Judge Goldstone Reconsiders his Report on The War in Gaza

[Viking]

Well, it seems that facts over time have revealed that the Goldstone Report would have been substantially different had those facts been available to the Commission at the time. So says Judge Goldstone himself.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reconsidering-the-goldstone-report-on-israel-and-war-crimes/2011/04/01/AFg111JC_story.html

Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes
By Richard Goldstone, Friday, April , 8:42 PM

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.”

Our report found evidence of potential war crimes and “possibly crimes against humanity” by both Israel and Hamas. That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying — its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.

The 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. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.

For example, the most serious attack the Goldstone Report focused on was the killing of some 29 members of the al-Simouni family in their home. The shelling of the home was apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander’s erroneous interpretation of a drone image, and an Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack. While the length of this investigation is frustrating, it appears that an appropriate process is underway, and I am confident that if the officer is found to have been negligent, Israel will respond accordingly. The purpose of these investigations, as I have always said, is to ensure accountability for improper actions, not to second-guess, with the benefit of hindsight, commanders making difficult battlefield decisions.

While I welcome Israel’s investigations into allegations, I share the concerns reflected in the McGowan Davis report that few of Israel’s inquiries have been concluded and believe that the proceedings should have been held in a public forum. Although the Israeli evidence that has emerged since publication of our report doesn’t negate the tragic loss of civilian life, 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.

Israel’s lack of cooperation with our investigation meant that we were not able to corroborate how many Gazans killed were civilians and how many were combatants. The Israeli military’s numbers have turned out to be similar to those recently furnished by Hamas (although Hamas may have reason to inflate the number of its combatants).

As I indicated from the very beginning, I would have welcomed Israel’s cooperation. The purpose of the Goldstone Report was never to prove a foregone conclusion against Israel. I insisted on changing the original mandate adopted by the Human Rights Council, which was skewed against Israel. I have always been clear that Israel, like any other sovereign nation, has the right and obligation to defend itself and its citizens against attacks from abroad and within. Something that has not been recognized often enough is the fact that our report marked the first time illegal acts of terrorism from Hamas were being investigated and condemned by the United Nations. I had hoped that our inquiry into all aspects of the Gaza conflict would begin a new era of evenhandedness at the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted.

Some have charged that the process we followed did not live up to judicial standards. To be clear: Our mission was in no way a judicial or even quasi-judicial proceeding. We did not investigate criminal conduct on the part of any individual in Israel, Gaza or the West Bank. We made our recommendations based on the record before us, which unfortunately did not include any evidence provided by the Israeli government. Indeed, our main recommendation was for each party to investigate, transparently and in good faith, the incidents referred to in our report. McGowan Davis has found that Israel has done this to a significant degree; Hamas has done nothing.

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. That comparatively few Israelis have been killed by the unlawful rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza in no way minimizes the criminality. The U.N. Human Rights Council should condemn these heinous acts in the strongest terms.

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. Our report has led to numerous “lessons learned” and policy changes, including the adoption of new Israel Defense Forces procedures for protecting civilians in cases of urban warfare and limiting the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas. The Palestinian Authority established an independent inquiry into our allegations of human rights abuses — assassinations, torture and illegal detentions — perpetrated by Fatah in the West Bank, especially against members of Hamas. Most of those allegations were confirmed by this inquiry. Regrettably, there has been no effort by Hamas in Gaza to investigate the allegations of its war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

Simply put, the laws of armed conflict apply no less to non-state actors such as Hamas than they do to national armies. Ensuring that non-state actors respect these principles, and are investigated when they fail to do so, is one of the most significant challenges facing the law of armed conflict. Only if all parties to armed conflicts are held to these standards will we be able to protect civilians who, through no choice of their own, are caught up in war.

The writer, a retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former chief prosecutor of the U.N. International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, chaired the U.N. fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict.

I'm expecting a massive case of Israeli "I told you so" -ism decrying the UN as useless and that they were justified in not cooperating with the commission in the first place. Pro-Pals will naturally ignore this.

I suspect much light and noise with no substance and peace just that much further away than before Goldstone's OP ED.

[The Brain]

UN personnel are deeply antisemitic. Film at 11.

[Slargos]

I intensely dislike this conflict since it forces me to sympathise with the jews. 

[CountDeMoney]

I intensely dislike this conflict since it forces me to sympathise with the jews. 

Jews.  They're good, and they're good for you.

[viper37]

he does say however that these new facts weren't available at the time because Israel refused to cooperate.  Seems like Israel kinda shot themselves in the foot.

[Razgovory]

Is this big news in Europe?  I have long since ceased to care what the UN says about Israel.  Actually, the Palestinians are lucky their neighbors and arch enemies are the Israelis.  If they bordered and habitually attacked say, Russia or the US or France there wouldn't be any Palestinians.

