Whatever happened to Judge Richard Goldstone?

When in 2009 South African Judge Richard Goldstone published his report into alleged violations of international human rights & humanitarian law in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, the BBC feted him as a wise man who despite being Jewish was able to see the truth about Israel.

When some time later Richard Goldstone admitted that if he had been aware of information that has become known since writing it then his report would have been different, he blamed Israel for failing to co-operate with his commission, biased as Israel knew it would be, and the BBC covered the partial retraction with much less attention than they did the original report. The BBC do have a narrative to keep to.

Now I see that Richard Goldstone has written a piece for the New York Times that I don't think the BBC will report at all. The piece is about the Palestinian Authority's push for United Nations membership and a matter that as a liberal South African judge Richard Goldstone does understand, the accusations that Israel is an 'Apartheid State' - I have emphasised the key points:

' The Palestinian Authority’s request for full United Nations membership has put hope for any two-state solution under increasing pressure. The need for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians has never been greater. So it is important to separate legitimate criticism of Israel from assaults that aim to isolate, demonize and delegitimize it.

One particularly pernicious and enduring canard that is surfacing again is that Israel pursues “apartheid” policies. In Cape Town starting on Saturday, a London-based nongovernmental organization called the Russell Tribunal on Palestine will hold a “hearing” on whether Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid. It is not a “tribunal.” The “evidence” is going to be one-sided and the members of the “jury” are critics whose harsh views of Israel are well known.

While “apartheid” can have broader meaning, its use is meant to evoke the situation in pre-1994 South Africa. It is an unfair and inaccurate slander against Israel, calculated to retard rather than advance peace negotiations.

I know all too well the cruelty of South Africa’s abhorrent apartheid system, under which human beings characterized as black had no rights to vote, hold political office, use “white” toilets or beaches, marry whites, live in whites-only areas or even be there without a “pass.” Blacks critically injured in car accidents were left to bleed to death if there was no “black” ambulance to rush them to a “black” hospital. “White” hospitals were prohibited from saving their lives.

In assessing the accusation that Israel pursues apartheid policies, which are by definition primarily about race or ethnicity, it is important first to distinguish between the situations in Israel, where Arabs are citizens, and in West Bank areas that remain under Israeli control in the absence of a peace agreement.

In Israel, there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute: “Inhumane acts … committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” Israeli Arabs — 20 percent of Israel’s population — vote, have political parties and representatives in the Knesset and occupy positions of acclaim, including on its Supreme Court. Arab patients lie alongside Jewish patients in Israeli hospitals, receiving identical treatment.

To be sure, there is more de facto separation between Jewish and Arab populations than Israelis should accept. Much of it is chosen by the communities themselves. Some results from discrimination. But it is not apartheid, which consciously enshrines separation as an ideal. In Israel, equal rights are the law, the aspiration and the ideal; inequities are often successfully challenged in court.

The situation in the West Bank is more complex. But here too there is no intent to maintain “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group.” This is a critical distinction, even if Israel acts oppressively toward Palestinians there. South Africa’s enforced racial separation was intended to permanently benefit the white minority, to the detriment of other races. By contrast, Israel has agreed in concept to the existence of a Palestinian state in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank, and is calling for the Palestinians to negotiate the parameters.

But until there is a two-state peace, or at least as long as Israel’s citizens remain under threat of attacks from the West Bank and Gaza, Israel will see roadblocks and similar measures as necessary for self-defense, even as Palestinians feel oppressed. As things stand, attacks from one side are met by counterattacks from the other. And the deep disputes, claims and counterclaims are only hardened when the offensive analogy of “apartheid” is invoked.

Those seeking to promote the myth of Israeli apartheid often point to clashes between heavily armed Israeli soldiers and stone-throwing Palestinians in the West Bank, or the building of what they call an “apartheid wall” and disparate treatment on West Bank roads. While such images may appear to invite a superficial comparison, it is disingenuous to use them to distort the reality. The security barrier was built to stop unrelenting terrorist attacks; while it has inflicted great hardship in places, the Israeli Supreme Court has ordered the state in many cases to reroute it to minimize unreasonable hardship. Road restrictions get more intrusive after violent attacks and are ameliorated when the threat is reduced.

