behavior that appears to constitute war crimes, if not crimes against humanity. Although Israel has succeeded in having the issue of one-sidedness focus on fairness to Israel, there are also some reasons to insist that the report falls short of Palestinian hopes. For one thing, 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, the report takes no notice of the temporary ceasefire that had cut the rocket fire directed at Israel practically to zero in the months preceding the attacks, nor of Hamas' repeated efforts to extend the ceasefire indefinitely provided Israel lifted its unlawful blockade of Gaza. Further it was Israel that had seemed to provoke the breakdown of the ceasefire when it launched a lethal attack on Hamas militants in Gaza on November 4, 2008. Israel disregarded this seemingly available diplomatic alternative to war to achieve security on its borders. Recourse to war, even if the facts justify self-defense, is according to international law, a last resort. By ignoring Israel's initiation of a one-sided war the Goldstone Report 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 that comprise 53% of the population. One might also notice that the report accords considerable attention to Gilad Shalit, the one IDF prisoner held by Hamas in Gaza, recommending his release on humanitarian grounds, while making no comparable suggestion to Israel although it is holding thousands of Palestinians under conditions of harsh detention.
In the end, the Goldstone Report is unlikely to break the inter-governmental refusal to challenge the Israeli blockade of Gaza or to induce the United Nations to challenge Israeli impunity in any meaningful way. Depending on backroom diplomacy, the United States may or may not be able to avoid playing a public role of shielding Israel from accountability for its behavior during the Gaza War or its continuing refusal to abide by international humanitarian law by lifting the blockade that continues to impinge daily upon the health of the entire population of Gaza.
Despite these limitations, the report is an historic contribution to the Palestinian struggle for justice, an impeccable documentation of a crucial chapter in their victimization under occupation. Its impact will be felt most impressively on the growing civil society movement throughout the world to impose cultural, sporting, and academic boycotts, as well as to discourage investment, trade, and tourism with Israel. It may yet be the case that as in the anti-apartheid struggle the shift in the relation of forces in the Palestinian favor will occur not through diplomacy or as a result of armed resistance, but on the symbolic battlefield of legitimacy that has become global in scope, what might be described as the new political relevance of moral and legal globalization.
*Prof. Richard Falk - is an American professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, writer (the author or co-author of 20 books),[1] speaker, activist on world affairs, and an appointee to two United Nations positions on the Palestinian territories.
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