Richard Goldstone's Mea Culpa

Richard Goldstone has issued a mea culpa of sorts in the Washington Post for the report he issued, under the auspices of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), that found “evidence of potential war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity” by both Israel and Hamas during Operation Cast Lead. This was a military operation Israel undertook in late 2008 to suppress, if not stop, Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza from launching repeated rounds of rocket attacks aimed at Israeli civilians.

The UNHRC is notoriously anti-Israel. The council has no criteria for membership but a common pattern seems to be dominance by human rights abusers who also share an obsessive antipathy to Israel. Hence, the Council voted overwhelmingly in 2007 to make Israel’s actions a permanent item on the council’s agenda and so it has remained to the present day. Of the 14 country-specific resolutions passed in its current session, six of them deal with Israel.

So it was not a shock when the final Goldstone Report was issued that it was harshly critical of Israel, while seemingly providing a softer approach towards Hamas. Lost in the coverage was the fact that the Israel Defense Forces has long been in the forefront of protecting all civilians, not only its own, when it undertakes defensive operations, and that it was again reviewing its own tactics to see if the rules of engagement (among the most carefully drawn and followed in the world) were followed.

The world also ignored the refusal of Hamas to cooperate with the Goldstone Commission in a review of its own actions. These actions included not only the terrorism practiced against the Israelis but against their own people. There was evidence that, for example, Hamas was using human shields and launching rockets from positions adjacent to schools and places where Israel would refrain from attacking for fear of appearing to target civilians.

The report was criticized by some in the West for its failures to fairly consider the evidence (it is important to note that Goldstone himself was a jurist in South Africa). Alan Dershowitz wrote in the Huffington Post that one of the fatal flaws of the report was that acts that were accidental on the part of the Israeli Defense Forces (such as the death of civilians) were held to be intentional while those intentional acts of Hamas (dressing terrorists as civilians, using civilians as human shields, firing from areas packed with innocents) were  held to be accidental.

Such moral inversions are, of course, standard operating procedure at the United Nations. Dershowitz also noted that a central problem of the report was that different “evidentiary standards, rules and criteria in determining the intent of Israel and determining the intent of Hamas” were used by the writers of the Goldstone Report.

The findings of the report were predetermined. The Goldstone Report was less a fair review than a punishment wrapped in an indictment surrounding a canard.

Nevertheless, it is welcome that Goldstone apparently is willing to reveal flaws in the report. In his opening sentence, he writes:

We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone Report. If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.

The final report by the U.N. committee of independent experts — chaired by former New York judge Mary McGowan Davis — that followed up on the recommendations of the Goldstone Report has found that “Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza” while “the de facto authorities (i.e., Hamas) have not conducted any investigations into the launching of rocket and mortar attacks against Israel.

Then he seemingly bites the hand that empowered him in the first place: the UN Human Rights Council. He reveals that the original mandate adopted by the UNHRC was “skewed against Israel” and that he hopes for a “new era of evenhandedness at the UN Human Rights Council, whose history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted.” (America has announced its intention to continue to serve on the council, despite earlier promises that its current seat would be used to fight the “anti-Israel crap” there — a promise made and forgotten by American Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice back in early 2009.)

What could have motivated Goldstone to pen his op-ed? Perhaps it was a result of later evidence presented, as he writes.

Or perhaps, the blowback to him personally led him to backtrack from his conclusions. After the release of the Goldstone Report his history as a “hanging judge” in apartheid  South Africa came to light. Some drew the conclusion that Goldstone, far from taking to heart that the role of the judiciary is to be judicious, seems to approach with alacrity the goal of pleasing his superiors — be they South African leaders or anti-Israel UN apparatchicks. Will the conspiracy-minded Middle East just chalk up his op-ed to the machinations of the all-powerful Jews? Probably.

Regardless of Goldstone’s motivations, it is pleasing that he has shed additional light on the manifold flaws in the report that bears his name  and that he has tried to repair some of the immense damage he and that report have caused over the last few years.

Sadly, it may be too little and too late.