Of course, the Palestinian people have national aspirations and human rights that all must respect. But those who conflate the situations in Israel and the West Bank and liken both to the old South Africa do a disservice to all who hope for justice and peace.

Israel, unique among democracies, has been in a state of war with many of its neighbors who refuse to accept its existence. Even some Israeli Arabs, because they are citizens of Israel, have at times come under suspicion from other Arabs as a result of that longstanding enmity.

The mutual recognition and protection of the human dignity of all people is indispensable to bringing an end to hatred and anger. The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes, rather than promotes, peace and harmony.'

Somehow I doubt that the BBC will be reporting this statement by Richard Goldstone, I however will be quoting it often, in fact every time someone accuses Israel of being an 'apartheid state'.

The Goldstone Report

I have been too busy over the past few days to devote enough time to the revelations that Richard Goldstone has 'all but acknowledged being incredibly naïve and irresponsible when he authored a harshly critical report for the United Nations Human Rights Council after Israel's 2008-2009 war with Hamas in Gaza.'

This post is therefore for me to have a record of what has been written on the subject and so I can see how/if the BBC do report yhe subject.

Centre for Security Policy:

'By Frank Gaffney, Jr.

One might have been forgiven for thinking it was an April Fool's joke. At the very least, the author of an oped published in the Washington Post last Friday - former South African Supreme Court Justice Richard Goldstone - sure looked foolish as he all but acknowledged being incredibly naïve and irresponsible when he authored a harshly critical report for the United Nations Human Rights Council after Israel's 2008-2009 war with Hamas in Gaza.

It seems the lead author of the Goldstone Report has experienced a severe case of second thoughts or buyer's remorse. Presumably, that is due at least in part to a belated appreciation of the immense damage caused by his misbegotten handiwork. As the jurist put it in his essay, "If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document." He is not the only one who is reconsidering - or should be - what they are about.

Unfortunately, as in the case of the Goldstone Report, in most instances where buyer's remorse is setting in, there is really no excuse for the actions to be taken in the first place. Consider several examples:

Let's start with Justice Goldstone's opus. In it, he assailed the Israel Defense Forces for engaging in "potential war crimes" and "possibly crimes against humanity" by purposefully attacking non-combatants. In so doing, his report established a moral equivalency for the Jewish State with the terrorists of Hamas and contributed mightily to international efforts to stigmatize and delegitimize Israel. Yet, Goldstone now acknowledges, based on subsequent investigations conducted by others (including the Israeli government), that "civilians were not intentionally targeted [by Israel] as a matter of policy."

Welcome as this vindication of Israel is, it cannot undo the immense damage done by charges made eighteen months ago, when there was ample reason not to tar the Israelis with the same brush as Hamas. Justice Goldstone now avers, "That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying - its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminate­ly aimed at civilian targets." There is, however, no excuse for him not knowing and affirming at the time that Israel had adopted a wholly different approach. No amount of remorseful op.ed. articles will obscure that reality, or mitigate the damage done by his moral equivalence.'

The Commentator:

'The British Government is standing by the United Nations Goldstone Report alleging that Israel committed "war crimes" in its Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009 even though Justice Richard Goldstone has now distanced himself from his report’s most controversial conclusions.

On Friday, Goldstone wrote a piece in the Washington Post in which he stunned diplomats, politicians and analysts by withdrawing the allegation that Israel had deliberately targeted civilians during the 22-day conflict. He said: “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

The Foreign Office, however, confirmed its continued support for investigations into Cast Lead and said it did not want to see the withdrawal of the Goldstone Report from the United Nations.

"Justice Goldstone has not made such a call, and he has not elaborated on his views surrounding the various other allegations contained in the report, allegations which we firmly believe require serious follow-up by the parties to the conflict," a Foreign Office spokesman told the Commentator on Monday evening.

