Important article published in a widely read mainstream American Jewish publication written by a prominent Jewish writer.
Ed Corrigan
http://www.momentmag.com/
Why have we stopped talking about the Goldstone report? Why has it sunk out of sight, leaving scant residue but the vilification of a man’s good name?
I refer to Richard Goldstone, who headed the fact-finding mission charged by the United Nations Human Rights Council with investigating possible war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during Israel’s three-week military action last year in Gaza.
Goldstone’s panel investigated 36 separate incidents, traveled all over Gaza and spoke to more than one hundred witnesses. Violations were found on both sides of the conflict, though far more were attributed to Israel. Hamas was charged with firing thousands of rockets and mortars at civilians in southern Israel and embedding mortar launchers in Gazan houses, hospitals and schools. The report might have contained more details about the impact of rocket attacks on residents of Sderot and Ashkelon had the Israeli government not barred fact-finders from entering Israel to interview victims of the attacks.
The Israel Defense Force’s infractions were cited in great detail: Thousands of private homes reduced to rubble. Gaza’s civilian infrastructure—the Parliament, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Interior, schools, mosques, courthouses, prisons, Gaza’s only flour plant, scores of agricultural fields, water supplies, the main poultry and egg-producing farm and a sewage treatment plant—in ruins.
According to witnesses, IDF soldiers shot people whose arms were shackled and a mother and three daughters who were carrying a white flag. Twenty-one members of one family were killed in Gaza City. This testimony echoes first-hand accounts by 30 Israeli veterans of Operation Cast Lead who co-founded the organization Breaking the Silence, as well as the findings of human rights groups such as B’Tselem and Amnesty International. The Goldstone report recommended that Israel and Hamas undertake independent internal investigations and if war crimes were proven, the perpetrators be punished in their own courts. If the parties refused to investigate themselves, it asked that the evidence be referred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Some weeks after the report’s release, a rabbi friend emailed me asking what I thought of it, promising me “confidentiality.” He knew how perilous it can be for a Jew to go public with an opinion that diverges from the “mainstream,” meaning the views expressed by “Jewish leaders” of “major Jewish organizations” and others who purport to speak for “the Jewish community.”
To understand the price for breaking ranks, just look at how mercilessly Judge Goldstone—a proud Jew and declared Zionist—was vilified, not by gentile anti-Semites or Arabist Israel-haters but by Jews in the Israel-right-or-wrong mafia who, rather than address the troubling issues raised in the report, resorted to character assassination to delegitimate its lead author.
An international blitz of blogs, op-eds and talking heads rained slander on Goldstone, accusing him of “blood libel,” favoring Hamas, betraying his people, being a naïve dupe, malicious traitor, self-hating Jew and enemy of the Jewish State. Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, called the report “the most serious and vicious assault on the State of Israel” since the UN’s 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism.
It should have been harder to besmirch the man whom Aharon Barak, former president of the Israeli Supreme Court, calls “a dear friend” with “very deep ties to Israel.” In fact, had Israel cooperated with the mission and presented its case persuasively, I believe it would have had a formidable ally in Richard Goldstone.
A former judge of South Africa’s Constitutional Court, Goldstone chaired his country’s Commission of Inquiry into violence under apartheid, prosecuted war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Kosovo and investigated the Oil for Food scandal in Iraq. The American Bar Association and the MacArthur Foundation gave him their top awards.
His Jewish credentials are similarly solid: board member of Hebrew University; chair of a Brandeis advisory board on ethics, justice and public life; president of World ORT; service on an international panel of the Commission of Enquiry into the Activities of Nazism in Argentina, which investigated War War II war criminals.
Before accepting his assignment, the judge, noting the UN’s biased record against the Jewish State, affirmed Israel’s right to self-defense and insisted that the panel’s mandate be expanded to include violations by Hamas, not just the IDF. He got his way, then spent nearly three months begging the Israeli government to cooperate with the inquiry and gave up only after receiving a flat no from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.
This is deeply regrettable, he says, since his mandate was the most even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the history of the UN and the final report contains the first and only condemnation of Hamas’ rocket attacks ever to appear in a UN document. Sadly, the force of that condemnation was lost once Israel rejected the report and the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution by a vote of 344-36 denouncing it as “biased and unworthy of further consideration.”
I wish the document’s charges were being actively discussed and convincingly rebutted by an internal investigation, but debate has been effectively squelched. Smears and death threats have done little to erode Judge Goldstone’s prestige among those familiar with his lifelong commitment to truth and justice. But the ad hominen attacks have deeply wounded him, his wife, two daughters and four grandsons who must relate to their Jewish friends and colleagues under a cloud of McCarthyite slander.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin has just completed her tenth book, The Man in the Playground, her second novel.
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