Set His Teeth on Edge

Why Did Goldstone Recant?

I don’t know what made Richard Goldstone issue last week’s mealymouthed retraction of the central finding of the eponymously named Goldstone Report just as I don’t know what led the respected jurist with a Zionist background to put a Jewish imprimatur on an investigation of Israel’s actions in Operation Cast Lead by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Goldstone admits in his Washington Post retraction that the UNHRC is undeniably biased against Israel and that the commission’s original mandates assumed prior to investigation that Israel had committed war crimes. Each of Goldstone’s fellow panelists had long records of anti-Israel statements and at least one of them had publicly condemned Israeli “war crimes” prior to the investigation.

But one thing I know for sure: The answer to the first question is not as Goldstone claims that he suddenly discovered new evidence proving that Israel did not “deliberately [engage in] disproportionate attacks designed to punish humiliate and terrorize [Gaza’s] civilian population.” Goldstone cites Israel’s 400 investigations of alleged operational misconduct in Gaza as important new information. But if he once believed Israel capable of deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza why should he put any faith in Israel’s investigations of its soldiers’ alleged misconduct?

Goldstone claims that in the absence of Israeli participation in his panel’s investigation there was “no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion” other than that Israel had set out to kill civilians. That’s nonsense. Goldstone knew of the thousands of rocket attacks from Gaza over a three-year period and of Israel’s great restraint in the face of those rocket attacks. He knew that those rockets were manufactured and launched from among Gaza’s civilian population. And he further knew that he had no answer for former Israeli ambassador to the UN Dr. Dore Gold when the latter challenged him in a debate at Brandeis University to specify how Israel could have defended its citizens from rocket attack without going after Hamas and other terrorists who use the civilian population as a defensive shield.

Further he knew of the Palestinians’ penchant for exaggerating civilian casualties. For instance the death of fifty-two Palestinians killed in Jenin during Operation Defensive Shield (according to a subsequent UN fact-finding report) at least half of whom were fighters morphed into the deliberate massacre of 5 000 civilians in Palestinian propaganda and a complicit European press. (In his Post piece Goldstone acknowledges that Hamas has now confirmed Israel’s claim that the overwhelming majority of casualties in Gaza were combatants.)