Goldstone's shameful U-turn
Ilan Pappe, The
Electronic Intifada, 4 April 2011
Judge Richard Goldstone in the Gaza Strip, June 2009. (UN Photo)
"If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone report would have
been a different document." Thus opens Judge Richard Goldstone's
much-discussed op-ed in The Washington Post. I have a strong
feeling that the editor might have tampered with the text and that the
original sentence ought to have read something like: "If I had known
then that the report would turn me into a self-hating Jew in the eyes of
my beloved Israel and my own Jewish community in South Africa, the
Goldstone report would never have been written at all." And if that
wasn't the original sentence, it is certainly the subtext of Goldstone's
article.
This shameful U-turn did not happen this week. It comes after more than a
year and a half of a sustained campaign of intimidation and character
assassination against the judge, a campaign whose like in the past
destroyed mighty people such as US Senator William Fulbright who was
shot down politically for his brave attempt to disclose AIPAC's illegal
dealings with the State of Israel.
Already In October 2009, Goldstone told CNN, "I've got a great love for
Israel" and "I've worked for many Israeli causes and continue to do so"
(Video: "Fareed Zakaria GPS," 4 October 2009).
Given the fact that at the time he made this declaration of love he did
not have any new evidence, as he claims now, one may wonder how could
this love could not be at least weakened by what he discovered when
writing, along with other members of the UN commission, his original
report.
But worse was to come and exactly a year ago, in April 2010, the
campaign against him reached new heights, or rather, lows. It was led by
the chairman of the South African Zionist Federation, Avrom Krengel,
who tried to prevent Goldstone from participating in his grandson's bar
mitzvah in Johannesburg since "Goldstone caused irreparable damage to
the Jewish people as a whole."
The South African Zionist Federation threatened to picket outside the
synagogue during the ceremony. Worse was the interference of South
Africa's Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, who chastised Goldstone for
"doing greater damage to the State of Israel." Last February, Goldstone
said that "Hamas perpetrated war crimes, but Israel did not," in an
interview that was not broadcast, according to a 3 April report the
website of Israel's Channel 2. It was not enough: the Israelis demanded
much more.
Readers might ask "so what?" and "why could Goldstone not withstand the
heat?" Good questions, but alas the Zionization of Jewish communities
and the false identification of Jewishness with Zionism is still a
powerful disincentive that prevents liberal Jews from boldly facing
Israel and its crimes.
Every now and again many liberal Jews seem to liberate themselves and
allow their conscience, rather than their fear, to lead them. However,
many seem unable stick to their more universalist inclinations for too
long where Israel is concerned. The risk of being defined as a
"self-hating Jew" with all the ramifications of such an accusation is a
real and frightening prospect for them. You have to be in this position
to understand the power of this terror.
Just weeks ago, Israeli military intelligence announced it had created a
special unit to monitor, confront, and possibly hunt down, individuals
and bodies suspected of "delegitimizing" Israel abroad. In light of
this, perhaps quite a few of the faint-hearted felt standing up to
Israel was not worth it.
We should have recognized that Goldstone was one of them when he stated
that, despite his report, he remains a Zionist. This adjective,
"Zionist," is far more meaningful and charged than is usually assumed.
You cannot claim to be one if you oppose the ideology of the apartheid
State of Israel. You can remain one if you just rebuke the state for a
certain criminal policy and fail to see the connection between the
ideology and that policy. "I am a Zionist" is a declaration of loyalty
to a frame of mind that cannot accept the 2009 Goldstone Report. You can
either be a Zionist or blame Israel for war crimes and crimes against
humanity -- if you do both, you will crack sooner rather than later.
That this mea culpa has nothing to do with new facts is clear
when one examines the "evidence" brought by Goldstone to explain his
retraction. To be honest, one should say that one did not have to be the
world expert on international law to know that Israel committed war
crimes in Gaza in 2009. The reports of bodies such as Breaking the
Silence and the UN representatives on the ground attested to it, before
and after the Goldstone report. It was also not the only evidence.