In his piece, entitled “Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and War Crimes”, Goldstone admitted that it was now clear that “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy”. With reference to evidence provided by Israel, he added: “…I regret that our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes”.

One diplomat told the Commentator that his retractions would cause acute embarrassment to countries such as Britain that stand accused by Israel and its supporters of adopting a reflexively anti-Israeli position in order to placate oil rich Arab states in the Middle East, as well as Britain's growing Muslim population.

But the Foreign Office appeared undeterred, saying:

"Allegations of breaches of International Humanitarian Law made against all parties to the Gaza conflict are not limited to the Goldstone report and have arisen from certain other credible organisations. We firmly believe that any and all such allegations must be met with credible and independent investigations by the parties to the conflict."

On Saturday, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for the UN immediately to cancel the report.

“Everything we said has proven to be true: Israel did not intentionally harm civilians, its institutions and investigative bodies are worthy, while Hamas intentionally fired upon innocent civilians and did not examine anything,” he said. “The fact that Goldstone backtracked must lead to the shelving of this report once and for all.”

Addressing his cabinet on Sunday, Netanyahu reiterated his call referring to the report as “libel”.

"There are very few instances in which those who disseminate libels retract their libel. This happed in the case of the Goldstone Report. Goldstone himself said that all of the things that we have been saying all along are correct – that Israel never intentionally fired at civilians and that our inquiries operated according to the highest international standards. Of course, this is in complete contrast to Hamas who intentionally attacked and murdered civilians and naturally never carried out any sort of inquiry. This leads us to call for the immediate cancellation of the Goldstone Report.”

The UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, chaired by Richard Goldstone, submitted its report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva in September 2009. The report suggested that war crimes had been committed by all parties in the Gaza conflict. However, it has been used only against Israel and has served as the basis for an extensive anti-Israeli political and legal campaign in the international arena.

There have so far been three votes on the report in the United Nations. In the first, at the Human Rights Council, Britain absented itself. In the second, in the General Assembly, Britain abstained. In the third, also in the General Assembly, Britain voted in favour. All three votes were slightly different. The first asked countries to endorse the report’s findings; the second called for investigations on the basis of the report; and the third gave an extension to the time period in which those investigations should take place. But the move from abstention to outright support signaled a clear hardening of Britain’s position against the Jewish state.

Critics within Britain have accused the Foreign Office of undermining British national interests by giving credence to a report which could serve as a precedent for actions against British soldiers and officials involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As in Gaza, terror groups in the two countries embed themselves in the civilian population making it impossible for British and other allied forces to target them without the risk of hitting civilians too. In Iraq alone, the death toll stands at a minimum of 100,000. During Operation Cast Lead it was between 1,000 and 1,500 depending on whose figures are accurate.

With such considerations in mind, the Goldstone report has always been considered by Israel to be part of a campaign to delegitimise the Israeli state and label it as a war criminal.

“We face three major strategic challenges,” Netanyahu said last year, “the Iranian nuclear program, rockets aimed at our citizens and Goldstone.”

In a report published in 2010, the Reut Institute, a Tel Aviv-based think tank warned that the deligitimisation campaignt “has already gained strategic significance and may evolve into an existential threat.” The Reut report said that Israel's freedom to act militarily against perceived threats has been limited as a result of the campaign.

On Sunday, the Israeli Prime Minister set up a committee to help formulate a response to “reverse and minimize” the great damage that followed the publication of the report.

An editorial in Israel’s leading newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, referred to the Goldstone Report as a modern day “Dreyfus trial” with Israel in the dock.

"Not only must Goldstone apologize but so too all those who intervened and contributed to creating the modern Dreyfus trial for the State of Israel,” the newspaper said. The editorial declared that, "For the past decade, Israel has been waging a war against modern anti-Semitism under the cloak of human rights, the goal of which, for the Israel-haters, has been to undermine the state's legitimacy as a home for the Jewish people.”'

