Justice Goldstone and the Jews

We Jews should be very proud of Richard Goldstone. In an ancient tradition of Jewish self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling, the author of the recent report from the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict has braved personal vilification and institutional mendacity to describe the crimes committed by Israeli forces in the course of their invasion of Gaza in December 2008.

To be sure, the Goldstone Report also itemizes the crimes of Hamas, notably in its campaign of rocket-firing into Israel. But the scale of human rights abuses by Israel vastly outdoes anything Hamas could hope to have achieved: Israeli civilian victims of Hamas rocket attacks numbered less than ten. The attack on Gaza by the IDF resulted in at least 1,100 Palestinian civilian deaths. The major perpetrator of human rights abuses in this conflict is without question the State of Israel, and Justice Goldstone records as much.

That the Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen to conduct an international campaign against Justice Goldstone and his report need not surprise us. Israel refused to cooperate with the UN investigation; long before its conclusions were published, Netanyahu had set in motion a campaign to deny and denigrate them. More dispiriting, and of greater political consequence, is the pitiful and humiliating response of the Obama Administration. The "fierce urgency of now" apparently required that Washington join Tel Aviv in discrediting the Goldstone Report, and with it the UN inquiry.

This response is of course in keeping with America's long-standing determination to protect Israel against the consequences of its actions at home and abroad; but the universal international condemnation of the destruction of Gaza renders the Obama Administration's response peculiarly self-defeating -- everyone knows what happened in Gaza, so Washington's collusion in covering it up merely draws further attention to the discrediting of U.S. foreign policy and moral standing brought about by our unhealthy relationship with Israel.

There is a special irony to the public slandering of Justice Goldstone now under way. In the first place he is not only Jewish but has close family links to Israel and the Zionist ideal. Secondly, Richard Goldstone has an impeccable resumé as a critic of racism, prejudice and repression -- most notably as an active opponent for many years of the apartheid regime in his native South Africa. During the '90s he served as Chief Prosecutor at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals dealing with human rights abuses, crimes and genocide in the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. It would be hard to fictionalize a more convincing biography for an engaged and ethically uncompromising jurist in the great tradition of Jewish political activism. Goldstone's standing in the world will only rise as a consequence of Israel's short-sighted attempts to discredit the man, the report and the facts. That our own government has chosen to join in this unworthy exercise should be a source of deep embarrassment and shame.

Please join me and Jews from all over the world in signing the Jewish Appeal Letter in Support of the Goldstone Report written by Jews Say No an organization in NY. Go to: http://www.petitiononline.com/UNreport/petition.html

 

Comments

[AWAMORI]

Author says: "Israeli civilian victims of Hamas rocket attacks numbered less than ten."

Lies!
Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip have occurred since 2001. As of January 2009, over 8,600 rockets had been launched, leading to 28 deaths and several hundred injuries, as well as widespread psychological trauma and disruption of daily life.


Author says:"The attack on Gaza by the IDF resulted in at least 1,100 Palestinian civilian deaths."

Also lies! 300 civilians, 700 armed terrorists.

[DaveSam]

Tony Judt is on the money with his praise of the Goldstone report. Even to someone familiar with the events in Gaza, the report is shocking in its meticulous detail of Israeli assault against civilians. The reports critics have mostly nitpicked about nonsense. The original mandate was one-sided (Goldstone insisted it be changed before he accepted the assignment); the report did not take into account the rockets (of course it did). In fact, Goldstone accepted as a premise the questionable claim that any military response was justified, questionable because Israel could have continued the cease fire simply by easing the inhumane blockade and allowing more food, water, medicine, etc. to reach 1.5 million people, a "concession" it was unwilling to make. Goldstone found that even if Israel did have the right to respond, it intentionally targeted civilians and their infrastructure. Israel and its supporters have had a very difficult time rebutting the dozens of individual instances of such targeting that were so convincingly depicted in the report. After decades of targeting civilians as surely as its own civilians have been targeted, Israel is quaking at the prospect of accountability rather than impunity for such behavior, which is unacceptable regardless of the identity of the perpetrators and victims. So far, the US seems to be solidly in line with it, but most off the world is not.