The pictures and images we saw on our screens and those we saw on the
ground told only one story of a criminal policy intending to kill, wound
and maim as a collective punishment. "The Palestinians are going to
bring upon themselves a Holocaust," promised Matan Vilnai, Israel's
deputy minister of defense to the people of Gaza on 29 February 2008.
There is only one new piece of evidence Goldstone brings and this is an
internal Israeli army investigation that explains that one of the cases
suspected as a war crime was due to a mistake by the Israeli army that
is still being investigated. This must be a winning card: a claim by the
Israeli army that massive killings by Palestinians were a "mistake."
Ever since the creation of the State of Israel, the tens of thousands of
Palestinians killed by Israel were either terrorists or killed by
"mistake." So 29 out of 1,400 deaths were killed by an unfortunate
mistake? Only ideological commitment could base a revision of the report
on an internal inquiry of the Israeli army focusing only on one of
dozens of instances of unlawful killing and massacring. So it cannot be
new evidence that caused Goldstone to write this article. Rather, it is
his wish to return to the Zionist comfort zone that propelled this
bizarre and faulty article.
This is also clear from the way he escalates his language against Hamas
in the article and de-escalates his words toward Israel. And he hopes
that this would absolve him of Israel's righteous fury. But he is wrong,
very wrong. Only a few hours passed from the publication of the article
until Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and of course the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate President Shimon
Peres commissioned Goldstone with a new role in life: he is expected to
move from one campus to the other and hop from one public venue to the
next in the service of a new and pious Israel. He may choose not to do
it; but then again he might not be allowed to attend his grandson's bar
mitzvah as a retaliation.
Goldstone and his colleagues wrote a very detailed report, but they were
quite reserved in their conclusions. The picture unfolding from Israeli
and Palestinian human rights organizations was far more horrendous and
was described less in the clinical and legal language that quite often
fails to convey the magnitude of the horror. It was first western public
opinion that understood better than Goldstone the implications of his
report. Israel's international legitimacy has suffered an unprecedented
blow. He was genuinely shocked to learn that this was the result.
We have been there before. In the late 1980s, Israeli historian Benny
Morris wrote a similar, sterile, account of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of
Palestine. Palestinian academics such as Edward Said, Nur Masalha and
Walid Khalidi were the ones who pointed to the significant implications
for Israel's identity and self-image, and nature of the archival
material he unearthed.
Morris too cowered under pressure and asked to be re-admitted to the tribe. He
went very far with his mea culpa
and re-emerged as an extreme anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist:
suggesting putting the Arabs in cages and promoting the idea of another
ethnic cleansing. Goldstone can go in that direction too; or at least
this is what the Israelis expect him to do now.
Professionally, both Morris and Goldstone tried to retreat to a position that
claimed, as Goldstone does in The Washington Post
article, that Israel can only be judged by its intentions not the
consequences of its deeds. Therefore only the Israeli army, in both
cases, can be a reliable source for knowing what these intentions were.
Very few decent and intelligent people in the world would accept such a
bizarre analysis and explanation.
Goldstone has not entered as yet the lunatic fringe of ultra-Zionism as
Morris did. But if he is not careful the future promises to be a
pleasant journey with the likes of Morris, Alan Dershowitz (who already
said that Goldstone is a "repentant Jew") between annual meetings of the
AIPAC rottweilers and the wacky conventions of the Christian Zionists.
He would soon find out that once you cower in the face of Zionism -- you
are expected to go all the way or be at the very same spot you thought
you had successfully left behind you.
Winning Zionist love in the short-term is far less important than losing
the world's respect in the long-run. Palestine should choose its
friends with care: they cannot be faint-hearted nor can they claim to be
Zionists as well as champions of peace, justice and human rights in
Palestine.
Ilan Pappe is Professor of History and Director of the European
Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. His most
recent book is Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel
(Pluto Press, 2010).
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11895.shtml
........................................................................................................................
The documented record still stands: Israel intentionally targets civilians and
civilian infrastructure
by Alex Kane on April 3, 2011
Judge Richard Goldstone’s mea culpa in the Washington Post today is indeed
“confusing and potentially damaging,” as Adam Horowitz writes.