Melanie Phillips in The Spectator :

'In an extraordinary article in the Washington Post, Richard Goldstone has now admitted that his infamous report was wrong. Having fuelled the blood libel that in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza Israel had targeted civilians and possibly had committed crimes against humanity, he now says that, as a result of the final report of the UN committee of independent experts and other evidence that has emerged since his report was published, he accepts that

civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy

and further states that

if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.

What self-serving rubbish. There was ample evidence at the time from numerous sources that Hamas was telling lies about the number of civilians who were killed by Israeli fire. There was ample evidence that Hamas was deliberately putting civilians in harm’s way. There was ample evidence that Hamas does not operate under the rule of law or uphold human rights. There was ample evidence that Israeli rules of engagement required the IDF to avoid hitting civilians wherever possible. There was ample evidence that Israel always investigates allegations of misconduct made against its soldiers and holds them to acount under the rule of law. Yet Goldstone, having accepted the poisoned chalice from the UN Human Rights Council to subject Israel to a show trial whose verdict preceded the evidence (despite his protestations that he modified this odious remit), chose to believe the propaganda put out by Hamas and its proxies among NGOs with a long track record of malevolent hostility to Israel.
Even now, in this purported mea culpa, Goldstone does not take responsibility for the Big Lie he helped perpetrate with such terrible consequences in putting rocket-fuel behind Israel’s delegitimisation as a pariah in the eyes of the world. Instead, he blames his false conclusions upon Israel’s refusal to co-operate with his inquiry.
So for the second time, he is again blaming Israel for its own victimisation – first at the hands of Hamas, and now at his own hands.
Ludicrously, he now says that his report’s

allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion.

The protestation that he had no alternative but to believe Hamas is quite astounding. Hamas is a terrorist organisation with a solid track record of lies, distortions and ‘Pallywood’-style fabrications as a strategy of aggressive warfare.  Israel, the victim of that aggression, has a solid record of telling the truth. Yet Goldstone chose to believe the Hamas version of events. Nor was this all. As he says in the Washington Post:

Some have suggested that it was absurd to expect Hamas, an organization that has a policy to destroy the state of Israel, to investigate what we said were serious war crimes. It was my hope, even if unrealistic, that Hamas would do so, especially if Israel conducted its own investigations. At minimum I hoped that in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail its attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case. Hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel....
In the end, asking Hamas to investigate may have been a mistaken enterprise. So, too, the Human Rights Council should condemn the inexcusable and cold-blooded recent slaughter of a young Israeli couple and three of their small children in their beds.
I continue to believe in the cause of establishing and applying international law to protracted and deadly conflicts....Regrettably, there has been no effort by Hamas in Gaza to investigate the allegations of its war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

Can you believe this? He appears to have expected genocidal aggressor Hamas to behave in a civilised fashion by investigating its alleged abuses -- while he chose to throw the book at its democratic victim, Israel. And now the most he will acknowledge is that expecting Hamas to do so

may have been a mistaken enterprise.

By his own admission, the man stands revealed as at best an abject idiot and at worst a moral and judicial bankrupt. His report blackened Israel’s name for defending itself against existential attack; encouraged its attackers to ratchet up their onslaught safe in the knowledge that the international community now had official confirmation that Israel was morally beyond the pale; put Israeli civilians, along with Israel’s very survival, at increased risk by helping delegitimise Israel as a global pariah; and fuelled the pressure on Israel not to defend its civilians by military means against the attacks which have relentlessly increased in audacity and scope.
Regardless of its manifest moral and intellectual inadequacies, however, his recantation carries inescapable consequences. All those who have used Goldstone’s report as a basis for their own delegitimisation of Israel now also stand revealed as having endorsed one of the worst officially sanctioned international falsehoods in history. All their attacks on Israel which relied upon Goldstone’s report are now shown to be equally baseless and discredited. Any future such attacks which use this report as an authority will be demonstrably false and malicious. The UN should now declare the Goldstone report null and void. Any less will make it knowingly and demonstrably party to a travesty of justice.
But of course, like all previous blood libels against the Jews, the poison this one has injected into the global bloodstream has no antidote. The damage is done – and no amount of self-serving recantations by Richard Goldstone will undo the terrible harm he has done.'