[JonasSalk]

The Goldstone Report has been proven to have been utter crap for over a year. Why is this news all of a sudden?

[KRonn]

Well, light dawns on marble head!  But will it matter much, to ingrained views against Israel? The Palestinians,  alinged with radical types and leaders who are enemies of us all and civilised nations. Calling us the Satans of the world!!  What's there to be confused about who to side with? 

[Siege]

Goldstone Mea Culpa: Chickens Come to Roost at Leftist Nest   
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu    Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Likud Knesset Member Miri Regev attacked the New Israel Fund Sunday for feeding Judge Richard Goldstone biased information against Israel for his report charging Israel with alleged war crimes.

Goldstone admitted on Friday that the report damning Israel for the defensive Operation Cast Lead campaign against Hamas terrorists was not accurate.
"All of the material from the left was supplied by the NIF, and the question now is what to do with them [the NIF]," the Foreign Minister said Sunday morning.
Likud MK Miri Regev said she will bring up the issue of the NIF at a meeting of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee.

Yossi Beilin, former leader of the Meretz party and a leading architect of the Oslo Accords, which literally exploded in Israel's face in the outbreak of violence since 2000, nevertheless found Israel to blame for the original Goldstone Report.

While admitting that Goldstone's article in The Washington Post on Fridaywas "important," he added, "The damage was done, and we are part of the reason because we did not cooperate. We refused to give him [Goldstone} material."

Foreign Minister Lieberman maintained that Israel won legitimacy by not cooperating. He said allowing Goldstone to question IDF officers and soldiers and "get into the guts of Israeli policies" would have been a self-destructive act.
He said the significance of Goldstone's backtracking from his original report is that "all efforts of [Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud] Abbas and [PA Prime Minister PA Prime Minister Salam] Fayyad to take the Goldstone report to the International Court in Hague are finished."
The silence of American left-wing groups to Goldstone's comments was not overlooked by Commentary's Jonathan S. Tobin, who wrote an article under the headline, "Goldstone Recants! Will the Left Follow His Example?"

"What we must now hear are similar apologies from all those groups and individuals, from Human Rights Watch to J Street to mainstream bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and minor Palestinian mouthpieces like Hussein Ibish, that either defended Goldstone's false allegations or sought to aid efforts to promote his scandalous charges," Tobin wrote. "There must be an accounting from all of Goldstone's previous champions. Like Goldstone's report, their credibility on this issue is finished."
Tobin pointed out, "The former judge admitted that his report was wrong. He said that Israel's efforts to follow up on every accusation of illegal conduct of its forces proved that there was no deliberate aggression against civilians."

"He also admitted," Tobin continued. "That the number of civilian casualties of Palestinians reported by Israel – which was far below the inflated numbers claimed by so-called human rights groups — was accurate. As it turns out the vast majority of Palestinians who died in the fighting were Hamas fighters, not civilians as his report had charged."

However, the website of J Street political lobby, which claims to be "pro-Israel and pro-Peace" but also backs talks with Hamas, did not relate to the report as of Sunday afternoon.
The Americans for Peace Now organization posted a "tweet" that linked to an article that ignored Goldstone's admissions and instead insisted,  "Even a superficial reading of the op-ed [by Goldstone]shows that he has not retracted a single comma in the Goldstone Report, nor does he express any regret for having written the report the way it was written. He simply says that had he known then what he knows now, the report would have been different."

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[Sheilbh]

Why does this justify Israel not cooperating with it?  Surely it shows that Goldstone's an honest man who would have written a substantially different report with the evidence Israel could have provide?

[Admiral Yi]

Why does this justify Israel not cooperating with it?  Surely it shows that Goldstone's an honest man who would have written a substantially different report with the evidence Israel could have provide?

A defensible reason would be to not interfere with ongoing Israeli investigations.  Similar to Congress and Abu Graib.

Don't know if that's the real reason.

[Viking]

The Israeli reason for not cooperating iirc was that the terms were issued by the UN Human Rights Comission and the terms were biased against Israel as well as the members of the comission were biased (Goldstone a member of Human Rights Watch, A Pakistani High Court Judge, The Law Professor already had declared that the Gaza War was "an act of aggression" and the last member was an Irish Soldier). Goldstone did have the terms altered before being willing to chair the commission.

[Admiral Yi]

Do you know what the terms were pre and post Puff?

[Sheilbh]

Do you know what the terms were pre and post Puff?

The initial remit from the UNHRC was just about Israel.  Goldstone and Mary Robinson rejected that and produced wording that it would cover all humanitarian abuses and the like in the war that was then accepted by the UNHRC.

Incidentally I don't know anything about the other two, and she was certainly biased, but the Pakistani advocate (I thought she was a lawyer not a judge) is a very admirable woman more generally.