Key findings in the U.N. report–that
“Israeli armed forces had carried out direct intentional strikes
against civilians” in eleven incidents examined in detail and that
Israel destroyed civilian infrastructure like the Sawafeary chicken farm
in a systematic and deliberate fashion–is muddied up by Goldstone’s
claim that “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of
policy.”
Even granting the claim that the incidents his team investigated, now
with the circumstances “explained” through Israeli military
investigations, do not indicate that civilians were targeted, there is a
documented history of Israel doing just that. And it wasn’t just
during the Gaza assault.
The so-called “Dahiya doctrine” was used during the 2006 war on Lebanon. In a
February 2009 report, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel explained:
In the beginning of October 2008, the Commanding Officer of the IDF’s
Northern Command, Maj. General Gadi Eisenkott, gave an interview to
Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, in which he unveiled what he called the
“Dahiye Doctrine”: ‘What happened in the Dahiye Quarter of Beirut in
2006, will happen in every village from which shots are fired on Israel.
We will use disproportionate force against it and we will cause immense
damage and destruction. From our point of view these are not civilian
villages but military bases.
This is not a recommendation, this is the plan, and it has already been
authorized.’
According the Dahiye Doctrine, Israel will achieve deterrence not by
attacking individual rocket launchers, but rather by using
disproportionate force which will influence the behaviour of its
opponents…
According to the doctrine, massive destruction is a necessary element
for creating deterrence. The damage must be done not only to military
installations, or explained by concrete military necessity, but must
include civilian infrastructure so that reconstruction will be expensive
and time consuming
This deliberate doctrine leads to the deaths of civilians and
civilian infrastructure. The Lebanon war “resulted in at least 1,109
Lebanese deaths, the vast majority of whom were civilians, 4,399
injured, and an estimated 1 million displaced,” according to a Human Rights
Watch report. Various other reports–this Human Rights Watch report, testimonies
from Breaking the Silence and many others–document Israel’s policy of targeting
civilians and civilian infrastructure.
In the Gaza Strip, civilians are routinely shot at and sometimes killed if they
step into the so-called “buffer zone,” which constitutes some 35 percent of the
Strip’s arable land. An October 2010 report by Defense of Children
International states:
Between 26 March and 14 October 2010, DCI-Palestine documented 14
cases of children shot whilst collecting building gravel near the border
fence between Gaza Strip and Israel. Due to a severe lack of job
opportunities and a shortage of construction material entering Gaza from
Israel, hundreds of men and boys scavenge for building gravel amongst
the destroyed buildings close to the border fence. The gravel is
collected into sacks, loaded onto donkey drawn carts and sold to
builders for use in concrete. Children can earn up to 50 shekels (US
$13) per day which is used to help support their families. Reports
indicate that Israeli soldiers on duty in the observation towers which
line the border between Gaza and Israel frequently fire warning shots to
scare workers away from the border region. Reports also indicate that
these soldiers sometimes shoot and kill the donkeys used by the workers,
and also target the workers, usually, but not always, shooting at their
legs. In the cases documented by DCI-Palestine, the children report
being shot whilst working between 50 to 800 metres from the border
fence.
A separate U.N. study on the “buffer zone” reports:
Since the end of the “Cast Lead” offensive in January 2009, the
Israeli army has also killed a total of 22 civilians and injured another
146 in these circumstances.
The examples are endless, but what they make clear is that the
Israeli persecution of Palestinians documented in the Goldstone report
and numerous other sources was not confined to “Operation Cast Lead.”
Goldstone’s “reconsideration” in the Post today doesn’t change the
documented history.
Alex Kane, a freelance journalist and blogger, writes on Israel/Palestine and
Islamophobia in the U.S. at alexbkane.wordpress.com, where this post originally
appeared. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.
http://mondoweiss.net/2011/04/the-documented-record-still-stands-israel-intentionally-targets-civilians-and-civilian-infrastructure.html
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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