JERUSALEM - For Jews around the world, the ten days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur is the season of soul-searching, where we ask forgiveness both from God and from our fellow human beings for sins large and small. But this year the Jewish holiday season came just as the UN issued a scathing report on Israel's recent military operation in the Gaza Strip. And so, my government's representatives around the globe have turned the tradition upside-down; rather than taking responsibility and making amends, they spent the past ten days deflecting all accusation of wrongdoing.
The UN fact-finding mission headed by Richard Goldstone found that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes in last winter's military operation in Gaza. The report calls on both sides to launch criminal investigations into these allegations and to hold accountable anyone found to have committed these crimes. If either side fails to do so, the mission has requested various UN bodies to take measures to ensure such accountability.
Israel's response is a categorical condemnation of the report as biased and one-sided (Hamas has made a similar condemnation). Government spokespeople and major Jewish organizations claim the report is so fundamentally flawed as to be useless, or worse, a blood libel. The U.S. also criticized the report, dismissing calls for any serious international follow-up.
The full-throated, unequivocal denouncement is unsubstantiated: Israel claims the report ignores eight years of Hamas rocket fire at Southern Israel, though the report firmly denounces these attacks, calling them war crimes. Israel points to the one-sided mandate formulated by the UN Human Rights Council, though we know that Justice Goldstone accepted the offer to head the inquiry only on condition that its mandate was explicitly expanded to include all sides.
This is not to say that the report has no faults. I was disturbed by the framing of Israel's military operation as part of "an overall policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population for its resilience." The facts presented in the report itself would not seem to support such a far-reaching conclusion. In light of the sweeping conclusions regarding Israel, the very careful phrasing regarding Hamas abuses is particularly conspicuous. The mission did not find conclusive evidence regarding Hamas' use of mosques and civilian buildings for military purposes, nor does it criticize Hamas' firing from and shielding themselves within civilian areas. The evidence accumulated over the past eight months regarding both these phenomenon cannot be ignored.
Yet these lacunae are an indictment of Israel as much as of the UN report. Justice Goldstone all but begged Israel to cooperate with the mission and provide all the information it has to make its case. Israel refused, thereby dooming the report to a perhaps inevitable blind spot. I cannot avoid the feeling that Israel actually prefers this emphatically harsh, yet flawed report. Israel's generals and legal advisors will never acknowledge it publicly, but they must know their conduct in the Gaza operation did not accord with international requirements. This would also be reflected in the more measured, nuanced report that would have resulted from Israeli cooperation. Yet such a report would be much harder to denounce.
All the tendentious mudslinging and the more grounded criticism cannot delegitimize the report's central recommendation: that Israel itself must conduct credible investigations into its own conduct. The whole international system is based on the premise that justice should be done at home. Only in cases where there is no possibility of obtaining a domestic remedy does the international community step in to fill the vacuum. The Goldstone report reiterates this premise.
For months the Israeli human rights community has urged Israel to open credible, independent investigations into the hundreds of allegations of military misconduct. Israel has stubbornly refused, largely making do with military debriefings that categorically absolve Israeli forces of any wrongdoing. Only a handful of military police investigations have been opened, and the one criminal investigation to be concluded is the exception that proves the rule. A soldier in the Givati brigade was tried, convicted and sentenced -- for stealing a credit card.
After eight months of lobbying and advocacy, eight months in which B'Tselem sent dozens of cases to Israeli law enforcement officials, I must conclude that left to its own devices, Israel would never conduct the necessary investigations. Such an outcome is intolerable for the Palestinian residents of Gaza, who have no redress for all that they suffered. It is also harmful for Israeli society which has a right to know what was done in its name, and for Israeli democracy. And it is extremely damaging for the international legal system if such a high-profile case can be ignored. Under the circumstances, the international community cannot let this scenario occur.
So Israel now has a choice. It can continue to shoot the messenger and bury its head in the sand, hoping despite all signs to the contrary that this whole controversy will somehow disappear. Or it can initiate a genuine process of truth-telling and taking responsibility. Such a process may well be painful, but we will emerge stronger and healthier for it. As a friend and crucial supporter, the United States should not dismiss the report out of hand but rather encourage Israel to conduct serious investigations.
Jessica Montell is Executive Director of B'Tselem: the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. jmontell@btselem.org
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It is the fervor with which negative information about Israel is examined that makes them suspicious. If comments about Hamas' crimes were not so measured, both in the Goldstone report as on this site, then Israelis might believe the source of your passion.
As it is, the moral imbalance voiced by many forces Israel to rely only on it's own moral direction. It will continue to do so no matter how many Jews outside of Israel want to demonstrate their "correct" thinking and pass the litmus test for "a good jew" by performing that ironically ubiquitous above-mentioned Jewish ability for self-examination for the pleasure of audiences around the world.
It's entirely possible the Goldstone report is correct and those people responsible for committing crimes should be condemned. But the report is not convincing; it relies heavily on unreliable Palestinian (including Hamas) testimony. I do not believe you would be convinced of the IDF's innocence after a hundred internal investigations. Open your mind and consider the possibility that the IDF might not be as bad as you assume they are.
The other main claims against Israel are Palestinian allegations that less thana dozen times, Israel intentionally shot at civilians waving a white flag, and at ambulances. a total of about a dozed related deaths is alleged. There is no objective or impartial evidence to support these partisan allegations. No country would ever be charged with war crimes on this basis.
In the case of the incursion into Gaza last December by Israel forces when 305 children and 104 women, all unarmed civilians, were deliberately killed by the IDF, those responsible for authorizing such killings i.e. the Israeli Defense Minister and the Israeli Prime Minister i.e. Barak and Olmert, must be tried before an international court.
To fail to bring the perpetrators of alleged war crimes before the international court would be a breakdown of both democracy and international justice and it would set a precedent for the future that the deliberate killing of unarmed civilians including hundreds of children is acceptable.
I don't think that many of us would want to live in a world where that was the accepted fact and I do not believe that the international community will stand in the way of the judicial process.
Being cut off from fuel, food and medicine for months at a time, the Gazans were held in a siege by the IDF. Meanwhile, in many parts of the so-called Territories, Israeli builders continue the state program of misappropriating land from its owners, and building illegal settlements in contravention of signed treaties. Deal with it. Live with what happened. Those who would defend it, defend it. But please G-d stop denying the facts obvious to the fair-minded.
Lady, don't you know "the fix was in?"
You hold onto some ideal that the United Nations is a "fair" organization. It is not.
It is not your Saviour, it is your Inquisitor. Do you not know your history?
If you care so much about Palestinians, why not lobby Egypt to open its border? Has that been tried yet?
"There's no question that the HRC, which mandated the Goldstone [fact-finding mission into the Gaza fighting], has an inappropriate, disproportionate fixation with Israel," she said, adding that the Council was "a political body made up of diplomats, not human rights experts, which means that the powerful states are never going to come under scrutiny the way the powerless will. So China, Russia and the US will never have commission of inquiry, regardless of how their crimes rank relative to Israeli crimes."
The truth is that Goldstone ignored many, many testimonies such as Col. Richard Kemp and the doctor in Ashkelon who's story was belittled. In contrast, he believed everything the Palestinians told him and accepted it as truth without collaboration. You cannot make this a framework for investigation. The IDF is better to work on its own.